Provincial Politics – Page 129

Reading the bones in la belle Province.

February 10, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Some thoughts while watching a few of the regular ‘talking heads’ being interviewed on recent events in Quebec: These so-called experts treat their voters as specimens—spread-eagled, pinned and dissected on a board. They ignore the impact of those allophones who steadfastly remain Quebeckers. And they think the rest of Canada ignores Quebec. What they need to overcome is their own biases that they bring to their analyses.

Politics is a fluid process and attitudes change.Quebec’s angst has its roots in history but real change for Quebec started in the 1960s and was called the quiet revolution. For lack of a turning point, we can use Expo ’67. It had challenge, umbrage, rebirth and confidence. It led to the excesses of the October Crisis. It made René Lévesque an unlikely revolutionary and by 1976, he was Premier of Quebec and vowing separation. He was a professional communicator and there was little to decipher in his threats to our country and his plans for Quebec.

But his referendum lost and he never recovered. His party lost its balance and appeal and never recovered. Separatism became a platform for demagogues who had lost touch with the people. Voting in Quebec became a tidal event. Each new wave is followed by dangerous undertows. You can only determineQuebec’s choices if you know how to throw and read the bones.

The reason is that Quebec voting has become increasingly volatile. A strange hybrid party has emerged that is the rump of the now defunct right-wing Action démocratique du Québec and deserters from the left-wing parti Québécois who formed the Coalition Avenir Québec. If you think that is a strange combination, consider this: Pollsters are telling us that if an election was held tomorrow and if this party had the candidates ready, it could win a provincial election.

And why was anyone surprised last year that the New Democrats won so many Quebec seats in the federal election? The voters no longer trusted Gilles Duceppes’ Bloc Québécois. That party had nothing to offer. Michael Ignatieff was old guard to them and they were not getting on the Liberal train. And they had an understandable fear of the right-wing agenda of Stephen Harper. Why not vote for that guy Jack’s New Democrats?

The NDP benefited from René Lévesque’s legacy of social democratic rule in the 1970’s and 80s.Quebec voters like those politics. It is too bad the Quebec federal Liberals had never thought to present a more social democratic program.

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“Then they came for the trade unionists.”

February 4, 2012 by Peter Lowry

And why should you worry about a bunch of union people? Is anyone looking after your interests? The German people did not seem to care before the Second World War but a pastor, Martin Niemöller, wrote, after the Allies released him from imprisonment in Dachau: “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

And that is the most basic reason why Canadians have to speak out about incidents such as the Caterpillar scam in London, Ontario and the Rob Ford attack on city unions in Toronto. These should be a matter of deep concern to everybody.

The General Motors diesel engine works in London, Ontario were acquired by American venture capital firms in a fire sale when GM was on the ropes. The Canadian government gave the new company a $5 million incentive to keep Canadians working at the London works just five years ago. Today, owned by the giant Caterpillar Inc., with US$42 billion in annual sales, the plant is being moved to Indiana where the state government has passed ‘Right to Work’ laws and Caterpillar can pay a barely living wage.

The Rob Ford Versus the Unions scenario is a little different. The city of Toronto can hardly move city jobs to a less union-friendly environment. They have to create one. And they are hardly talking about a small adjustment to keep city taxes down. When was the last time you had someone say to you:”Just give up all your rights and we will look after you”?

If you think that is a good deal, you better settle in for a long strike and some very smelly garbage—in half the city—as the weather warms up. Just by prolonging the strike for two months with the savings in salaries, Ford will have reduced city expenses to his budget.

Torontonians are in trouble. If they let Ford win against the city workers, they had better wonder who is next. We will believe that this fiasco is over when we see Rob Ford wearing a button saying: “Have you hugged a union member today?”

The London Caterpillar situation is far more serious. This is not just giving the finger to trade unionists but is also saying ‘screw you’ to the Canadian government. Maybe Prime Minister Stephen Harper could care less but Dalton McGuinty and that bunch of Whig wusses at Queen’s Park had bloody well better do something.

