Provincial Politics – Page 123

Solving voting concerns is not easy.

May 5, 2012 by Peter Lowry

THE DEMOCRACY PAPERS #1- Revised It was in 2007 that The Democracy Papers were written to make the case for our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in North America. Despite changes being rejected firmly in Ontario and twice in British Columbia, people still complain. The complaints are understandable. No system is perfect. Neither is democracy but it is better than the alternatives.

It was November, 2005 when the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform suggested a ‘mixed-member proportional’ (MMP) electoral system be voted on in a referendum accompanying the Ontario General Election in October 2007. These people had no little or no experience with politics, political parties or the various electoral systems they reviewed. Their proposed solution confused Ontario’s voters.

The citizens’ assembly suggested that people have two votes, one for a candidate in an enlarged riding and the other for a party. In this manner, they believe, there could be a fairer representation in the provincial legislature of the popular vote between parties. They never explain why this should be necessary.

The assembly members believed that because a party’s candidates receive maybe 15 per cent of the popular vote, then that party should be allowed to have 15 per cent of the seats in the legislature. The question is: ‘Why?’

With only 15 per cent of the vote in a general election, your party is a loser. Reality is that if your party cannot garner more than 15 per cent of the popular vote, it really needs to improve its platform strategy, reconsider its leadership and take a long hard look at its candidates. To reward your party for this poor showing is to encourage mediocrity.

What used to happen to this 15-per cent party is that it got maybe three or four candidates elected. This could be because these are outstanding people and the voters recognize this and vote for them despite their party affiliation. It could also be that there is a large concentration of people sympathetic to the party’s ideals in that riding. Or maybe so many people in that riding are related to the candidate and s/he cannot lose. Whatever the reason, it is usually not difficult to figure it out.

If, for example, you are the New Democratic Party, it is not hard to understand that the party can do well in areas of the province with a strong union vote. While the party fields candidates in ridings where there might be little union support, such as in the more affluent parts of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), these party stalwarts are there to establish their credentials in the party. Realistically, they know to limit their campaigning to showing some signs and making appearances at all-candidate meetings. And any long-term NDPer is realistic about how that works. Most of the good workers in these throw-away ridings are asked to put their efforts into ridings with better possibilities. And if the throw-away candidate makes a good showing despite the situation in the riding, they might be offered a more NDP-friendly riding next time.

Conservatives and Liberals have to spread themselves over far more ridings. While there is always a tendency to slack off a bit in ridings where a sitting member seems entrenched, there will be a renewed effort whenever the incumbent shows signs of weakness.

Until the 1990s, Ontario political parties were ‘candidate-centred.’ This meant that local riding associations used to have the right to choose their candidate without too much interference from party headquarters. While the system tended to produce the occasional maverick, everyone agreed that the stodgy legislature needed some livening. One of the problems with this was sometimes it was hard to find the right riding for a star candidate favoured by the party leadership.

Today, of course, party leaders control the ridings because they sign off on candidates so that they can be funded with taxpayers’ money. The day of the maverick has ended. Instead of being candidate centred,Ontario has been forced into a ‘party-centred’ political structure. One thing that the citizens’ assembly’s MMP voting would help to ensure is that Ontario stays locked into being party-centred.

And there is no question that party-centred politics is a natural breeding ground for corruption. The classic study of this is New York City’s Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party organization that controlled the city’s politics, throughout its boroughs, for 80 years.

Ontarians do not have to look far to see the potential problems with a party-centred system. Québec’s federal Liberals are a good example. The Montréal-based party organization appoints Liberal candidates across the province. And that is another reason why Paul Martin’s Liberals were dragged from power by the sponsorship scandal. Successive prime ministers, Chrétien and Martin had ignored the corruption-prone system at the roots of their Québec support.

But for the apolitical citizens’ assembly, political history such as this would have been a bore. They were given the option of several voting systems. They thought they were doing their job when they chose one of them. They just did not have the political experience to know in what direction their option would send the province.

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The Kitchener-Waterloo conundrum.

May 4, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Does Ontario deserve this? Here we have been basking in the proposition that Premier McGuinty would have to be replaced by a real liberal to solve Ontario’s leadership problems. The Kitchener-Waterloo by-election could turn that upside down. It could cause Mr. McGuinty to stay with a majority. It is not fair.

By offering long-time Tory MPP Elizabeth Witmer the top job with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, the Liberals have opened up a seat in the Legislature that is a potential win for them. It was one of the few urban seats in Ontario that was held by Hudak’s Conservatives. Witmer held it in her own right and it is not one that Hudak is likely to hold with Witmer gone.

