Provincial Politics – Page 120

Helping hold on to Hudak.

July 27, 2013 by Peter Lowry

You realize of course that any win for the Conservatives in these five current by-elections in Ontario is just going to encourage Conservative leader Tiny Tim Hudak. Is that fair? Does Ontario really deserve Hudak? Did anyone in the Liberal brain trust know what they were doing when they put Wynne’s government in this position?

If Finance Minister Charles Sousa had brought out a Liberal budget earlier this year, we could have forced the New Democrats into defeating the government. There was no question but the Conservatives were guaranteed to want the election. They are going to give Timmy Hudak one more chance before they turf him out of the leadership.

Until Wynne gets her feet wet in a general election, she remains a pretender to the job of Premier. She only became Premier because of a corrupted leadership race that left liberals unsure and wary. Liberals want to give her a chance but the so-called conciliator is not showing any leadership. Her seven-point plan for party renewal and reform has yet to produce any ideas, direction or reform. And while the media might refer to her as being left of centre, the progressives in the Liberal Party have seen no evidence of that.

Item six in Wynne’s plan for party renewal and reform was to increase party member involvement in policy development. Some effort in this area would have been helpful before she did the flip-flop at the Premiers’ meeting this week on the abolition of the Canadian Senate. She seemed to forget some of the strictures of what passes for a constitution in this country. We have a long way to go before we can even begin to discuss an elected or reformed Senate.

Conservative problems with Timmy Hudak are far more serious than those Liberals have with Wynne. Hudak is Michael Harris Light. He is just an acolyte. He has none of the charm nor does he have the smarts of Michael Harris. He is all that was wrong with Harris without understanding where Harris went overboard and destroyed his government. Hudak is an ideologue without a conscience. He is incapable of running anything as complex as a government for Ontario.

If a whimsical electorate realize they will change nothing by sending five opposition members to Queen’s Park, we are hung with Hudak until we do have a general election.

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Casting runes in the heat of summer.

July 24, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Political polling has never been an exact science. It has always required an overview of common sense, mathematical probability, historical data, statistical smoothing and wishful thinking. Then, and only then, could you report the result you wanted in the first place. In the past 50 years, little has changed.

Looking at the mix of polls being obtained from the five by-elections in Ontario, we can safely say that nobody really knows what will happen. What we are hearing is an assortment of pretty good guesses mixed with a bunch of longed for wishes. The one thing we know for sure is that the automated telephone calls that are annoying voters in the five electoral districts are producing less reliable results than those derived from the entrails of animal sacrifices.

Since animal sacrifices are a no-no in this age of political correctness, we have to settle for ‘Press one for candidate number two.’ What the pollsters cheerfully admit is that the four-year old’s who answer many of the telephones are more truthful in their response than the adults who stay on the line long enough to indicate something. The fact that those aged 19 to 35 are seriously under represented in the sample is casually covered by guesswork. Voter’s comments about the stupidity of the call are thankfully not recorded.

What these by-elections really need is a return to good old common sense. As a politico, we have to go with the troops on the street analysis. This means that we would be surprised if Ottawa South went anything but Liberal. The Liberals here can probably out-man the other parties by about two to one. Every worker means three more votes and when only 30 to 40 per cent of the voters are going to show, do your own math.

This approach also applies to Scarborough-Guildwood. The Liberals will swamp the opposition and bring an interesting new personality, Mitzie Hunter, to Queen’s Park.

In Etobicoke-Lakeshore, there will be more Conservatives with whom to contend and it makes for a more even fight. The wild card there is Tiny Tim Hudak. It the Conservative leader keeps his mouth shut and lets Doug Holyday run in his own way, the Liberals are in a hell of a fight.

London-West has some of the same problems. The voters here are a bit more forgiving of Timmy Hudak but if he gets in their face, there is no telling.

The troops on the street are missing in Windsor.-Tecumseh. There is little sympathy for former MPP Dwight Duncan’s scurrying exit and resentment over the outcome of the Ontario Liberal leadership. With the Liberals staying home, the New Democrats are getting something of a free ride. Andrea Horwath will trumpet that win far and wide.