If nothing else, McGuinty could wear the crown a little easier if he sat down with Andrea Horwath, Leader of the Ontario New Democrats. Mrs. Horwath has a vested interest in aiding the unionists in London. Deb Matthews, one of Dalton’s key Cabinet colleagues, has a legislative seat at risk if there is no support for London area jobs.

Just think. Premier McGuinty could have a win-win situation, if he just got off his ass.

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Ontario doctors discriminate Deb!

January 31, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Despite being a long-time fan of Deb Matthews, Ontario’s Minister of Health and Long Term Care, we have to admit that she has failed to solve the key problem in Ontario’s health care system. The problem is the doctors. They discriminate and there are people who cannot get a family doctor.

The people who cannot get a family doctor are elderly. They want too much of a doctor’s time. The poorest served of these elderly people are the chronically ill. The doctor cannot cure them. These people tend to have multiple problems that are difficult to treat. That can frustrate the doctor. And that is why doctors do not want these elderly patients in their practice. Doctors want young, healthy families as patients who can be treated quickly and easily.

Sure, the Ontario Medical Association tells doctors not to discriminate because of age or health of prospective patients. The Health Ministry tells the doctors not to discriminate. Despite this, Ontario Human Rights has let them discriminate. Hospitals still let them practice in their facilities, even though they know they discriminate.

That leaves the ball entirely in your court Deb. You are the one who pays these doctors. Your Ministry condones this discrimination. Take a look at the offer on your Ministry’s web site to find a family doctor for Ontario residents. Get your Ministry to issue you a health card with a false name and then fill in an honest application for yourself. You are a grandmother, see how many doctors want to have you as a patient?

When you spoke to the Toronto Board of Trade yesterday (Jan. 30) Deb, you said that the Local Health Integration Network would take more responsibility for local doctors. That was not necessarily good news. From where we sit, in a town that accounts for about a third of the full-time population of the North Simcoe Muskoka LHIN, it is ill-equipped to do anything about the discrimination problem.

While some people hate the LHIN concept in general, we felt that it might work if the centralized bureaucracy at Queen’s Park was proportionally decreased as the health care management was spread across the province. Okay, maybe that was wishful thinking.

But it is still the centralized staff at Queen’s Park that negotiates with the doctors. Do something about the discrimination. Please.

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Who do you trust?

January 21, 2012 by Peter Lowry

There seems to be a universal inability to trust these days. We have come a long way from the politics of trust. We can forget the former grandfatherly images of the sage politicians who would look after our interest. Today we look at politicians as no-holds-barred fighters in a cage. Politics has become a survival of the fittest contest as the savaged and bleeding winner earns the title by being the last person standing.

As usual it is American politics that leads the way. Who is Mitt Romney and why is he ordained to lead anyone, anywhere? And why is President Obama so relaxed and laughing while it is the Republican’s turn in the cage? Is Newt Gingrich that funny? And did Rick Santorum (who?) really win in Idaho? And does it matter? Can the Tea Party recover in time to win South Carolina and save the nation from Romney?

Stay tuned folks.

The question is not who is going to win, but why. The United States of America is practicing the politics of hate and if you hate, you no longer trust. And that is the growing concern of political observers across North America.

In Canada we are already reaping the fruits of Conservative hatreds. The formerly docile pet poodles of Stephen Harper’s Conservative caucus are growing fangs and demanding the raw meat of vengeance on their left-wing opponents. Harper is still looking at the long-haul strategy and is trying to keep them penned.

But enough of their hatred for the liberal left spills through to keep the tensions high.