Kitchener-Waterloo voters are more knowledgeable than voters in the average Ontario riding. With two universities in the riding as well as many major high technology firms, the average voter is better educated, more affluent and more politically aware. The vote for Witmer in the last Ontario election was in part out of respect for her as a long-serving Member of the Legislature and a mild protest against McGuinty.

The voters’ problem in the upcoming by-election is that they have little choice. Unless there is a second coming and a new Bill Davis appears on the scene to rescue the Ontario Conservatives, these voters are not going to embrace Tiny Tim Hudak. Nor are they going to suddenly convert to the New Democrats. Andrea Horwath will do better than expected in the by-election but there is too much of a gap between the reality of the last NDP vote in the riding and what the party would need to win.

The party with the most serious candidate problem is the Liberals. They must have somebody sitting in the wings, capable of carrying the banner, or they would not have made the move on Witmer. Eric Davis, the previous candidate for the Liberals, might not be the choice for the party this time, if the Liberals want to guarantee the win. The Liberals need someone who can come across as their own person.

That is probably the solution for the Conservatives as well. Witmer’s son has already ruled himself out but there are always other possibilities. The Conservatives desperately need a candidate who does not come across as an ideologue.

They will also have to count on Tiny Tim staying away from the riding.

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Ontario’s schizophrenic Whigs.

April 29, 2012 by Peter Lowry

We hate to talk so much about Ontario’s Whigs but we are worried about them. We have never heard of collective schizophrenia before. To see signs of disconnection with reality, actions that are unrelated to intent and such obvious delusions from the Ontario government are matters of very serious concern. Maybe if the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) adds some shrinks to its bargaining unit, their next sit-down with the government negotiators might give us some answers.

It is getting so bad that recently one of Ontario’s top medical teaching specialists—one of the guys who earns and actually deserves more than $500,000 a year—ignored the recommendations of the resident who had done the detailed examination and launched directly into one of our occasional political discussions. He said he could care less about more money but he wanted to know where the Ministry of Health was headed. There were no good answers for him.

Like him, we also had high hopes for Deb Mathews when David Caplan was dumped from the Health Ministry. Mathews has a lot going for her and she took the initial orientation in stride despite it being just in time for a tough Ontario election last year. Sure, she was blind-sided by the Ornge helicopter business but that was a legacy that was none of her doing. She is cleaning house as quickly as possible.

What confuses the electorate in Ontario is that we have a government in this province that cries poor-mouth one day and the next day tells us our economic growth is better than forecasts. The Treasurer in Ontario supplies crying towels with his neoconservative budget and then rails against the New Democrats who want a two-per cent surtax on the filthy rich. And the Treasurer has the gall to tell us that the NDP’s two-per cent surtax is “high-spending.”

What we really cannot get over is how they can brag so loudly about how their plan is working while demanding that the public sector are going to get a pay freeze. What did the civil servants do wrong that they have to be the goats?

The Whigs tell us that Ontario is a North American leader in job creation and they have yet to get any of the public sector people to agree to their pay freeze. When Standard and Poor’s put the province on ‘Watch,’ it was not a down grade. The ratings people are as curious as we are to see if the Ontario budget can actually work.

The health specialist had the last word in our budget discussion. He closed the chat by saying, ‘Lose 20 pounds by the next time you come and see me.” It makes you wonder what he might say to our chubby Ontario Treasurer Dwight Duncan.

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Ontario’s Whigs want to help Hudak?

April 28, 2012 by Peter Lowry

There is something wrong here. We hear that the Ontario Liberal government is concerned about Tiny Tim Hudak’s negativism. We are told by Dalton McGuinty’s people that Timmy’s Conservatives should be helping keep the Whigs out of the clutches of the rapacious New Democratic Party (NDP). How did the world get turned so backwards in this province?

There was a time when we liberals demanded of David Peterson’s people that they negotiate immediately with the NDP to end the threat of a Conservative minority government. It was 1985 and we issued in the first Liberal government in Ontario since Liberal Premier Mitch Hepburn went back to Elgin County in 1942 to watch the grass grow. (The Conservatives soon defeated his replacement, Harry Nixon.)

As Premier, David Peterson never had much chance to figure out where he was in the political spectrum but he never felt he had to apologize for making a deal with the NDP. Yet here we have McGuinty complaining that he would rather make a deal with someone as ignorant as Conservative Tim Hudak than make a deal with Andrea Horwath of the NDP. This is enough to make a real liberal want to cry.

What Dalton McGuinty does not understand is that Ontario does not want or need two right wing political parties. If he even knew where the middle ground might be, he is a long way to the right of it. Ontario Liberals should not have to hold their nose when voting for provincial Liberal Party candidates. McGuinty has got to go.

