Provincial Politics – Page 124

Political hypocrisy is always with us.

April 5, 2012 by Peter Lowry

This is an old story. It was over 30 years ago and the head table group was meeting in a room off the ballroom in the Sheraton Hotel across from Toronto city hall. An Ontario cabinet minister and the writer were enjoying a drink and having an interesting discussion about when we expected to have casinos in Ontario. At the time, we were just starting to have ‘charity casinos’ in the province and there was concern about where these events were headed.

We were joined by a young politician from North York who had already cut a swath for himself in municipal politics and was soon to be named Metropolitan Toronto chairman. “You are discussing one of my favourite topics,” he told us. “In fact, I just got back from a weekend junket to Las Vegas.”

“Well Paul,” I said to him, “We’re discussing having casinos in Toronto so that you do not have to go so far. How do you feel about having casinos here?”

Today, Paul Godfrey is chair of Ontario Lottery and Gaming and he might not be amused to be reminded of what he said as a politician, so long ago. Suffice to say, he rejected the idea of having casinos in Toronto. It was political hypocrisy at its finest! (Political hypocrisy is when you put down the voters as needing protection when what they really need is protection from this type of politician.)

But he is hardly alone in that. Toronto city hall has politicians today calling for a vote on whether to allow casinos. Where do they get off telling Torontonians if they can go to a casino? Where do they get off, telling us we do not want the jobs, the attraction for tourism and the opportunity to have a world-class casino?

While they are at it, maybe they should also have a vote on which churches we should go to, whether convenience stores should sell beer or if they should ban lotteries. There is no end to opportunities for the bigots and hypocrites among us to make sure people do not do anything they dislike—or are just being hypocrites about.

It seems the Ford brothers in Toronto might just be the rare exception as politicians. They might have some really strange ideas for Toronto transit and to be very bad at voter relations but you know that, with them, what you see is what you get—all 550 pounds (250 kilos) of them!

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Premier McGuinty’s Ponzi scheme.

April 4, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is a favourite argument with environmentalists. They agree that the Ontario Government’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program for ‘Green’ electricity smells like, tastes like and probably is a form of Ponzi scheme but that is alright because it supports wind power, sun power, thermal and biomass energy generation in our province. It does not seem to bother them that the program is rapidly escalating the cost of electricity in Ontario and it is the consumer who is paying the real costs of the scheme.

And never mind that McGuinty’s people had a fit of conscience last year (in time for the election) and gave consumers a stay of execution for part of the rising costs. We will still pay in the long run—and the government has been collecting Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on energy bills to cover the shortfall.

While we can all delight in the justice of Provincial NDP Leader Andrea Horvath calling for a two-per cent surtax on the money people earn over $500,000 per year, it sounds like a mathematical stretch to say this is enough to cover the HST on energy. If it is, we have a much greater disparity in incomes in this province than we realized.

But bringing some commonsense to the FIT program is the topic. When first hearing of the program a few years ago, we studied the possibilities of taking advantage of the program for our condominium community. We have the winds and the sun and the space for a wind turbine or for solar panels. We could do either or both and since we were already paying over $500,000 a year for energy for two towers, we hoped to both lower our energy costs and also feel good about the environment.

When we priced out the various options available to us to capture wind and solar energy, we realized that the suppliers were the only ones to get any money out of the deal. All they offered us was the feel-good part.

But when we looked at the obstacles in our path, we opted not to spend the rest of our lives chasing a Ponzi scheme. It is when you see widely acclaimed plans, supported by Babel council, for wind and biomass generation languishing for years awaiting approvals, it’s obvious how the province is controlling its scheme.

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In this corner, in the red trunks, Premier McGuinty.

April 1, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It seemed to be the week for political pugilism. Many of us were appalled at MP Justin Trudeau and a Conservative Senator actually putting on boxing gloves. They claimed they were doing it for charity and few of us were sorry to see the Conservative with a bloody nose. The better fight was between old adversaries, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Frankly, few could see the difference between the federal budget and the Ontario budget. Neither budget was a people pleaser. It was not until Jim Flaherty was back in Toronto on Friday and slammed the Ontario budget effort that we knew there was a difference of opinion between the two levels of government.

Despite the fact there was little real action in the coming year in the federal budget, Jim Flaherty took a roundhouse punch at Ontario’s budget ‘mismanagement’ at the staid Canadian Club in Toronto on Friday. Maybe he was just supporting Tiny Tim Hudak’s position against the budget. Even if it was as simple as that, his comments seemed to be somewhat extreme.

Instead of getting angry about the slurs, McGuinty chose to damn the federal budget with faint praise. It actually was funny to hear the Ontario Premier compliment the federal budget as a ‘measured effort.’ Just think of all those rabid Conservatives out there across Canada who now believe that Flaherty’s federal budget is a failure because a supposedly Liberal Premier praised it.

