Provincial Politics – Page 113

Stating the obvious for police boards.

August 17, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Why should the Province of Ontario further clarify the role of our police services boards? While it has been obvious for many years that these highly politicized boards are largely inadequate for the role they undertake, they have sufficient powers needed to do their job. To outline those powers in more detail to the members of the boards would almost guarantee their usage when not necessarily warranted.

What brings up this concern is the request by the chair of the City of Ottawa police services board for clarification of the role of the boards. The Ottawa board and others across the province appear to be confused by the report from retired judge John Morden on the Toronto G20 fiasco. You hardly need to read between the lines of Morden’s report to see why Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair should be fired and the Toronto Police Services Board should resign for failure to do their job.

But they are like many police board members across Ontario who seem to think they have no right to question those police operations that are managed by the police chief. They appear to be forgetting that the chief works under contract for the board. The board hires and fires the chief.

It is similar, with a few differences, to the relationship of the board of directors of a company and the company’s chief operating officer. The quasi-military chain of command and discipline needs of a police force require the board members to keep their distance from any action that could constitute interference in day-to-day operations.

But questioning policing policies and interaction of the police with the public are very much the right of the board. The board members are responsible for policing on behalf of the community. They work for the public and not the police.

This is one reason why it is very annoying to see police service board members acting as spokespersons for the police. As it stands today, municipal councillors and mayors who serve on police service boards should be declaring a conflict and not voting on police budgets. For the chair of the police services board to present the police budget to the council instead of a representative of the police officials who created it, is a corruption of the role of the police services chair.

But if we continue appointing unqualified people to police services boards, we are going to continue to muddle along. The problem is the people, more than the rules.

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Where is our Quebec headed?

August 15, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Ontario voters should have no problem understanding the quandary faced by Quebec voters. Nobody in Quebec seems to know where that province is headed. The election takes place on September 4 and there is no point in trusting any of the public opinion polls. Nobody can guess at this one. It is an election with too many imponderables.

Liberal Premier Jean Charest chose to have the election just as disgruntled students are headed back to try to rescue what they can of an interrupted school year. Those young people are voters and they are angry with Charest. His draconian response to their protests failed to contain them and caused their parents and others to join in the protests.

But if the student movement is the rock, then the construction industry inquiry is the hard place and Charest is caught between them. He could hardly delay the election until the construction inquiry reopens in September with daily exposure of corruption.

Pauline Marois, leader of the Parti Québécois joined the students, beating a pot for them, but is seen as a weak leader and with little new in the péquistes’ political arsenal. Charest sees her as his main opposition and constantly hammers at her for not being clear on a new separatist referendum.

The real opportunity for Marois’ péquistes is their credibility as social democrats. With the wide acceptance of the federal New Democrats in Quebec in the last federal election it opened the door for the Parti Québécois.

Nobody can really read François Legault, leader of the new Coalition Avenir Québec. He is obviously just as right-wing as Jean Charest but he seems to lack the political sensibilities. When he said the other day that Quebec student protesters needed to stop chasing the good life and learn from hard-working Asian students, he stepped in it.

While Legault was a Parti Québécois cabinet minister, he and his party are trying to stay ambiguous on the question of sovereignty. Where he is going to find voters who are neutral on the separatism issue is a good question.

And yet one of these three leaders is very likely going to end up trying to manage a minority government in the National Assembly in Quebec City after the election. Neither Legault nor Marois could hold together a minority in those circumstances for more than six months.

Those of us watching from the peanut gallery will just have to be philosophical about whatever happens. We have reason to be concerned with Stephen Harper driving the truck in Ottawa. He carries no brief for our Quebec. It is an integral part of our country and Quebec’s leadership should note our concern.

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Maybe we can make a deal with McGuinty.

August 10, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The by-elections called for the Ontario ridings of Kitchener-Waterloo and Vaughan could be a chance to make a deal with Dalton McGuinty. The problem is that voters will see the by-elections as a chance to kick sand in his face. While you can appreciate that they are sorely fed-up with McGuinty and his Whigs, it is the wrong thing to do.

The Liberals have to win if you really want to get rid of McGuinty. As perverse as that seems, the problem is that Dalton McGuinty is never going to quit as long as his Whigs are sitting in a tenuous minority situation. Give his party some stability in office and there can be an orderly transition to a new Liberal leader in time for the next provincial election. And any member of McGuiny’s caucus (other than the fat Treasurer) would do a better job than McGuinty.

While they are all voting as Whigs in the current Legislature, their basic instinct (other than the fat Treasurer) is to want to be Liberals. After all Whigs are just Liberals who are 200 years behind the times.