Nothing makes that clearer than the fight Health Minister Deb Mathews is currently having with the Ontario Medical Association (OMA). As the purported saviour of the political playpen of Ontario health services, Mathews is actually arguing with the OMA over whether we need more doctors. Almost a million Ontario residents cannot get a family doctor and she is refusing to pay for additional doctors. The OMA has made it very clear that they will accept a freeze on the doctor’s incomes if the money goes to new doctors. It could not be plainer that the OMA is trying to solve the problem of looking after patients and the provincial government only cares about the money.

As Ontario citizens, it is our responsibility to back the doctors. How many of those people making over $500,000 a year do you think are doctors? We should make the NDP wealth surtax at least four per cent. The doctors will not mind. They would consider it a direct contribution to good health care for the people of Ontario. After all, Dalton McGuinty does not give a damn.

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Mike Harris’ people are rescuing Hudak.

April 27, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The Ontario Conservatives have called in the first team. The rumour seems clear that Leslie Noble and Tom Long are taking over the management of Conservative leader Tim Hudak’s next provincial campaign. This remains in the rumour category because Noble and Long want to keep their respective private sector clients until telling them “So sorry, the Conservative Party calls.”

There are those among us that did not think Tom Long would accept the campaign management position because he might still harbour visions of replacing Tiny Tim as Conservative leader in Ontario. Since his failed bid in going for the national leadership of the Alliance Party in 2000, Long has longed for a return to the political spotlight. He is the type of person who likes to start at the top.

Teamed with Leslie Noble and Hudak’s wife Deb Hutton, it will be like the backroom of Mike Harris’ successful campaigns in 1995 and 1999. One thing you can count on is that there will not be a mistake such as Hudak’s last campaign manager, Mike Spiro, made in 2011. Spiro had a solid strategy going into the campaign but the length of the run-up to that campaign did him in. He did not adapt as needed through the summer to deal with the obvious concerns of Ontario voters over the economy.

But whether Tiny Tim can be resurrected is the problem. The current dissention in the Conservative back benches is not as much the problem as Hudak himself. He did not seem to remain up for campaigning last year. It was either the length of that campaign or he tires too easily. They might have to find a new strategy to fortify his presence throughout the campaign. Worst case they could send him on a holiday somewhere and tell everyone he has a communicable disease. Have we ever had a winner on a sympathy vote in Ontario?

The good news for the Tory brain trust is that the next provincial campaign is likely to be before the end of 2013 and will happen fast. It looks like the NDP will instigate it as that party has the most to gain in dumping McGuinty. It certainly cannot continue to support him. McGuinty has abused the NDP and shows no intention of coming over to the left side of the political ledger.

The only thing that can change the game is the early resignation of Dalton McGuinty. He has a brief window before the federal party gets into its leadership contest and once that is in full swing, there will be no room for a provincial event. Politics is always interesting.

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Premeir McGuinty calls it the NDP tax.

April 25, 2012 by Peter Lowry

If you make more than $500,000 a year in Ontario, you are going to have to pay the NDP tax. It is a surtax of two per cent of money you earn over $500,000. a year. Obviously, if you make that kind of money, you will not have to miss your grand tour of Europe next year. In fact, if Premier McGuinty had not made such a fuss about it, you might not have noticed the tax unless your accountant pointed it out to you.

If you pay this tax, it is a badge of honour. You should fly an orange flag from the battlements of your Ontario mansions. It means you are doing your part to end the deficit caused by the financial woes of 2008. General Motors paid back the money it was given back then. You are now doing your part.

Unfortunately, some of us do not make as much money. We are unable to join you in the role of deficit fighter. Mind you, we also had damn little to do with the bad times that hit us in 2008. Our banks might not have been caught up in the sub-prime mortgage scandal. We might not have been involved in Wall Street ponzi schemes. In fact, most Canadians had no involvement whatsoever in the cause of the financial hard times nor in the ham-fisted remedies utilized by our reluctant governments.

But we can assure you, we have paid and paid. We are paying the higher municipal taxes now because of the accelerated infrastructure programs forced on our municipalities by federal and provincial governments. We are paying other taxes that disappear into the maw of deficit reduction. We are paying the employment insurance and welfare for the people laid off by governments to reduce costs.

As long as you understand, we are all doing our part here. Mind you, it is a bit churlish of Premier McGuinty to call it the NDP tax that you high earners are paying. After all, it is not as though his Whigs have a majority at Queen’s Park.