Neither the federal nor Ontario budgets get any praise from us. They both attacked civil servants unnecessarily. They failed to rebalance both our corporate and personal tax systems. The feds did more for job creation and that was not much. They both complained about the deficits and then did almost nothing about them. They were posturing and they looked stupid doing it.

The continued attacks on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio Canada by the Harper Conservatives are beneath contempt. And after looking at some of the sunshine list published by the Ontario Government the other week, you feel embarrassed to live in Ontario. Just take a look at the poverty you see on the streets in Ontario and wonder about all these people paid over $100,000 per year by our provincial Government. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe young Trudeau was fighting mad, in his way, but pugilism is not the answer. In the upcoming fight for the federal Liberal Leadership, he is probably outclassed. He should get behind a real contender now.

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Well Mr. McGuinty, since you asked, your budget sucks.

March 28, 2012 by Peter Lowry

What Ontario Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan announced in the Legislature yesterday was not a liberal budget. It was closer to a Conservative party budget than anything liberal. It was all forecast by that dour banker Don Drummond. Who said he knew what was needed in Ontario?

Why, for example, does Dwight Duncan think it is so important to balance things over the coming five years? Is God going to strike him dead if he does not accomplish this?

Why can we not make plans to grow our Ontario economy and let more jobs and taxes balance the books? Maybe it was planned timing that the Ontario ‘sunshine list’ of publicly paid people who make over $100,000 per year was released last week. You do not need to freeze their inflated salaries. You just need to tax them properly.

And if anyone needs to understand the quote from George Santayana—the one that says: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it—it is the Ontario Liberals. When Bob Rae was Ontario Premier a few years back, he took on the unions to include them in his austerity program. It was these same unions who kept the Liberals in power in the 2011 election—not quite a majority—but enough to stay in power. You try to screw with those unions and after a sooner election that you expect, you will be looking up from down!

And to make matters worse, McGuinty, you are out to screw seniors. What did they ever do for you but vote for you? If you put in a means test on their Ontario Drug Benefit plan, you might as well also kiss that vote goodbye.

If you are going to start a fight with the Ontario Medical Association, you should fight over something worthwhile. How about your government forcing the doctors to stop discriminating against the sick and the elderly? The sick and the elderly are the people who cannot get a family doctor. Are you too stupid to figure out why?

You might be wondering why this supposed Liberal Party member is being so nasty to you. Our axe to grind is that we support real liberals. Maybe we should stop calling your people Whigs. Whigs are just Tories with a different name from another century. If we do not tell you when you are so wrong, who will?

And if you put that callow Tiny Tim Hudak in power, we will never forgive you!

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Are we really seeing red over Ornge?

March 27, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Considering this is budget day in Ontario, Ornge might just be last week’s topic. At that time, the opposition at Queen’s Park was in full cry for the head of Health Minister Deb Mathews. It was not until the Provincial Auditor brought us his report that anyone really knew how bad the situation is with that air ambulance service.

And all the auditor could tell us last week was that it was so screwed up, he could not figure it all out. All he knew was that the Ornge people had been playing fast and loose with the government’s money and rules, they were hardly forthcoming about their transactions and the province might have lost some money in the process.

But what more can Deb Mathews do? She has already fired the people involved. She has ranted and roared at those who are left. The Ministry of Health is a huge portfolio and she can hardly do a hands-on job with all the parts. What she probably needs more than all the shouting in the legislature is for her to shout at her bloated staff—they are obviously doing a lousy job.

She cannot keep using the excuse about the size of her Ministry. She certainly has enough staff to have an overview at the critical points. They let her down. The political staff particularly has to be sensitive to what can cause trouble for their Minister. They have to use similar smell tests as the Auditor General. If something does not pass the smell test, they have to find out why.

There are too many financial corpses around Ontario’s Health Ministry. Deb Mathews knew that when McGuinty gave her the job. It was probably her ego that prevented her from saying ‘No thanks.’ Taking over when she did, that close to the election, meant that she had little time to batten the hatches. She could hardly trust her predecessor David Caplan’s choice of political staff.

The opposition think she should take the bullet for Ornge, the way Caplan took the bullet for eHealth. The difference was he deserved it. He brought fewer skills to the task of Minister than his mother did back in the 1980s and she did an abysmal job.

But in the Health Ministry of today, there are different needs. We have the technologies today to lower the cost of health care and it is not happening. Why? We have people who cannot get a family doctor. Why? We have hospital boards with CEO’s being paid huge salaries and they are no more efficient. Why? We have district health units that are just adding more bureaucracy. Why? And the list goes on and on. Your trials have only begun Deb Mathews.

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Why is the Toronto Star against casinos?