But be cautious in placing your bets. We are still waiting for the fat lady to sing.

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Political donations do ads for Whigs.

July 19, 2013 by Peter Lowry

An e-mail came from the Ontario Liberal Party the other day. It was from Deb Matthews and Tim Murphy, campaign co-chairs for Wynne’s Whigs. This e-mail explained that since becoming Premier “Kathleen Wynne has worked hard to create jobs—jobs for youth just entering the workforce, career-building jobs for families trying to make ends meet, and job opportunities for those looking for new careers after the recession.”

The e-mail introduced a new advertisement that we were told we were privileged to be the first to see it. It was nice. A friendly, folksy Kathleen is shown with a mix of people in a variety of circumstances and her voice-over says that it is her job to create more jobs. Obviously these new jobs must be for Ontario voters. There are no specifics but there is a nice warm feeling and you have to admit that she is trying.

For some reason, the advertisement reminded us of the federal government’s ads for the economic action plan. The federal ads also give you a nice warm feeling but sometimes it is around the collar because it is federal taxpayers’ money paying for the federal ads. At least, Matthews and Murphy make it clear that this ad would be paid for by political donations. In fact, the e-mail said that our $10 or more donation would help keep this advertisement on the air.

But do we want to air this? Frankly, we would be more impressed with one or two concrete examples of how this government is creating better jobs for Ontario residents. After passing that do-nothing NDP budget recently, it is hard to believe anything new has happened in the Ontario job market—thanks to any government impetus. The federal government lies constantly about its supposed accomplishments, Are Wynne’s Whigs going the same route?

Premier Wynne told the media the other day that she is not all that confident of winning all five Ontario by-elections on August 1. She explained that the voters could decide to use the by-elections to remonstrate her government without defeating it. And what is the point of that?

If Wynne knew the by-elections were pointless, why did she call them? Why can we not have a general election in Ontario? We need one. Maybe in the heat of this summer, we should all get a little hot under the collar.

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Giambrone rises for Scarborough by-election.

July 10, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It was good for a bit of a belly laugh the other day watching the television news. It was about one of the upcoming provincial by-elections in Toronto. Lo and behold but there was former Toronto Councillor Adam Giambrone rising Lazarus-like from the political graveyard. He took the New Democrat nomination in Scarborough-Guildwood. While few might be impressed with him as a provincial candidate, you do have to admit, he, at least, knows how to lose.

While people who know the electoral district well think of the area as being a bit sexually repressed, it does not mean that the voters will hold his past against him. Frankly, most will not care. They are not going to vote NDP anyway.

Giambrone comes to Scarborough-Guildwood far behind his two main opponents for the Conservatives and the Liberals. The demographics of this part of Toronto are quite different from his old municipal ward in the Davenport area in the west end of Toronto. His Italian name will be of little help in the community. And his views on the transportation needs of that corner of the city will win him few converts.

His Conservative opponent, Ken Kirupa came to Canada from Sri Lanka and knows the area well as a real estate sales agent. Kirupa’s only major problem is Conservative Leader Tiny Tim Hudak. If Hudak stays away from the electoral district and out of the news for the next four weeks, Kirupa could make a good showing. He is not going to win.

It is the Liberal choice, Mitzie Hunter who has a clear edge at this time. Having canvassed in that area for various political candidates over the years, it can be reported that the voters are friendly, warm-hearted and communicative with Liberal canvassers. Jamaica-born Mitzie knows Scarborough and is well educated. She knows the people.

Mitzie has a further advantage in this by-election that she can draw on all of Scarborough area for Liberal workers and that has always been a very strong and well organized area for the Liberal Party. How Premier Kathleen Wynne goes over with the voters in Scarborough-Guildwood would probably not be a factor. In the same way, the gas power-plant cancellations in Mississauga and Oakville are neither understood nor of interest. Life will go on in this corner of our world.

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Wynne’s Whigs deny democracy.