McGuinty needed some cooperation and he sure was not going to get it from Tiny Tim Hudak and that odd assortment of Ontario Landowners and Harrisites who call themselves Conservatives. Some of his own caucus have been complaining about Tiny Tim leaving the field to the New Democratic Party’s Andrea Horwath when he would not play the negotiation game. Andrea preened for the news media while Tiny Tim when home to sulk.

It was certainly indicative of how much future cooperation Dalton McGuinty is going to get when instead of voting for the revised budget, the NDP sat on their hands and abstained from voting. That let the Liberal budget pass but we might lay a few dollars on an election before the end of next year in Ontario.

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Wildrose are Stephen Harper’s volk.

April 24, 2012 by Peter Lowry

You can imagine the Wildrose Alliance adherents gathering their belongings and families, loading their Voortrekker wagons, shouldering their long guns and setting off north to new lands. They are a tough breed. It is too bad that the tundra to the north of Alberta is so forbidding. They hardly want to go there. And their real leader, Stephen Harper, is too busy in Ottawa to lead them.

It means the spaced-out Trekees of the Wildrose Alliance will have to suck it up for the next four years. Alison Redford is Premier with a 61-member majority and the rabid Wildrose supporters will have to settle for Redford’s watered down Conservatism. She will have an opposition made up of Danielle Smith and more than dozen Wildrose snapping at her heels. That must not be a pleasant prospect for Redford after seeing how comfortable Smith is with the media and how they respond to her.

It was the media that almost made Smith the winner. With Tom Flanagan manipulating the Wildrose campaign, the media followed his trail of bread crumbs to favourable polls. Some of those polls were quite fanciful and the news media obviously wanted to be suckered into believing and reporting them.

But Flanagan went too far. His propaganda campaign for Wildrose reached such a crescendo of conviction that it scared many of Alberta’s Liberal party supporters. Enough of these stalwarts switched their votes to keep Smith and her Libertarian mob out. The Liberal voters opted to support the less strident and more trusted Progressive Conservatives. It leaves the real, non-Conservative opposition in the Alberta Legislature to five Liberals and four NDPers until the next election.

What is really scary about Smith is her loose cannon approach to Canadian politics. While she calls herself a Libertarian, it is not a term for which academics can agree on a definition, nor do most people understand the implications of the term. Yet, it is probably the only word that describes her extreme conservative views other than a comparison to the American Tea Party. There have been many groups such as the Tea Party emerge from the American southwest over the years. They are something that should be kept in the closet and only brought out to scare the kids on Halloween.

Sometimes, you get the feeling that Prime Minister Harper wants to keep the extremists around to make him look almost sensible. The only problem is that when you check back over some of the diatribes Harper used to write for the National Citizens Coalition (NCC), you realize he and Danielle Smith are reading from the same page.

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Can’t Ontario Whigs live off the vigorish?

April 22, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It looks like the New Democratic Party in Ontario is going to force Dalton McGuinty’s Whigs to tax people earning over $500,000 per year. And here we thought the Whigs had solved the province’s financial problems by finally promising a decent casino in Toronto. They can expect far more revenue from the vigorish at their casinos than the nickels and dimes they will get from people making vulgarly high incomes.

Vigorish, or ‘the vig,’ as it is often called in gambling circles, is the margin the casino keeps from the actual payoff to gamblers and the real odds. It is this vigorish that really challenges gamblers when they try to beat the house. It is the tightness of the vigorish in Craps, for example, that attracts gamblers because, if they know the odds, it is the fairest game in the casino. Yet the casino can still pay for the staff the game needs by milking the Craps players who lose on the high vigorish mid-table propositions.

It is like all the variations accompanying Blackjack today. For example, by betting on getting a ‘Perfect Pair’ on your first two cards, you are betting that you will have a mixed pair (the same value but of a red and black suit) and the casino will pay you six to one on your bet. They will pay you 12 to one for a pair the same color and 25 to one for a pair of the same suit. It does not speak well for the quality of mathematical teaching in Ontario that people cannot quickly see that the casino is keeping a great deal of their money if they go along with that foolish a bet.

Mind you David Olive of the Toronto Star tells us that casinos are a no-growth business. He tells us that casino habitués are middle-aged and old. He does not approve of casinos. That is why we are gathering at the Toronto Star building in Toronto tomorrow to trip him with our canes and run over him with our walkers. He is obviously much to busy pontificating about them to go to casinos, so he does not go and that is his right. He needs to recognize our rights.

He is worried, for some reason, that we seniors are a stagnant population and it means that the Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) casinos will have to try to steal business from each other. We only wish. The OLG monopoly, like any other monopoly, has damn little concern for its customers and the most concern for its bottom line. Just look at Bell Canada. That is one hell of a role model for casinos!