And even if you do not want to vote for such an out-of-touch party, the opposition parties are not any better. Tiny Tim Hudak, leader of Ontario’s hapless Conservatives is further behind the eight-ball than Dalton McGuinty. Hudak would frighten Adam Smith, the father of Conservatism. Smith published his seminal work on The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and Hudak seems to still be waiting to read Coles Notes on it.

The seminal book on socialism was more recent. Marx and Engels first published their unfortunately titled Communist Manifesto in 1848. Along with many social democrats, Andrea Horwath’s New Democrats appear to be locked into the unionism of the Dirty Thirties. While the late Jack Layton of her federal party worked hard to reposition the federal NDP, Horwath has shown no comprehension of how a democratic socialist party serves voters’ needs in the 21^st Century.

But McGuinty needs to hold Vaughan for the Liberals and to win Kitchener-Waterloo from the Conservatives to get his majority. It means that he needs to make a pact with Conservative voters in those ridings. He has to promise to have an orderly transition to a new leader for his party if they give him a majority. That would be an ideal solution for the 12 million plus concerned citizens of Ontario.

And there is no question but we are desperate for decent political leadership in Ontario!

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Casinos: keep clear of Ontario Place

August 9, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Those of us who want a casino in the Toronto area are likely not among those who want it on the lakeshore. And it definitely should not be at Ontario Place. We have even hemmed and hawed over the west end of Exhibition Park. You have to be a born and bred Torontonian to really understand the concerns.

Ontario Place was a legacy to Toronto from a dying breed of Ontario Tories. It was Premier John Robarts—who ran Ontario as Chairman of the Board—who announced the Ontario Place plan in 1971.

(God knows, we never expected to ever be nostalgic about those people. Yet, compared to the rabid right-wing Ontario Conservatives of today, Robarts and his key ministers of the time were progressive, benign and human.)

Over the next 40 years, Ontario Place evolved into a people place, a place for families and a place for youth. The highly politicized management of the park did it little good and it often ran behind the trends of what it could have accomplished. The Ontario Whig government of Dalton McGuinty shut down most of the park in 2011 because of that government’s total inability to plan ahead.

Ontario Place is now at a crossroads. Caught in limbo, it stands as a faded and failed Circus Maximus, torn between political objectives and postures. It needs more than former provincial Conservative leader John Tory and his team of planners to propose a future for the site. It needs far-sighted and brave planning—something of which the McGuinty Whigs are incapable. What Ontario Place must never become is a site for an adult-only casino.

It was the children’s area at the east end of Ontario Place that brought out families. It was the key to the long-term success of the park. It locked the park into a family orientation in the minds of Torontonians and it would be a very large mistake to try to change it.

Montreal has already proved with its Casino de Montréal, on the islands that held Expo 67, that an isolated, hard to reach venue for a casino is wrong. Montreal has also shown that shoe-horning a casino into a site that was never designed for a casino is also a really bad idea.

The west end of Exhibition Park is a possibility for a casino because it has always been such a forgotten area for exhibition planners. Toronto’s venerable “Ex” is tired and needs new thinking and a casino might be the stimulus for a new era in the 21^st Century.

There are many excellent sites for a casino and surrounding entertainment destination around the Toronto area. And there are many more outside the city’s jurisdiction if the city politicians want to be ignorant on the issue.

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Introducing Facebook for hypochondriacs!

August 8, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Do you remember eHealth? That is the computerized patient information system Ontario’s Ministry of Health has been wasting our money on for years. It is the one where consultants were even billing us for pastries for their tea breaks. It has wasted millions of dollars without producing anything. It has taken so long that the private sector has started offering competitive databases in hopes of capturing the business.

When you consider that the computerized patient database has been under development by the Ontario Ministry of Health since the Mike Harris Conservatives were in power, this is hardly a surprise. The problem is that the same question faces the private sector product as has been holding up the government version: how secure is it?

Nobody can guarantee security. You get the same answer from all the security experts: the only secure room is a room without a door. When you need a system that must be accessed by the medical profession to input data for patients and then be accessed by other medical professionals to assist that patient, security is your main problem. Patient confidentiality is the main consideration.

Take this private sector offering called mihealth. This is a database very much like Facebook. The only difference is that Facebook is very successful in that it has convinced more than 900 million people to provide their profiles which Facebook then sells to marketers. It is the largest invasion of privacy ever perpetrated and the joke is that the participants provide all the information. Those who know in the computer world turn up their noses at Facebook. The bad news for the marketers is that the information they are getting is not necessarily the truth, most of it is trite and boring but, frankly, the marketers are the only ones who care.

In the case of this mihealth database product, if it is less secure than Facebook, it might be immaterial. The mihealth marketing approach is to sell the patient a package—a very expensive package—and then go after the doctors to use it as a medium with which to communicate with their patient. The doctors could do the same thing with e-mails but have probably never thought of it.

