Category: Provincial Politics

Demolition Doug.

by Peter Lowry

Can Ontario make it to next June? That will be our first chance to get rid of the worst provincial government in Ontario since the bumbling of Mike Harris. It is terrible to think that liberal Dalton McGinty bored us for ten years and we tolerated liberal Kathleen Wynne for the following five years. Neither was as destructive as conservative Doug Ford and his incompetents.

While many might consider it malfeasance, the Ford government is certainly guilty of nonfeasance (the failure to act when needed). The government has failed us in protecting us from Covid-19. The erratic series of lockdowns and rules of the pandemic made the government and its medical advisors look foolish and its half-measures on vaccines are prolonging the agony.

But the destructiveness of demolition Doug and his demolition crew have torn the heart out of what was a fairly decent health-care system. The conservatives phony 2019 bill 124, foolishly named ‘Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations,’ has come home to haunt them. At a time when we are experiencing inflation at over four per cent, you cannot keep holding the nurses to a one per cent limit to any raises. Nurses are walking away from their profession. Many are leaving the province looking for better treatment in environments not unnecessarily strapped for cash.

Doug cannot be derelict in supporting teachers and healthcare workers, while building unnecessary highways to nowhere to please his developer friends.

The incompetence is underlined when our premier tells us that he cannot mandate vaccines for healthcare workers because we cannot afford to lose more of them. The unvaccinated will certainly help to keep the pandemic with us.

What is pathetic though is long term care minister Rod Phillips—you remember the conservative cabinet member who holidayed in the Caribbean while Ontario was under lockdown. Phillips is busy making promises to support ‘for-profit’ long term care with new rules. The new rules will hardly matter if no inspections are used to follow through.

Doug Ford is running a demolition derby down at Queen’s Park in Toronto. His bluster and incompetence are not what Ontario needs today. And hardly needs at any time.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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The Nation of Moe.

by Peter Lowry

That was the final straw from Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe. He actually said that his province was also a “Nation within Canada.” He is obviously tired of being the last of the three stooges: Doug Ford of Ontario (Larry), Jason Kenney of Alberta (Curly) and with Moe trailing along. He desperately wants some recognition for Saskatchewan.

Politically, I would say that the province has done very well over the years. Leaders such as John George Diefenbaker and Tommy Douglas are a rare phenomenon. Moe is not. Like Ford and Kenney, he has done a disastrous job in trying to lead his province through the pandemic.

The way the province usually works lately is that Curly in Alberta gets an itch and it is Moe in Regina who scratches. It got so bad recently with the coronavirus that patients in distress in over-crowded Saskatchewan hospitals were being air evacuated to Ontario. Even Ford in Ontario has shut his mouth about what to do about the pandemic as he sets his sights on next June’s Ontario election.

That might be the only thing different in Saskatchewan. The Saskatchewan Party which Moe leads is supposed to be a combination of conservatives and right-wing liberals. Whether there are any left-wing or progressive liberals remaining in Saskatchewan is a matter of some concern.

The media assessment of Moe’s claims of nationhood is that he desperately needs a distraction away from his bad handling of the coronavirus. Other than that, the media seem convinced that Moe is just following Kenney. Kenney has his own problems with a likely run at his leadership before next year’s provincial election in Alberta.

What is considered the funniest comment from Moe is that he is considering booting the RCMP out of the provincial police task in Saskatchewan. With the RCMP training centre in Regina, changing the provincial policing could be far more expensive than he imagines.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Doug’s Drive to Damnation.

by Peter Lowry

Like highways to hell, they are not roads that Ontario premier Doug Ford should take. Doug Ford lacks the political smarts, the political acceptance or a party eager to take him where he wants to go. And yet, he has the bus in drive and headed for the ditch. He is running an early municipal-type campaign in a province of almost 15 million.

His biggest problem is back-up. Watching deputy premier, Christine Elliott, the other day dealing with the media was an embarrassment. This woman held so much promise for the health ministry three years ago. She looks like she has aged 20 years. Ontario’s hospitals are in desperate need of resuscitation from her and her government’s bad management. They have had three years of wasted promises, tightened purse strings, bad direction and the horrors of the pandemic.

His “wunderkinder” education minister Stephen Lecce from Vaughn is also on the ropes. Despised and ignored by all flavours of teachers, Lecce’s private school, St. Michael’s never prepared him for the treatment he has received from the feet-on-the-ground hardscrabble public and Catholic teachers of Ontario. They know the difference between concern and crap and they hardly took to the BS of this kid.