In Ontario, Premier McGuinty is about to exact his revenge on the electorate for reducing his caucus to a minority government. When he plotted this, he must have thought he was going to lose. He hired a banker, Don Drummond, to plan his revenge. The not very secret Drummond report is soon to be released. The fact that McGuinty is still there to present it presents him with a conundrum. This is not chicken soup he is bringing to the electorate. It is a political expectorant. In bringing up the worst of the detritus of government, he is likely to have coughed himself right out of office.

Meanwhile, back in the United States of Hysteria, the Republicans continue to savage each other to prove who is the most pure, the most religious, the most hate filled—and who can defeat that abominable Obama. The election is in November.

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Why surprise at Toronto casino?

January 17, 2012 by Peter Lowry

The ‘maybes’ as opposed to the former ‘no ways’ in regards to a Toronto casino should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the hypocrisy of the Ontario government over the years. In an October 24 posting last year, this blog postulated that there really might be three casinos in the Toronto area. That could be pushing the envelope but the Toronto Star now reports that Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan says the province ‘may try its luck with a Toronto Casino.’

It had to happen. The province needs the money. The city needs the money. It is a match made in heaven.

The fiction over the years was that the government wanted to capture tourist dollars with its casinos. That was the supposed plan until easy access across the U.S. border became a thing of the past. A higher Canadian dollar made the casinos on the U.S. side of the border more attractive. And Ontario’s restrictive smoking and alcohol laws had already turned off many American gamblers. It makes it time to admit that the only market that can turn a substantial profit for the government is Toronto. All the government has to do is admit what we have always known: Toronto is the tourist destination preferred by most visitors to Ontario.

Mind you, Toronto Councillor Michael Thompson speaks for many Neanderthals when he says: “I wouldn’t want to hear about families losing their house or their life savings.” Obviously, Mr. Thompson and like-minded people out of Ontario’s puritan past should have stopped Niagara Falls, Rama, Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie, Skugog Island, Brantford, Gananoque and the National Capitol area’s Lac Leamy from taking the hapless gamblers’ money. That horse has been out of the barn far too long.

The only conflicted Member of the Legislature will be MPP “Tiny Tim” Hudak, Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. He will not only be against anything the government is for, but just think of the number of people in his provincial riding who work at the Niagara Falls casinos.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation’s study on “land-based gaming”—whatever that means—will be coming out soon and it will say whatever the Ontario government wants it to say. The only thing that might be a surprise will be a move by Ontario into Internet gaming. The government needs the money.

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Babel hears from the Ontario Legislature.

January 6, 2012 by Peter Lowry

Babel has heard from its man at Queen’s Park. The electoral district sent Mr. Jackson there in early October. We received mail from him this week and he also signed an article in the Examiner. There is little to say about the mailing piece; the recycle bin was already filled with copies from our neighbours, so we added ours. The Examiner article, we read.

The first thing that was obvious about the article was that our new Member of the Provincial Parliament has not spent his time taking a journalism course. This was written for him. It was very modest of him to only have his name at the beginning and end of the article. Usually something like this is written as a news release and the MPP’s name is worked into every second paragraph.

The story was based on Statistics Canada’s release of unemployment figures in October of last year. It also picked up on Conservative Leader Tim Hudak’s mid-December release that linked unemployment to the perceived weaknesses of Ontario’s apprenticeship programs. Whoever wrote the MPP’s article, failed to include the information on the subject from the mayor’s blog at Babel’s city hall Internet site.

The more timely response by Babel’s mayor to the unemployment figures last October pointed out the problem was that Statscan emphasized the donut hole instead of the donut. The mayor, justifiably, complained that Statscan made headlines of the unemployment and ignored the similarly high rate of employment. It is a factor of the average age of people in Babel. With its younger population, Babel is also near the top of the charts of the percentage of people employed.

Tiny Tim Hudak’s December release was just to blame Premier McGuinty for all of Ontario’s unemployment woes. This was hardly a surprise. What was confusing was that he explained that Ontario only allowed one new apprentice for every four journeyman trades persons in the province. While not a trained economist such as the Leader of the Opposition at Queen’s Park, we must admit that the ratio rule makes absolutely no sense. Surely there are various trades that need more apprentices and some that need fewer apprentices. Is nobody doing any forecasting in this?

