Category: Provincial Politics

Ontario Energy Minister Chris Bentley announced last week that it cost $180 million to move the under-construction Greenfield Power Plant from Mississauga to Sarnia. That sets a new price on a seat in the Ontario Legislature. The move, ordered by Dalton McGuinty’s campaign team, saved at least three Liberal-held ridings in Etobicoke and Mississauga. It sets a new level for the cost of a seat in the Ontario Legislature. It is a clear indication of what is wrong with political parties today.

It is only over the past 25 years that highly centralized political parties have become the reality in Canada. When the McGuinty campaign team, under MPP Greg Sorbara, decided to cancel Greenfield, the team spoke with the authority of the Premier. The three seats it meant on the Liberal side of the Legislature were critical. The three Liberal candidates involved stuck to the party line.

So, what do you get for $60 million today? You get a lot less than you got 25 years ago. At that time, we still had members of the legislature and in Parliament who could think for themselves, who could represent their constituents—not as a ward-healer but as an advocate—and who stood up to the Premier and cabinet in caucus and committee. It was a time when elected people held the reins and the paid staff members were the workers.

It is hard to believe that members for all parties yearn for the day when the party leader was beholden to the members who supported him or her. Having the leader as boss of the party destroys our political system. It turns a highly successful bottom up political system into a travesty of bossism and regression.

But leave a little of the blame for this on the news media. It is not that they are lazy or less knowledgeable. They are basically cheap. It costs them far less to only follow and report on the leader of the parties in the legislatures and in parliament than it would to properly report on the political mood and the actions of local candidates. Local candidates are never allowed to concern the local media with facts.

Never having met a political candidate worth $60 million, we are a bit nonplussed at this serious rate of inflation. Maybe Sorbara’s excuse is that he really was showing how decisive McGuinty could be in wasting $180 million of the taxpayers’ money. Beat that Tiny Tim Hudak! Beat that Andrea Horwath!

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Remember the old joke when a friend is about to board a bus or train and you shout to them: ‘Write if you find work!’ That would have been a good line to use the first time our new Member of the Ontario Legislature took the GO Train to Toronto to report in at Queen’s Park. As an opposition MPP, he had limited prospects for doing anything worthwhile under the uninspired leadership of Conservative Leader Tiny Tim Hudak.

But to our surprise, eight months later, we can report that MPP Jackson has found work. He is undertaking an ‘accountability series’ to protect us from Liberal excesses on spending for the Pan Am Games scheduled for Ontario in 2015. While the opportunity with the games will be nowhere near the scale of chicanery that federal MP and Treasury Board chief Tony Clement was able to commit in his riding a couple years ago during the G8 Conference, our Mr. Jackson promises to be quite vigilant on our behalf.

While just three years from the Pan Am Games, Mr. Jackson finds it quite suspicious that the Provincial Liberal government claims that the games infrastructure projects are mostly on-time and on-budget. He notes that the true costs could be almost twice as much if you add in the infrastructure that was being built outside the games budget. The athlete’s village, for example, that is designed as a modern condominium, will be put to good use after the games and is not being charged to the games when it will only have a brief stint housing the athletes. The Air Rail Link is being built by Metrolinx in time for the games but is not chargeable to the games. Mr. Jackson does not know who is paying for this but we expect Metrolinx can tell him.

Jackson has found out that some of the people involved in the games organization are Liberals and he considers this as an obvious connection for him to investigate. This does not apply, of course, to the members of the TO2015 Games team appointed to it by the federal government.

We understand that MPP Jackson will be providing weekly updates on this ‘accountability series.’ With a budget of about $1.4 billion and related projects for about as much again, he will have his work cut out for him. And considering that he has nothing in his biography to support any expertise in this field, we can only hope that Tiny Tim Hudak is giving him the full support of the Conservative Party research staff.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Enough is enough, already. It is not only unseemly for the Ontario Medical Association to be fighting with Premier McGuinty and his Whigs but it is the rest of us who suffer. And what is McGuinty trying to prove? If he thinks he is going to win any kudos by bullying some group, he would be smart to pick a group that does not fight back. Ontario’s doctors are not all that sympathetic a group but they are one with the resources to give McGuinty a hell of a fight.