July 5, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It is probably the most anti-democratic news out of Queen’s Park since Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty quit and prorogued the Legislature last year. It was bad enough that Premier Kathleen Wynne chose the Thursday before a long weekend for the vote in five by-elections. The two-week period before and after that holiday weekend is the time when the most urban Ontario residents take summer holidays. The only question is how a turn-out of likely less than 50 per cent of eligible voters can help Wynne’s Whigs?

We only have four weeks to learn the answer.

While the Liberals and Conservatives have already appointed candidates, the New Democrats are delayed. The Ontario NDP has this quaint custom called nomination meetings. Nomination meetings used to be held by all parties so that the local party members could choose their candidate. The NDP still respect that custom. Wynne’s Whigs and Hudak’s Conservatives find the custom too democratic for them. It is so much easier to simply appoint the right candidate.

That is why Conservative Leader Tiny Tim Hudak is so pleased that the Conservative candidate in Etobicoke-Lakeshore—a Mr. Ryan—has agreed to step aside so that a Toronto Councillor Doug Holyday can be appointed as candidate for the Conservatives.

In the rush to appoint candidates for the five electoral districts, Wynne’s Whigs have forgotten the party is supposed to strive for gender equality. Four men and one woman, are hardly gender equal. Maybe the fact that the Whig’s female candidate in Scarborough-Guildwood is also a visible minority counts double.

Mind you, the pollsters are already busy with their automated telephone calling and measuring entrails of sacrifices to determine who will win for Wynne. And the news is not all good.

You do not have to be a genius to know that there is trouble in Windsor and the natives are annoyed. A New Democrat win in Windsor-Tecumseh is certainly quite possible. At the same time, London could return to the Tories. And since the by-elections will have no serious impact on the standings in the Legislature, the voters in all five electoral districts can be whimsical in their choices.

But the putative brain-trust around Fortress Liberal at Queen’s Park has already shown us what idiots they really are to have called these five by-elections. A general election forces voters to come to a logical and somewhat more reasoned decision. In this series of by-elections, they can decide to whom they want to give the finger—with impunity. It is a meaningless vote.

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The bother of bitumen.

July 3, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It should be made clear: bitumen is not oil. Distilled, bitumen becomes asphalt pitch, refined it can become synthetic oil. Bitumen is not ‘heavy oil’ and it is a lengthy, highly polluting process to convert Canada’s Athabasca tar sands into synthetic oil. While we can compute the hundreds of billions of barrels of potential oil from the tar sands, we have to realize that the pollution of our environment will be immeasurable.

To start with, it takes large quantities of steam or hot water to effectively wash the sand from each barrel of bitumen. The greasy sand and fouled water are the first by-products of the process. They start the pollution process. The pollution increases dramatically when you refine the bitumen into synthetic oil. The carbon and heavy metals sent into the air from the oil refining process are just part of the problem. There is a bitumen coke residue from the refining. People who do not care about the environment can use this high carbon, high sulphur slag as a fuel.

Alberta oil and tar sands companies have certainly tried to contain the pollution problem. They already have about 80 million tons of bitumen coke filling old tar sands pits and tailing ponds and any other place that it can be dumped.

Why else would Alberta insist on exporting unprocessed bitumen? The province will export it in any direction—south to the Texas Gulf oil ports, west to Kitimat and Vancouver, B.C., or east to Saint John, N.B. or Portland, Maine. Alberta does not want to destroy the environment of more than half the province by trying to process the bitumen at home. The province is allowing others to destroy the environment that we all share.

If Alberta tar sands companies produced synthetic oil from bitumen, they would not have to add hydrocarbons, polymers or light crude oil to the bitumen to help it flow through pipelines. Nor would it be necessary to heat the bitumen or increase the pressure in the pipeline to put more bitumen through the pipelines.

And it is this heat and pressure that already appears to be increasing the number of pipeline accidents. Bitumen slurry does not act like crude oil when it has a pipeline accident. When Enbridge had that bitumen spill near Kalamazoo, Michigan on July 25 and 26, 2010, it dumped 843,000 US gallons (later estimated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at over 1 million US gallons) of the heated bitumen slurry into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River.