David Olive, and the Toronto Star, seem worried that the OLG may have finally tapped out the market. He should talk to MGM about that. Now that is a business that knows what it is doing. It builds wonderful casino resorts that put Ontario’s pathetic lottery and gaming people to shame. MGM might not pay quite as much vigorish to the provincial coffers but it would certainly show the politicians what real casinos are all about.

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The need to play nice in the Ontario legislature.

April 17, 2012 by Peter Lowry

After a particularly uninformative and poorly resolved election in Ontario last year, the political parties are not playing well together. With McGuinty’s Liberals just two seats short of a majority, everyone is posturing and giving the other guys the raspberry. It is a fractious and unproductive place.

Tiny Tim Hudak has a tenuous grip on the reins of his second place Conservatives. When the Liberals brought out their budget a few weeks ago, Tiny Tim and his team took their bats and went home to sulk. It was above their intellectual pay grade to come up with any improvement in what was basically a conservative budget anyway.

Andrea Horwath and her bunch had the balls to stay and play. They decided to use the opportunity to embarrass McGuinty’s bumblers and their budget. Horwath used the Chinese torture technique and dribbled out the conditions for cooperation over the interval. McGuinty played into her hands by swinging at the first pitch. He did not understand that she was just warming up.

What hit pay dirt with Ontario’s voters was Horwath’s proposal to tax the rich. That got them. It was simplistic. The public was tuned in to it because of the ‘Occupy’ movement. And McGuinty had stupidly promised that he would not raise taxes. Why he had made such a promise was not clear to anyone. All it does is give legitimacy to the Conservatives and their extremist supporters.

And now all the kids are positioning themselves for an election. An election at this stage would be like the book Hunger Games, only nobody wins. It hardly takes a genius to realize that by destroying McGuinty, Horwath will let Tiny Tim and the horde of the Ontario Landowners through the gates of Ontario’s Capitol.

Not that an election is not needed. Our problem in Ontario is that we have three party leaders who really need to go. Dalton McGuinty is a noose around the neck of the Liberals. He is right wing, unimaginative, dull and hardly what Ontario needs at this time.

Andrea Horwath has never been able to live up to her potential. Every time she shows a bit of smarts, she surprises herself and she pulls her head back into her shell. If she had just paid attention to what Jack Layton did with the federal wing of her party in the last election. He obviously knew he had nothing to lose and he went for the brass ring. The result was not pretty but he did it.

But then you think of how the party of Bill Davis in Ontario has sunk so low. Tiny Tim Hudak is not only an embarrassment to the former Progressive Conservatives but the Ontario Landowners and Harrisites also want him gone. Maybe if they send him on a world cruise during an election he might give his party a chance.

The question is: Which party can get rid of its leader first?

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They take their politics seriously in Alberta.

April 10, 2012 by Peter Lowry

No one seemed too surprised at seeing the bruises on a provincial Conservative candidate in Edmonton the other day. The candidate claimed that he had been punched by an overly enthusiastic Wildrose Alliance Party supporter when door knocking. Luckily the campaign is in its last two weeks. It might all be over before anything more serious happens.

We always teach prospective canvassers that the greatest danger in an election campaign is a broken stair to a front door. We have been told occasionally to get off someone’s porch but this has never been followed up with physical violence. Albertans like their politics on the raw side.

That was why it was disappointing to see that Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith’s bus was repainted to move her picture away from the twin wheels toward the rear of the bus. There was no question that it emphasized her bust line well beyond what nature had given her. Whoever had positioned that picture on the bus knew exactly what he (or she) was doing. It got a great laugh to launch her campaign.

Only the braver of the western bloggers and media experts are saying who the likely winner is at this stage. The betting is still even money between Alison Redford’s Conservatives and Danielle Smith’s new Wildrose Alliance Party. It will probably be the television debate, scheduled for this Thursday that will push the undecided vote one way or the other. Those of us in the East will have to settle for seeing the debate on the Internet but you can expect Danielle Smith to have the advantage.

Smith has the better television skills. Redford has the incumbency factor but after 41 years of Conservative rule in the province, her promises are a bit tired. While a right-wing Libertarian spiel from Smith would not go down very well with Eastern voters it does not come across as crazy to Westerners. They have been softened to it for years by the Social Credit and Reform Parties and the Manning’s (Ernest and Preston).

This is not to ignore that the Liberals and NDP are also in the race. It is just that this is Alberta and there is only one moon in the sky.

So mark your calendar for election night, April 23. Our best guess at this stage is Smith will win but there is lots of time for a Conservative recovery. Alberta politics is like that.

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