Doug’s new finance minister is probably irrelevant. The guy took over from Rod Phillips when he was caught vacationing in the Caribbean while the province was on lockdown. I would check the name of the new guy but since his reports seem different from the premier’s directions, it seems pointless.

Meanwhile Phillips is throwing more promises at the long-term care homes in Ontario in hopes that it will bring him to redemption. What Phillips has yet to learn is that promises of better policing of long-term care facilities has to be seen to be believed.

But the one in Doug’s cabinet who still looks like a deer in the headlights is Brian Mulroney’s little girl Caroline. There was no way Doug could leave her as attorney general, but transport was an even worse choice.

Here is Doug out hustling the crowds on the elixir of new highways but who is going to school Caroline on why these new roads to nowhere are going to solve any of Ontario’s real needs?

And besides, the concern for the environment is simmering on the public’s back burners at the moment. By next June’s provincial election, the dams might burst and Doug and his highways will disappear in the maelstrom.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Can Kenney Keep His Cool?

by Peter Lowry

It appears that in the hiatus, waiting for parliament to convene later in the month, the news media have been having some fun. They are doing their best to start a feud between Alberta premier Jason Kenney and the Bloc Québécois’ leader in the House of Commons Yves-François Blanchet. Since they both like referenda, the media figure these guys have something in common.

The media guys, with little to do, were making fun of the Alberta referendum on equalization payments. This is a federal fund that is distributed to provinces in need. Alberta had its municipal elections last month and ran two province-wide referenda at the same time. One referendum was to stop adjusting clocks twice a year and stay on daylight time. The other was to get the federal government to cooperate in changing the constitution to stop Alberta taxes going into the equalization fund.

Typical of municipal elections, when the local mayoralty is a hot subject, as many as 50 per cent of the locals get out to vote. And when it is a ‘ho-hum’ matter, about 35 per cent might carry out their civic duty. And while there, some voted on the referendums and some did not. It did not help that many constitutional experts and quite a few non-experts had spread the word that the constitutional question was a silly waste of time.

But, silly or not, Municipal voters hate paying for things they do not understand. There were lots of blank ballots but some 61 per cent of those who voted said ‘Yes.’ They decided, at the same time, to sticking with correcting their clocks twice each year.    

The news media had checked with senior liberal party people to find out when they would sit down and negotiate with Jason Kenney and his united conservatives. The answer they got was “Why?”

The reality is that it would take a vote in every province and a majority of Canadians agreeing to even open the constitution to discuss the question.

Since M. Blanchet has participated in referenda in his home province of Quebec, the news media thought he might have a few tips for Mr. Kenney. Since M. Blanchet has never won a referendum, that was when the name-calling got started.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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It’s Too Late for Ford.

by Peter Lowry

The Ford government in Ontario is desperately seeking voter approval for next June. The election is seven months away, but to win, the conservatives figured they better start early. The other day, they announced that their recent ten-cent per hour increase in the minimum wage was not enough. They announced that as of January 1, the minimum wage in Ontario would be $15 per hour. That was the minimum wage increase that the liberals planned to implement if they won the 2018 provincial election.

And that was before the pandemic and before the rapidly rising prices for groceries. At a time when the estimated living wage in Toronto has reached $22 per hour, the Ford conservatives are coming from behind. The only good news in the announcement was that servers in bars and restaurants were to be included in the new minimum.

There were, of course, the complaints by restaurant owners that they could not afford that kind of a hit so soon after the lockdowns of the pandemic. And there were no kudos from the union leaders Ford invited to join him in making the announcement. It was interesting seeing the Unifor president and the Ontario Pubic Services Employees at a Ford function.. You don’t have to think about it for long to realize that none of those union people represent anybody who only works for minimum wage.

(Mind you, the Toronto Star ran the picture under the headline: Union leaders back Premier’s wage increase. If the headline writer had read the reporter’s story, he or she would have known that the union leaders were there out of curiosity, not approval.)