If McGuinty wants to really learn a lesson, he is going to get it in the upcoming byelection in Kitchener-Waterloo. McGuinty was laughing at how the teachers and nurses’ union group screwed over Tiny Tim Hudak and his Conservatives last year with their $2 million ‘Working-Families’ advertising. He is now going to take his medicine. He will see the merit of stopping third-party political advertising by the time the doctors are through with him.

As wrong as this type of advertising is, McGuinty has only himself to blame. The doctors are going to hammer home the message that McGuinty does not care about the 20,000 people in Kitchener-Waterloo who do not have a family doctor. They will crucify the sacrificial lamb that runs for the Liberals without coming out for any candidate. Voters will probably just give the New Democrat their vote if the Horwath candidate can at least spell his or her own name.

After his poor showing so far in a legislature, in which he is supposed to be the Leader of the Opposition, Tiny Tim Hudak will be whistling past the grave yard trying to save the seat that Elizabeth Witmer held as a Conservative. With the troubles at Research in Motion and major job losses, here is Hudak proposing that Ontario pass right-to-work legislation. That approach might appeal to rednecks that know no better but will never fly with an educated and sophisticated workforce such as you have in Kitchener- Waterloo.

Admittedly, we had high hopes for Deb Mathews when she took over the Health portfolio just before the last election. Maybe McGuinty tied her hands and kept her from doing the job of which she is capable. Surely there is someone at Queen’s Park smart enough to sit down with the Ontario Medical Association or maybe a more representative group of medical specialists and say: Look, we have got to find a way to rein in the rising costs of Medicare before it bankrupts us. You’re the experts. Tell us how?

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

You would think that someone close to him would be able to whisper to Provincial Conservative Leader Tim Hudak when he is making himself look like a jerk. Heck, he should be able to guess from the smiles he sees on Premier Dalton McGuinty. Take Tiny Tim’s recent attack on Ontario’s labour unions. That was not only an attack on unions but it was an attack on every employed person in Ontario.

Tiny Tim wants more of us working. The only problem is he wants all of us working for about $3.00 per hour. This is not taking Ontario back to those salad-days of Hudak’s mentor, former Premier Mike Harris, but back to the union-busting days of the 1930s. We know that at some time in his life, Tiny Tim studied economics. It is too bad it did not seem to sink in.

Hudak thinks Ontario’s labour laws are outdated.  He thinks the way to compete with American states with ‘right to work’ laws is to dismantle our unions. He particularly wants to do away with the Rand Formula—the automatic check-off of union dues for all employees who benefit from the union agreements that was devised in 1946. It was the introduction of the Rand Formula that helped create the most cooperative and greatest growth in industry in Canada’s history through the 1950s and 1960s.

And what Tiny Tim does not seem aware of is that industry usually gets the kind of union it deserves. In progressive industries in Ontario such as the petroleum industry, the high standards set by the companies are matched by the unions. It is a cooperative relationship and highly successful. It would be a shame to screw up that good relationship.

In industries where there is frequent union strife and a less cooperative relationship, it is more often the fault of management rather than the unions. Mr. Hudak should take a little time to ask why public sector unions can often be at loggerheads with the politicians who have no understanding of union relations.

In a province that has been bleeding industrial jobs, the need is for government to encourage innovation, foster entrepreneurialism, help small business and to develop a more cooperative relationship between employers and both unionized and non-unionized employees. What we do not need in this province is ideology wrapped in myopia that demands that we screw up years of learning how to treat employees fairly.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The union group, working under the euphemism of ‘Working Families’ in the 2011 provincial election, was not helping our democracy. The group was interfering in it. The more than $2 million the teachers and nurses’ unions spent was a crude attempt to get around our election rules.

The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled last week that the union group was not an Ontario Liberal Party front. That was not the point. Nobody cared whose front it was. The point was that it was an unfair attack on a political party. You cannot be expected to get into a fist fight and stay within Marquess of Queensbury rules when some stray dog joins in the fight and starts taking a chunk out of your ass.

Any reader of this blog will confirm that the writer carries no brief for Tiny Tim Hudak’s Ontario Conservatives. Far from it.