March 21, 2012 by Peter Lowry

You never want to be on the wrong side of an issue with the Toronto Daily Star. The editors show no mercy. They will stomp you. They will grind you down. They go after you full blast on both editorial and news pages. They have no patience for fact or pleas for an open mind. The Star likes to be a crusader. It makes them feel close to the roots of the paper’s founder, Joseph Atkinson.

Yet the Star’s current crusade makes no sense. Why are they damning a casino for Toronto? If the casino is sanctioned by the Ontario government, it is not illegal. It is just another entertainment centre. Is this some false morality? Do they really think they will change anything?

To be fair, it should be noted that a few centimetres of editorial space were allocated to the pro side of the debate today—in the Toronto Star.

But their owned-and-operated grocery store advertising wraps around the province have been turned loose to carry on the fight against the demon Toronto casino. Our own Babel Backward provided a scathing attack today in an editorial intended to enrage the populous. Full of confused claims and erroneous facts, the editorial was an outcry about local employment.

The editorial claims that three casinos in Windsor, Fort Erie and Sarnia are to be padlocked (sic). The fact that these were money-losing slot operations was glossed over. It was then claimed that all slots at racetrack operations would be gone next year. That was not only wrong but completely misrepresented the situation.

What it boils down to in the editorial is local jobs. Rama (which is not on the market, as stated in the editorial) has about 2500 employees. If Torontonians stop coming to Central Ontario because there is a casino in Toronto, a lot more people than the Casino Rama managers are going to be very surprised.

While slots are hardly our thing, Georgian Downs is a very nice little facility. It is quite likely to keep hiring people in Innisfil and paying the municipality for being there. It will not be getting more grants to keep the horses running but that was a luxury the province could ill afford. That racing money was a separate issue.

It all boils down to small town myopia. You should have felt the chill in the air when we told our favourite local council member that the best use for Babel’s Lakeshore train station lands was a casino. And he also ignored the suggestion of a concert hall.

Maybe those of us who choose to live in small-town Ontario deserve this. The positive thought is that we will soon have a world-class casino just an hour away in Toronto!

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Ontario Lottery and Gaming is not in the game.

March 18, 2012 by Peter Lowry

There was no rush to analyse the Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) Strategic Business Review. The media gave us the salient features. The report was a no brainer. This blog has been telling you there would be at least one major casino in Toronto very soon. There was nothing prescient about it. It was obvious.

What we did not know was that the OLG report would show readers how incompetent it is. The executive summary should have included the resignations of all the executives involved in this mess. Originally it was assumed that the government asked for this report last summer and said to deliver it sometime after the October election. You are stunned when you read that this material was a year-and-a-half in the making.

It reads as though it took a month for some interviews, two weeks of writing and a year and a half for approvals.

In trying to demonstrate a path to the future, the report tells us what a failure OLG has been. It has not kept up with the needs of the marketplace. It has failed to serve Ontario citizens. It has suffered from political interference. OLG facilities have further confused the market by trying to satisfy the regulators at the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) and putting political considerations ahead of the wishes of the market.

The report shows that Ontario now has the lowest per capita profit from gambling of any other part of Canada except for Prince Edward Island and the Arctic. That is not only embarrassing but shows the incompetence of everyone involved.

The report freely admits that the OLG has failed to keep up with technology, changing consumer preferences and tourism patterns. What they have been doing, we are not told.

Now the OLG wants us to let them do more. Whether it should be done under new management, is the important question.

It is amusing to note that Toronto is going to get a casino while the report insists municipalities have a veto on facilities in their backyards. If we want to give municipalities the right to reject legal casino’s maybe we could let them to reject pay-day loan leeches and tattoo parlours at the same time. Mind you, casinos provide far more in taxes and employment benefits to the community.

Maybe the report is being too subtle when it mentions that the AGCO is also involved in overseeing gambling in the province. Since the OLG wants to just oversee it and leave the operations to the private sector, we might have one to many overseers here.

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And 39 per cent want chocolate

March 15, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is always interesting to see these instant surveys that tell us that something the province is doing is not approved by a large number of voters. To-day’s instant results are about casinos. We are told that some high percentage of voters do not want a casino in their backyard. And so what? What would life be like in Ontario if everyone wanted to go to a casino every chance they could get?

It would be chaos. The economy could not afford all of us going to casinos. We would have to convert every church hall into a bingo parlour. There would be slot machines replacing the baptismal font. The manse would be hosting poker games.

Obviously nobody would want to go that far. We can strike a bargain on the issue. Let’s agree to keep the gamblers out of the churches and the churches out of the casinos. They are not incompatible systems. And the losers need some place to pray after they donate their money to the casino.

To even suggest that everyone would like to have casinos in their city is foolish. Some like casinos and some do not. Some like strawberry ice cream and some like chocolate. That is what makes humans interesting.

