Provincial Politics – Page 136

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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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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