But fair is fair. Nobody was paying that kind of money to tell voters what a wus Dalton McGuinty is. Nor was any group wasting money telling people what they thought of Andrea Horwath and her Ontario New Democrats. If politicians want to spend their money on scurrilous attack advertising, that is within the rules. It is fair because under the spending controls in the election, the attacked party has similar spending limits and can answer or not as the party wishes. What a political party does not have is unlimited spending to deal with every crackpot who comes along and wants to say something nasty about the party. Nor should the party have to deal with this from what are supposed to be non-combatants.

If you have $2 million to spend on an election and it is that important to you, you should be running in the election. You really should not be standing at the sidelines, trying to trip players from teams you do not like.

As any Tim Hortons’ server can tell you, some people like their coffee black and some want a double, double. That is what an election is about. The voters get to tell the politicians what they want. We always hope beyond hope that voters have enough positive opinions of our party to get their approval.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

It was just like another hockey season for the Toronto Maple Leafs. You are never sure if the players or the fans are more relieved that it is over. At Queen’s Park, nobody had expected much from Dalton McGinty’s Whigs and therefore nobody was disappointed.

Sure, we all had a good laugh at the posturing over a possible election next month. That had as much possibility as a metre deep snow storm this June. What really puzzled us was McGuinty’s complaint that Horwath’s people were amending Dwight Duncan’s budget in committee.

Excuse us, but is it not the role of the committee to consider amendments to legislation being reviewed by the committee? Yah, when you have a majority government, you can run roughshod over the opposition and block the amendments but when you are in a minority position, you have to act a bit smarter than that.

It was pretty silly for McGuinty to call media conferences to tell the gullible media people that Andrea Horwath was breaking her word. When would Mrs. Horwath have promised him that her MPP’s were not going to do their job? That might be a promise that Tiny Tim Hudak might make but his caucus does not include many PhD candidates.

The problem for McGuinty is that with the Legislature out for their summer holidays, the attention will be focused on the Ministry of Health. It is going to be a very hot summer for Health Minister Deb Mathews. For a very smart person, Ms. Mathews has really been fumbling the ball on this portfolio. The Ontario Medical Association has been running circles around her and if they keep it up, she will be the one going down the drain.

Maybe it is McGuinty’s fault for interfering with her handling of the situation but the doctors have had possession of the ball since the kickoff. It was obviously McGuinty’s ploy that set new schedules for some medical procedures. The government might have been saving money but it is the public that suffer from the fallout.

The doctors said from the get-go that they will give up any increase for existing doctors but we do have to have new doctors. With a million Ontario citizens without a family doctor, the Ontario Government has much to answer for. You would think that in a province bleeding jobs like an arterial wound, they would be willing to put a few more young doctors to work.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The argument, as we understand it, is that under our Canadian Constitution, we have the right to ensure that any school teaching or activity is consistent with our philosophical and religious values. It takes a while for that claim to digest. What is frightening about it are the bigotries, the hatreds, the teachings of vitriol and the misconceptions of ages past that can be interlaced in those religious values. Times change, attitudes change but the larger the religious ship, the longer it takes to turn it from the perceptions of its past.

This argument is creating conflict. It challenges Canada as a secular society. That is a value our country offers and attracts the world beyond our borders. We host the world’s religions without challenge other than our protection of individual rights. When those rights are challenged on religious grounds, our society demands that the state must win.

It does no good for any religion to ignore the realities of society. The Anglican Synod, for example, can never heal the schism in its church by ignoring the rights of same sex partners. There is considerable doubt that ignoring the question will do much to change the patterns in human sexuality in this country or anywhere else.

If the Catholic bishops really want to take on the Ontario government over anti-bullying measures, they will do more harm to themselves. It has all the characteristics of a battle between balloons and pincushions, each armed with pins. It is not a battle that the Catholic bishops can be allowed to win. They can take the supposed moral ground if they want but it is the government that holds the purse strings.

At this time of ill-advised austerity, government and economists are taking a hard look at the millions spent each year on the duplication of a Catholic school system. When you look back at the 2007 provincial election, you can consider John Tory’s religious schools offer as a referendum on separate school systems in the province. The decision was clear.

You can claim that the Canadian Constitution enables the Separate School system in Ontario but the constitution was written 145 years ago. It is out of date. It dealt with different times. It dealt with different sets of prejudices.

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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]