Unlike crude oil that floats, bitumen is heavier than water and as the hydrocarbons from the bitumen slurry dispersed in the air, the bitumen sank to the bottom of the river. That took time and, during that time, the spill traveled some 40 kilometres down river. The last published figure for the cost of the clean-up has now past US$675 million. The bitumen clean-up continues.

And Enbridge thinks we should trust the company to reverse its old Line 9 that runs through Toronto and pipe bitumen slurry to the east coast so that it can be shipped to countries where people do not care about polluting our environment.

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Why is Ontario buying into by-elections?

June 30, 2013 by Peter Lowry

By-elections are sometimes fun but the five coming up in Ontario will be a serious waste of time and money. Why are we doing it? What will we prove? All five electoral districts were formerly held by Liberals. They are Liberal seats to lose. If the Liberals lose just one, does that mean that the voters are just a bit annoyed? If the Liberals lose all five, does that mean the voters are really pissed? Are we really paying for these by-elections to provide the Wynne government with a barometer?

But the vote will not change the legislature. It will still be a Liberal minority government. So what is to be won here?

If the strategy is to have all five by-elections at once, it means that the Liberal strategy mavens at Queen’s park do not expect they will win them all. So they might as well get it over with. It is like pulling off a band-aid all at once.

That is a bad strategy. It does not work well with band-aids either. If the mavens are right, the opposition will unite sooner rather than later to pull Wynne’s government down. The Liberals can beat them to the punch by going for the general election now.

The media think by-elections are a test of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s leadership. They are not. Nobody seriously expects that the Liberals will be so badly trounced that Wynne would resign. Neither will the New Democrat’s Andrea Horwath nor the Conservative’s Timmy Hudak, should their parties get blanked out.

And how long will the five new Members of the Provincial Parliament get to sit in the legislature before Horwath and Hudak pull the plug? Not even Horwath would be silly enough to keep supporting bad budgets to keep the Liberals in power. All she is doing is giving Wynne time to get comfortable in the role of Premier and get the gas plant scandal out of the way.

In turn, all Liberals want from Kathleen Wynne is to learn where she wants to lead the Liberal Party in Ontario. And it would certainly be nice if she would make an effort to restore democracy in the party. Surely she has had enough time to settle in and find out where her new office is located.

But time is up. She has a summer ahead of her without that pesky legislature making noises. She has time to think. Obviously, she has to call at least two of the by-elections. She can also call a general election. That is a far better option.

And the good news for Kathleen Wynne and her party is that the same old team of Andrea Horwath and Timmy Hudak are the opposition. The voters already know those two are losers.

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Babel backs a ballot bollix.

June 28, 2013 by Peter Lowry

A year ago, there was an interesting meeting with the City Clerk in Babel. A very charming and knowledgeable person, she was generous with her time and interested in the subject of the meeting. It was about the voting system used for Babel municipal elections. It was suggested to the Clerk that Babel had some citizens knowledgeable of ballots and computers who could lend some free expertise to help move Babel towards a more modern, efficient, accessible and secure municipal voting system. She was not interested in the offer.

This subject is being revisited because of a news article recently about the report to the Ontario Legislature by Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer on Alternative Voting Technologies. The 271-page report is similar to what we were offering the city for free. The City Clerk should read it.

Greg Essensa, Ontario’s chief electoral officer wants more citizens to vote. He thinks only 50 per cent turnout for provincial elections is bad for democracy. How about a turnout of closer to 30 per cent in municipal elections? That is the real disgrace.

What was most worrying in the last municipal election in Babel was that in the wards where we were getting a high turnout of voters, we were getting impossibly long line-ups to vote. If more than 50 per cent of those eligible had tried to vote, thousands would have been denied their franchise.

Some of the things noted over many years of helping people vote are that people like ease of access to familiar voting locations and simplicity in voting. Nobody gets that in Babel. The polling places are always being moved, the system is cumbersome and very slow and the civic employees given the job of helping voters appear poorly trained.