There are even some people who should never go to a casino. It is up to them to make that decision. It is the same as people who should never drink alcohol. They are often the one who will politely turn down the offer of a cocktail.

Gambling is a form of entertainment. It has been with us since pre-history. It has been obvious for some time that with the Americans tightening border crossings that the tourism-based casino strategy was in trouble. It was hardly long before the Ontario Government and Ontario Lottery and Gaming remembered that Toronto is Ontario’s number one tourist destination.

And it is quite likely that Woodbine Racetrack can clear some slots area for casino tables in short order. And there is lots of space there, on the track property, for a real casino to be built in the next few years. A place to stand, a place to grow, Ontari-ari-ari-oh!

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The eastern pipeline option.

March 14, 2012 by Peter Lowry

You have to admire the resourcefulness of Albertans. They always have answers at the ready to overcome political obstacles. Whether the blockage is created by Ottawa or the Legislature in Edmonton, they will come up with an answer. The usual solution is to form a new and more right-wing political party. The current provincial inheritor of the Conservative-Reform-Alliance parties is the Wildrose Alliance. The party has been poised to move in on the Alberta Conservatives as that party’s strength erodes.

Well ahead in the public opinion polls, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is acting as premier-in-waiting for the election to be held in the next couple months. Smith has Conservative Premier Alison Redford in a bind as the Premier is committed to supporting the Trans-Canada’s Keystone XL Pipeline through the United States to the Texas Gulf refineries as well as the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline over the Rockies to Kitimat, B.C. This left Smith with an option that had not been considered, an all Canadian solution. She suggested shipping Alberta’s heavy tar sands oil to refineries in Sarnia, Montreal, Quebec City and Saint John. The only pipeline that would be new on that route would be to Saint John from Montreal.

While it was not a brand new suggestion, it got rave reviews in the more conservative media when Smith proposed it in a speech in Ottawa. It could hardly be ignored in Alberta.

But what Smith did not add was the fact that the Enbridge eastern route is through the U.S. before crossing the Canadian border again into Ontario. One of the options all along was to divert heavy oil from the Enbridge pipelines south to Texas. This is a slightly roundabout route but it gets around most of the serious ecological concerns.

Mind you, the more practical people with a concern for the ecology are pointing out that heavy oil can cause the most serious harm to the ecology. They explain that refined oil cannot mix with water and is much easier to clean up than heavy crude. They ask why the heavy crude cannot be processed to a stage in which it could flow easier and not be an ecological disaster waiting for a pipeline break. Nobody seems to be able to answer that.

Nor would it be a concern of someone such as Wildrose’s Danielle Smith. This is a person who did her internship in Alberta politics as an acolyte of the Fraser Institute. In the convoluted politics of Alberta, Ms. Smith describes herself as Pro-Choice Libertarian. That is quite a fence-sitting accomplishment for any politician.

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Mayor Ford’s dilemma.

March 8, 2012 by Peter Lowry

It is obvious that Ontario Conservative leader ‘Tiny Tim’ Hudak has never served on a municipal council. He seems to have absolutely no idea how the mayor and council interrelate. This must be causing confusion for those of his Conservative members who got their political start in municipal politics. Some of them have also served as mayors. They could explain to Tiny Tim the mistakes Toronto Mayor Ford has made with his city’s councillors.

Tiny Tim has been suggesting to Premier McGuinty that the Ontario government should only support Mayor Ford’s vision of subways. McGuinty has been smart enough to say no and that he will abide by the council’s decision between Light Rapid Transit or subways. McGuinty has enough problems without taking on a rebellious Toronto council.

There is certainly no need for anyone to be surprised that city council has had enough of Toronto’s abrasive mayor. Ford was always odd man out as a councillor. It was like his promise to Toronto voters that he would end the gravy train at city hall. They voted for him and then found out he was the gravy train.

It was obvious a year ago last summer that Ford was set to win the mayor’s chair in Toronto. The only viable opponent was George Smitherman, the openly gay former minister in the McGuinty government. Smitherman was an easy winner downtown while Ford reaped the conservatism of the suburbs. The suburbs are bigger. It was no contest.

But the mayoralty is no holy grail. The job has residual power but it is power that has to be exercised with care and flair. The mayor has to build an alliance with the city officials because s/he works closely with them. If the mayor exercises the power well, the mayor gets more done. The mayor also chairs council and the executive committee. If you know how to wield the gavel, it is power.

But the mayor is still just one vote. To wield power, you need allies. You need to build bridges to former opponents. You have to make nice and work toward the possible. Making new enemies on council just bares your back for more knives.

Looking at it another way, you have to remember that council is the mayor’s mob. The mayor just has to be smart enough to lead that mob to where both sides want to go.

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