What is most curious about the announcement is that there is no increase in the works for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) this is the program that supposedly works alongside Ontario Works for the close to a million Ontario adults who require support for disability or reason to be unable to work. In all the variable rates explained in the government web site, there is no mention of any increase because of the escalating cost of living. And there is no way under today’s cost of living in Ontario that those people are anywhere near what they need to have adequate, safe housing or food to eat. Mr. Ford’s government would make Ebenezer Scrooge (before meeting some ghosts) look like a spendthrift.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Ford’s Snakes and Ladders.

by Peter Lowry

The Ford government in Ontario is desperately trying to find a rationale for voter approval. It wants to be seen to be doing something that will earn it a chance at re-election next June. It has chosen the Bradford Bypass as the main player. And the politicians are now playing a childish game of snakes and ladders over some of the most vulnerable land in the province.

Bradford, Ontario is the centre for the area known as the Holland Marsh, some of the richest, most fertile land in the province. It is a major source of garden vegetables for Ontario’s 14.5 million citizens. The Bradford Bypass, also known as Highway 404, is designed today to skirt around most of the Holland Marsh to join Highway 400 just north of Highway 88. What this will do is create a greatly increased flow of traffic going north around Barrie.

While the Highway 400 bridges around Barrie are currently being rebuilt to accommodate up to eight lanes of traffic, all we know in Barrie is that the summer-weekend traffic jams on Highway 400 from the added Highway 404 traffic are not something to which we will look forward.

In the children’s game of snakes and ladders, it is the ladders you have to climb but the snakes slide you back down again. It seems the Ford conservatives are working with the snakes to slide us back down. The conservatives seem to have a penchant for aiding their friends the developers who have fortuitously bought parcels of land just where the new highway will have access for buyers of their developments. And yet moving the new highway 10 to 20 kilometers north would lower land costs and completely bypass the Holland Marsh.

Ideally, of course, an arm of Highway 404 was to connect with the proposed Highway 412, east of Lake Simcoe, to accommodate traffic going north of Orillia. Can we assume that is still the intent?

And the biggest snake for us to slide down was the by-the-way from the Ford conservatives that they are thinking of making this new section of Highway 404 a toll road. The bastards will probably sell our highway to a Russian consortium, and we will pay, and pay, and pay.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Death Wish of Conservatism.

by Peter Lowry

At a time when Justin Trudeau is busy busting liberalism in Canada, the conservatives are doing themselves no favours. It is as if there is no place for the old political parties. Even the new democrats are losing their grip. That old time socialism ain’t what it used to be.

But today, let’s stick with the conservative’s problems. And those, they have a plenty. Ruction in the ranks, pathetic provincial leaders and disparate directions are just a few. When you realize that Justin Trudeau is the longest serving first minister in Canada and that only one province and the Yukon have liberal governments, you get a sense of the problem.

And where do you start. Just because the Coalition Avenir Québec doesn’t call itself conservative does not mean it is not conservative. It has its own ideas on what is fair and the federal government is going to have to take the Quebec government to the supreme court to get them to stop discriminating against religion and the English language.

Ontario is likely to present the most ongoing problems. There are actually people who say they will vote conservative next June and if enough commit that act of lunacy the province would have four more years of an incompetent government intent on creating a dynasty. One almost hopes that Doug Ford and his buddies are stupid enough to turn down the federal offer of ten dollar a day daycare.

And none of the Prairie provinces is helping. There is a new gal in Manitoba, a nerd named Moe going nowhere in Saskatchewan and then Jason Kenney in Alberta. Things are so bad under conservative rule in Alberta that Albertans, at least in Calgary and Edmonton, are starting to vote liberal.

With Alberta and Ontario headed for provincial elections next year, we can have a contest to see who is the most distrusted conservative leader in Canada. The conservative party of Canada will be having a vote to see if Erin O’Toole has legs for the next federal election or is to be cast aside.

And to think there are liberals who are dissatisfied with the leadership we get in our federal and provincial liberal parties.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Alerting Alberta.

by Peter Lowry

It can be a delight to read one of David Climenhaga’s reports on Alberta politics. He seems to be a knowledgeable and fearless reporter of things political in Calgary and Edmonton. He does not seem to share the general public’s admiration for the Jason Kenney administration and its leader.

But dammit, I was waiting breathlessly for the report of Kenney’s Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns. It was like sitting outside the walls of Fort Zinderneuf in Beau Geste waiting for something to happen.

And what do we get? Nothing, nada, zilch. What do they always say: Follow the money?

Albertans paid $3.5 million for a 697-page report of nothing. In fact, Climenhaga was somewhat critical of the clarity of the prose. For the amount that Albertans paid for that report, it could have had some decent editing.