But our earnest MPP gives a plug to Georgian College for its efforts with apprenticeship programs. We expect we can all agree with that as we face a new year in Babel with renewed determination.

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Should we kill all the lawyers?

December 28, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Having been active in business, charities and politics, one gets to know many lawyers. Some of them are quite civilized and likable people. Despite this, there is a strong tendency to agree with William Shakespeare’s character in Henry VI, Part 2 who suggested that (to have an effective revolution) first we have to kill all the lawyers. In Shakespeare’s time, the line probably had even the lawyers in the audience laughing.

At a neighbourhood get-together the other evening, a lawyer made the mistake of claiming that lawyers are put on earth to assure us less fortunate people of access to the law. The reaction to his claim was spontaneous and bordered on the rude. Of course, in his field of law, he has every right to feel proud of what he is able to do for people. It is just that lawyers themselves are often guilty of promoting bad jokes about lawyers.

To many of us, the lawyer is seen as someone with their hand out, waiting for the rest of us to pay our tithes for access to the law. Without legal training, your way is barred. Even in small claims court in Ontario where having legal counsel is not always necessary, we have noted that court-ordered settlements tend to be more generous when lawyers are involved—probably to pay their fees.

But lawyers have been with us since before the days of Cicero in ancient Rome. In Robert Harris’ wonderful novel Imperium, he showed how inseparable lawyers were from politics as far back as Cicero’s time. Mind you, assassination was one of the alternatives to having more votes back then, so you would have expected politicians to be a bit more cautious in making enemies.

Politicians in our day need not be quite as concerned. If they are also lawyers, they can look after themselves quite nicely, thanks to the voters.

If, for example, you have ever struggled with condominium law in Ontario, you can quickly learn what an ass, the law can be. Condominium law, in this province, is probably the best example of lawyers looking after lawyers you will ever see. The elected board of directors of a condo community is treated in the act as though they are incompetents—and can be.

Of all failures of Ontario lawyer-politicians, the most offensive was the response to Toronto Police Chief William Blair when he asked about laws supporting his expanded police force for the G20 in Toronto. He was given the wrong and outdated act under which he was to operate that even he knew had to be wrong. Nobody stepped up to take the blame. Premier Dalton McGuinty (a lawyer) and his pack of lawyers at Queen’s Park disgraced our province!

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They want who to keynote?

December 24, 2011 by Peter Lowry

That is it! We are not going. So what? There is no way that we can agree to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty giving the keynote address to the federal Liberal biennual conference in mid January. You need to be some sort of a real liberal to set the right tone for the conference. Dalton McGuinty is not liberal.

Dalton McGuinty is a whig. A whig is a liberal twice removed and 200 years behind the times. If Tiny Tim Hudak had a brain or Andrea Horwath a plan that could work, there is no way Dalton would still be Premier of Ontario.

The purpose of the Liberal Party of Canada gathering in January is to go forward, not backward. This is a meeting where we must deal with the needs of Canadians in the 21^st Century. Dalton cannot get out of the 19^th Century. He knows nothing about the 21^st Century. He thinks electricity is something that comes from windmills and sunlight. He thinks gas fired generating stations can be loaded on a hay wagon and moved somewhere else. He thinks you can solve the province’s medical problems by giving the health portfolio to someone with an I.Q. of more than 80.

Canada needs to know that it is going somewhere besides all-day kindergarten. It believes in our right to a family doctor—of our choice! It wants medicare to mean something besides more user fees. Canadians think adding HST to other gas taxes is pushing a bit too far.