We should let the doctors solve the problem. This will be after the doctors in Ontario sit down with the Ministry of Health and everyone plays nice. The province needs a better thought-through funding formula for the medical profession and the doctors need to come down from Mount Olympus and walk with the ordinary people.

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Experts on gambling are everywhere.

August 4, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The name seemed familiar. Michael Warren was the same guy who had worked for the Ontario government at Queen’s Park. You would think he got in enough trouble when he tried to run the Toronto Transit Commission. When he offered to change Canada Post into a profit making corporation, you thought that was more challenge than anyone would want. Yet Warren tried. Now in an op-ed piece in the Toronto Star, he is telling us not to gamble on gambling.

It is like sitting at a blackjack table anywhere in the world. If you speak the language, someone at the table will eventually tell you what an expert they are. You have been sitting there watching this guy make the same bet 35 times in a row and he is telling you he is an expert on gambling. Never having seen Warren gamble, we will suspend disbelief and hear what he has to say.

He sees the recent Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) plans as a cash grab. While OLG’s planned growth of 75 per cent over the next six years might be ambitious, it could be done if casinos were more conveniently located and Internet gaming became popular.

Warren is particularly concerned about the Responsible Gaming Council’s figure of 3.4 per cent of Ontarians being ‘problem gamblers.’ He is also concerned that we might be encouraging young people to gamble when they are old enough. He says that the young people between 18 to 24 years already have the highest rate of problem gambling. He does not give us a source for that statistic.

You get the impression reading this ‘opinion piece’ that Warren is not in favour of legal gambling. It might surprise him to know that there are others in this world who might not be interested in gambling. And nobody is forcing them to go and gamble.

What he needs to understand is that there is a demand for more gambling centres in Ontario and they need to be upgraded. They need to be part of overall entertainment and recreational areas. We should encourage that model. We should also encourage a more competitive approach because that is the only way you will really know what the public wants. And, God forbid, we should leave gambling under the control of government people such as Michael Warren used to be.

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Gunfight in the Halifax corral.

July 28, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Canada’s provincial premiers get together every year to bitch about the federal government. You hardly expect the meeting to be shanghaied by a snarling match between two western premiers. Poor Jean Charest from Quebec, who is going to the polls next month, was almost ignored as everyone egged on Alison Redford from Alberta and Christy Clark from British Columbia. Their mud wrestling was actually in a slurry of tar sands bitumen spilling into B.C. from Alberta.

While Alison Redford won national recognition for her trouncing her Wildrose opponent in the last Alberta election, it was Christy Clark who was playing the careful political game. Faced with an election in the next year and not looking good in the polls, Clark needed the publicity to show that a) she is environmentally smart, b) was out for money to help B.C. taxpayers and c) looked good in the Premier role while she was at it.

Some people might have thought it was a slip of the tongue when Clark took the first poke at Redford. Clark appeared to be going after Alberta’s resources royalties and Redford made the mistake of responding angrily.Clark knew just where to scratch. The resource royalties are what has made Alberta the greed and isolationist capital of Canada.

Since the time when Ontario residents paid a premium for oil and gas products to support Alberta’s fledgling oil industry, this country has desperately needed a balanced national energy program. Instead, the federal government has used transfer payments to the have-not provinces to try to balance the economy. And the long-reigning Alberta Conservatives have built their dynasty on the fiction of provincial rights to resources.

By the time cooler heads prevailed in Halifax, Redford had fallen squarely into Clark’s trap. B.C. voters were bound to be fully behind Clark’s mildly stated case for protection from catastrophe if the Northern Gateway Pipeline was to go through B.C. She made the point very well that if B.C. was going to take all the risks for the pipeline, then why should the province not share in the profits. By the end of the conference, Redford had to explain that if B.C. wants to get more money from pipeline builder Enbridge, that was quite alright with her. Just do not think of touching Alberta’s royalties.

It looks like the lovely Premier of B.C., Christy Clark, went home with a smile.

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Down the rabbit hole with Paul Godfrey.

July 27, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Standing and chatting in the aisle between the Caribbean Poker and craps tables, we had looked around and asked, “What are we doing in this dreary place?”

“It’s just 20 minutes from home and you promised me a fancy dinner,” was the wife’s quick answer.

It turned out that the good steak place had a waiting list and we ended up with the second best restaurant at Rama. That was okay. Rama was treating. Luckily the casino does not just offer complimentary meals and entertainment to the big losers. The wife is a really tough craps player and the guys at the $5 table will always make room for her. She makes the game fun. And she knows how to play it.

Craps can be fun but my specialty is blackjack. This is a game where, if you understand the odds, take advantage of the opportunities, manage your money properly and know when to walk away, you not only enjoy the game but enjoy the profits it offers. Ontario Lottery and Gaming boss Paul Godfrey hardly needs us to help him produce $2 billion in profits each year for the Ontario government.