But I was waiting to find out who was paying money for critical commentary on Alberta’s foolish energy aspirations. I wanted my cut of the pie. Here I have been critical of Alberta tar sands operations all these years and never been offered a bribe to write more.

From the first time I saw open pit mining of the tar sands, I was revolted. Now that they are forcing bitumen up from the depths with steam and establishing vast acreages of settling ponds, I am even more revolted.

I have seen the warming of the glaciers, the rising of the seas, the swirling clouds of bitumen dust from the oil refineries, the smog of polluting coal smothering our cities and none of it offers hope for mankind.

And yet our ignorant world leaders are getting together for a soiree this next week in Glasgow to pat each other on the back and make stupid promises to be good and be kind to mother earth.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Kenney’s War Room carries on its expensive fight against truth, justice and the Canadian way—of ignoring the obvious.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Doug Defends Dougie.

by Peter Lowry

There was an opinion piece in the Toronto Star the other day about the trials and tribulations of Ontario’s attorney general Doug Downey. It was about him trying to defend Ontario premier Doug Ford. It would certainly be a tough job if the attorney general did not owe fame and fortune to the premier.

According to the opinion piece by the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn, it is tough to defend stupidity. Maybe if Doug Ford had not parachuted that ward healer from Severn into my riding, I would be more sympathetic.

And contrary to Regg Cohn’s column, Downey is not a Barrie lawyer. We already have enough lawyers in Barrie. Downey was the conservative’s go-to guy when he was on the local council in Orillia. He lives further up the road in Severn. His appointment to my riding of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte was probably just another way for Doug Ford to tell former conservative leader Patrick Brown that he was no longer wanted in Ontario politics.

Not that we were looking forward to having Brown in our riding but oddly enough, Downey turns out to be worse. We had no idea that Downey was the contemplated replacement for Ford’s first choice of attorney general, Caroline Mulroney. Her training and experience in law in New York State seems to require a different outlook than we need in Ontario.

Downey’s job is obviously not to protect our charter of rights and freedoms. Doug Ford called back Downey and the entire legislature from summer holiday when he wanted to use the ‘Not withstanding’ clause of the charter to suppress third party advertising for 12 months before an election. Downey was the guy who rewrote the act taking away our basic right to freedom of speech.

It seems we can still say whatever we wish about our premier. We are just not allowed to pay for it to be said where too many people might notice. He can lie to us, he can make outrageous promises, he can cheat us, yet we are not allowed equal time or equal access to communications to question what he is doing.

Despite Regg Cohn’s sympathetic view, I think Doug Downey might just be another front man for a con man.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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Promises, Promises.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario liberal leader Steven Del Duca is promising to resign if he does not change how we carry out elections in Ontario. He might as well resign as leader now and save us all a lot of time and trouble. It is like premier Doug Ford’s promise of a ‘Buck a Beer.’ It isn’t going to happen.

Any serious study of existing alternative voting systems will find that all have weaknesses. Inventing a new system is not going to happen and be accepted by Ontario voters overnight.

And no political party is likely to get the support to change how Ontario votes without a referendum. At present we use the Westminster system of constituent representation in a bicameral parliament federally and unicameral provincially in Ontario. As old and as creaky as this system might be, our voters know it and trust it. Attempts at changing how we vote have been made in three provinces and each attempt has been rejected by the voters.

It is not that change itself is being rejected. People are not going to rush into a system of voting that they do not understand. Change that can gain acceptance across party lines can go a long way to reassuring people. Change that benefits some parties and not others are non-starters.

There are two basic types of voting that some people are promoting.

Preferential voting, what is erroneously called ‘instant run-off,’ can be an advantage for what are called middle-of-the-road party candidates. You saw how crowded that ‘middle-of-the-road’ can become in the last federal election. Mind you, it would be an interesting experience to have an election where all the candidates tried to prove how lovable they could be. They would all campaign hard for your second preference.   

Proportional voting is another alternative. This one has the advantage that we could reduce the space needed for the legislative chamber. All you would vote for is a party. The leader of each party would have a list available for people who would sit in parliament as though you also voted for them. There are many variations on this around the world but they all have the same problems with minority parties trying to negotiate with other parties to form a government.

And I would miss not having a local member to take me to lunch in the parliamentary dining room when visiting.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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