To say that Babel’s voting system is computerized is a joke. It is an extremely cumbersome system that only uses a computer at the end to compile the votes. It is also very slow to load the votes into the computer. The real surprise is that the Babel system is more vulnerable to voting fraud than the old-fashioned paper ballots.

There is no question that we have to be extra vigilant as we move toward Internet and telephone voting. The key is in having people involved who have a stake in the reliability of the systems we use.

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Harper’s homeboy, Hudak.

June 24, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Ontario television viewers saw a new attack advertisement the other day. It looked like another attack advertisement by the Conservatives. And it was. It was just not by the federal Conservatives but by our Conservative Lights in Ontario. Even so, why does it not work the same?

The Ontario Conservatives must have been so impressed with the federal Conservative attack ads that they had the same people do one for provincial politics. The problem is that it is not very creative. All it does is remind viewers that the Ontario Liberals cancelled a couple of gas-fuelled power plants and did not really know how much it cost. The ad forgets to mention that the Conservatives were also supporting the local NIMBY’s who were opposed to the plants. Attack ads are so much easier for people with convenient memories.

However Federal Leader Stephen Harper cannot help Provincial Leader Tiny Tim Hudak. The Ontario Conservative Leader has to help himself. When you look like a loser, act like a loser, voters start to think that maybe you are a loser. And that is Timmy’s problem. He has never seriously looked at how a successful politician handles himself.

Mind you, with a mentor such as former premier Michael Harris setting the bar for him, Tiny Tim was in trouble before he started.

Hudak has been hoping that the voters are so tired of the Liberals that they will elect him. That kind of thinking could elect the Ontario New Democrats under Andrea Horwath.

When you think about it, Hudak has a couple attributes in common with Harper. They both took economics in college. Neither has ever done any work related to economics. And they both have all the charm, personality and warmth of ice sculptures.

There are two facts that are keeping the Liberals in power in Ontario and neither have anything to do with Ontario Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne. The first of these facts is NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. If that lady had one gram of leadership in her, she would never have supported the Wynne government’s budget. She had a duty to give this province the election it needs to clear the air.

And the other fact keeping Kathleen Wynne in power is the inadequacy of the leadership of the provincial Conservatives. If the Tories intend to keep Timmy around for another election, they might as well get it over with.

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A thoughtful farewell to Bob Rae.

June 21, 2013 by Peter Lowry

This is not a form of eulogy. We will probably have Bob Rae to kick around for some time to come. He was never our favourite Premier of Ontario. He and his provincial treasurer were suckered by that so-and-so Tom d’Aquino from the Business Council and Bob’s administration went down and out the door because of it. Here we had the first socialist premier and he put the screws to the unions.

Bob left Ontario with ‘Rae Days’ and a sour taste for the New Democrats that maybe the party did not deserve. Mind you trying to work with his cabinet and some of their staff people was an exercise in dealing with incompetence and nastiness that was never warranted. They did not seem to know how to be civil or businesslike.

When Bob went out in the wilderness and came back as a Liberal, some of us were less than impressed. He was never a very good socialist and there was never any proof that he knew how to be a Liberal. When he ran for the leadership of the party, it confused the party as well as the electorate. If he had won, it might have been the death knell for the Liberal Party.

And now that the negatives are covered, we can mention the good stuff:

Bob turned out to be the best interim leader the Liberal Party had ever experienced. He pulled those prima donnas in the Liberal caucus together and did a better job than the Official Opposition. He had the Liberal MPs fighting well above their weight class. He actually showed that he knew how to lead. And he led by example. Nobody could have worked harder. Whether he could have carried that effort through an election campaign is something that we can only speculate on.

And he is still a first class stump speaker. He might have picked up some annoying mannerisms in his public speaking but they were nothing that could not be fixed if someone took time to work with him on them. He is insightful, organized and you certainly get your money’s worth when you come to hear him speak on just about any subject.

And, what surprises many people, Bob Rae is a darn nice guy. He is personable, friendly, concerned and exceedingly polite. We could all learn from him.

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