But Paul has fallen for the one lure that is the downfall of all gamblers: greed. He wants more. He wants to break into the Toronto market. He wants to serve the potential market better. He could, we suppose, if he could just do something about the myopic politicians who get in the way. It might also help to overcome the criminal elements that are running clandestine gambling places throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

Paul also needs to pull his casinos out of the dark ages. Dark is not sexy in casinos. Dark is not only not sexy, it is eyestrain. Those places can afford proper lighting.

And Paul really needs to improve his employee relations. You get the distinct impression in dealing with employees at Rama that things are not that great. They seem fatalistic about how badly things are being run. The combination of the two organizations, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission and Ontario Lottery and Gaming trying to run these operations is ridiculous.

Paul Godfrey also needs to stop listening to local politicians posturing for votes and do his job properly. He obviously understands where local politicians are coming from. He was one.

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Would that they walked in our Birkenstocks.

July 26, 2012 by Peter Lowry

A spokesperson for Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said it all for the Ontario Whigs the other day. She is quoted in the Toronto Star as saying that “This government believes that Ontarians are well served by the current retail system for beverage alcohol.”

She is talking about a retail system established in 1927 to appease the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. This is about as up-to-date as the Ontario Whigs can get.

And this spokesperson has obviously never visited “The worst Beer Store in Ontario” here in Babel.

We gave up complaining about the dump a couple years back. It is a waste of time. This Beer Store does not accept complaints. The problem is that Brewers Warehousing (owned by the big foreign-owned beer companies) has to decide whether it is in the distribution business, the retail beer business or the bottle return business. It is currently making a disgusting mess of all three.

In Babel’s Anne Street store, the floors are awash in the dregs of empties to the point that the layered crud will rip the Birkenstocks off your feet. The smell is enough to knock you over. The constantly replaced staff is poorly trained and has two speeds: slow and slower. We could always drive more than twice as far and patronize one of the four other Beer Stores in Babel but they each have their own problems.

We keep pointing out to myopic Ontario politicians that the operative word for convenience stores in Ontario is the word “convenience.” The idea is that these convenience stores can be a convenient place to get supplies of beer and wine. Yes, it will be slightly more expensive but do not forget what the extra charge is for: convenience.

With distributing beer to convenience stores on its plate, Brewers Warehousing could do something useful and learn how to do distribution properly. It could also improve its bottle return operations at its less busy retail stores.

One other idea that appeals to us is that standards could be set for convenience stores that want to sell beer and wine. In one easy action and a few inspectors, you can upgrade 90 per cent of Ontario’s convenience stores. And in convenience stores, complaints that the public make could matter.

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Three blind mice meet at Queen’s Park.

July 25, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Were the Toronto news media trying to make a point the other day? They were switching from the funeral of the young man killed in a gunfight at a recent barbeque to a meeting at Queen’s park about gun violence in Toronto. The three blind mice were there: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

When considering these three men, it is very important not to confuse ignorance with stupidity. No member of this trio is stupid. They are all intelligent men. Many people confuse Rob Ford’s brashness and the ignorance of many of the things he says for stupidity. This is a mistake. The man is very smart. He knows his constituents and he plays to them. If he turns you off, so what? You probably did not vote for him two years ago. Watch him a year and a half from now. He might decide to win another term and it is likely he can.

Bill Blair also plays his role on the civic stage. He has all the wiles and charm of a highly successful con artist. He has the police services board securely under his thumb. He poses for the news media. He is a cop’s cop. He brings no new ideas or openness to policing in Toronto. And it is at a time when the city is in need of solutions.

And, as for Dalton McGuinty, the man does not even belong at the table. When you consider the brain power available to him and the resources at his fingertips, he was probably laughing at Ford and Blair having to come to see him. He promised them nothing and he gave them nothing. The only concession was that funding for the extra police for the anti-violence program will be allowed to continue. Ford figured that was all he was going to get so he treated it as a win.

What these three men and their many aides and acolytes need to understand is that Toronto does not have a huge gun problem.

But Toronto still has a gangs and guns problem that has to be contained.

Containing young gangs and keeping guns off the street takes a multiplicity of actions. You have to offer our youth more than malls to hang out. You have to give them opportunities in their community. You have to make sure they can get jobs. You have to give them pride in their community. Give them pride in themselves.

And if the federal government is going to so ignorantly let the border leak guns from America then get ahead of it. Offer to teach youth about guns. Give them a place to shoot. Teach them that hoods are the dorks and only use guns because they lack the manhood.

The reason Toronto does not have a larger guns and violence problem is because it has a basically law abiding citizenry. Toronto is a great city. It is a peaceful city. The city needs to keep building on what is great about it.

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