Why were we under the impression that the keynote address at the convention was to be a scholarly discussion by Adjunct Professor Don Tapscott from the University of Toronto? Anyone who could encourage the delegates to think ahead, think broader and advance the party’s position in the political spectrum is most welcome. Not having heard a lecture by Professor Tapscott, we are open to finding out what he has to say.

What Dalton McGuinty has to say is another matter. The other day we heard some talking heads on a news program speculating that the real opposition to the Harper Tories in Ottawa would have to come from the provinces. That is a lot of pressure to put on Jean Charest and three new Premiers. Dalton has his hands full in Queen’s Park.

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Is fear alone derailing our future?

November 16, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Franklin Roosevelt said it best in his 1933 inaugural address that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That certainly helps explain the pitiful excuses from both Ottawa and Queen’s Park to again shy away from high-speed train service in the Windsor–Quebec City corridor. These so-called politicians do not serve us well.

When something is so vital to the political and economic future of our country, why are we letting it be blocked by the callow, the myopic, the self-serving and the ignorant? “It’s time for us to pause and reflect,” says Ontario Premier McGuinty in answer to questions from reporters about the high speed train service. If he had told Ontario voters that, during the recent election campaign, he would have been doing his reflecting today back in his law practice in Ottawa.

Neither Prime Minister Harper nor Ontario’s Premier understand that, in times of adversity—such as today’s economic problems—the country needs clear, non-partisan direction. It needs determined and understandable leadership, not ideology. It needs bold moves forward, not quavering inaction.

They think of high speed trains down the Windsor–Quebec City corridor as train tickets. They have little understanding of how those rails of steel can hold this country together. If they keep letting Quebec isolate itself from the rest of the country, they will never notice when it leaves. It is important to remember that the Quebec government also wants this high-speed rail service. We have to build for togetherness, not separation.

Today, we know that the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal part of the scheme is doable, economically viable and essential to our nation. The only people who will hate it are the people who own Porter Airlines.

The right of way exists, the train stations exist, the dire need exists. All this country really lacks is leadership.

And with all the electricity that the two provinces generate, the trains have to be electric as an example of Canadian engineering to the world. At 300-plus kilometres per hour, Canadians could even learn to enjoy on-time rail service

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Worrying the Whigs in Ontario.

November 15, 2011 by Peter Lowry

Referring to Ontario Liberal Party members as Whigs is not entirely derogatory. There were some very progressive Whigs in their time. The only problem is that their time was in the 1800s. They were the grouping of like-minded lawmakers who became the Liberal Party in Great Britain and the name came into use in Canada.

The Ontario Liberals were created when George Brown of Toronto cobbled together the Clear Grits, a coalition of farmers from Southwestern Ontario, with left-wing Reformers, originally formed by William Lyon Mackenzie to fight Ontario’s Family Compact. From these honourable roots, the Ontario Whigs are determined to stay locked in the ideas of the 19^th Century.

Someone asked recently, how can you be liberal when you complain so much about Ontario Premier McGuinty and his government? We did some thinking. We came to the following conclusion:

It is not the harmonized sales tax. That was just bad judgement. And how can you blame the Whigs for accepting federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s $2 billion bribe to do it? Mind you, we have not had enough to say yet about the HST on energy costs!

It is not the ponzi scheme the Whigs are using to pay for renewable energy. That is, at least, an attempt to do something positive.

It is not the bad management decisions on the health file. When Ontario citizens get back the right to choose their own family doctor, we can start to feel a little more comfortable about where things are going in health.

It is not the unconscionable loopholes that allow contributors and third parties to drive a truck through the Ontario election expense rules. Any candidate or third party not spending far too much on the recent campaign was not trying.

What it was, was watching police trample the flowers beds and human rights at Queen’s Park on a rampage during Prime Minister Harper’s G20 events in Toronto. That is something McGuinty and company can never live down. As the province’s lawmakers, they did nothing to help Ontario citizens. That was their disgrace.

Obviously they have no competition but why are the Whigs waging war on us?

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