Provincial Politics – Page 37

The ground game has gone south?

October 31, 2020 by Peter Lowry

In my years in politics, I have taught thousands of people how the political ground game is played. It is basic to politics throughout North America. It takes lots of experience and determination to learn. You have to win some and lose some.

This comes to mind because the wife’s book club is reading a book supposedly on democracy by a guy named Dave Meslin from Toronto. She was chortling as she read me some bits from the book about his ideas on ranked ballots. She knows how that subject will get to me every time.

But I know her attitude toward the ground game and when the writer disparaged its importance today, she lost interest in his book. Seasoned politicos across the United States are in the midst of the strongest ground game they have ever played—and in the face of a virulent pandemic. The formula is the same everywhere: you identify your vote and you get out your vote. Techniques have to change to suit the times and the demographics of the constituency, the basics are the same.

The first by-election I was part of was Charles Templeton’s run as a liberal for a provincial seat in an East End Toronto riding in the Riverdale area. The new democrats handed us our heads. It was the only by-election where I personally felt the loss.

The next by-election I was part of was on George Ben’s team, another provincial liberal in the Queen and Ossington area of West Toronto. I asked George to give me the toughest NDP poll in the riding and keep out any other workers. The poll had less than 100 voters and something like 52 had voted NDP in the previous election. I spent a couple weeks walking that poll, talking to the people. On election day, the NDP were so confident, the guy pulling their vote was the leader of their party. I took a special delight in delivering that poll, that was supposed to be NDP, quite convincingly, for the liberal.

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The kid who couldn’t.

October 29, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Sam Oosterhoff MPP, is the youngest person, at 19, to be elected to the Ontario legislature. He might also be the MPP with the most to learn. The member for Niagara West received a more dubious first when he was made parliamentary assistant to the minister of education. It must have amused premier Doug Ford to appoint someone with less than a full semester of experience in the Ontario education system to the job.

But boys will be boys and the kid might be determined to embarrass the premier. The other day, he posted pictures on the Internet of himself and more than 35 fellow citizens without masks, crowded together at a Niagara area restaurant.

It is not that the kid was home schooled and was taught religious conservativism. Ford has publicly pleaded with the citizens of Ontario to wear masks and practice social distancing during the current surge in the coronavirus pandemic. And that request is supposedly meant to include the legislature’s enfant terrable.

And it is not as though Doug Ford was not looking after the province’s social conservatives. His government has been trying to slip through an omnibus bill that includes Charles McVety’s Canada Christian College that would give the Whitby-based college the rights of a degree-granting university. Mr. McVety has a well publicized reputation for being anti-gay rights and for his Islamophobia.

It is assumed that Doug Ford has learned from president Donald Trump in the United States that hypocrisy in regard to religion can pay off at the polls for conservative-minded politicians.

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Foregone Conclusions.

October 28, 2020 by Peter Lowry

A reader asked me recently why I was paying so little attention to the two by-elections in Toronto Centre and York Centre in Toronto. Knowing the two ridings like the back of your hand does not make them more interesting. It just makes the process more boring.

But if you want to read the entrails, those are, at least, more interesting. If you wanted further assurances of the death knell of the federal new democrats, this vote gave it to you. Without new leadership and stronger policy positions, the NDP are lost in the doldrums of politics.

Nobody should expect a by-election to provide as strong a liberal showing—by-elections rarely do. It was enough. Sure, the media push for the new leader of the green party was strong but she had also picked the wrong riding to contest.

The people who really understood the lesson of the two by-elections were the conservatives. The Tories had a small chance in York Centre but failed to pull it off. They are going to have to concentrate their efforts in the suburban ridings around Toronto in the next election if they are going to make more inroads in Ontario.

My guess is that there is going to be some serious study of where the votes came from for the new green leader in Toronto Centre. Without some expensive polling in the riding, my guess is that close to half of those votes came from disgruntled, younger liberals. The bulk were likely NDP votes searching for a new home.

My guess is that our two new MPs will be back on the hustings in less than a year. Incumbency will be their key to re-election.

What is more important is what has happened in the provincial elections in British Columbia and Saskatchewan. In the case of the conservatives in Saskatchewan who pose as the Saskatchewan Party and are supposed to combine conservatives and liberals are all conservatives. And those people who pose as provincial liberals in B.C. are all a bunch of conservatives also. The provincial new democrats won a majority in B.C. and that is the good news.

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Understanding ranked ballots.

October 26, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It looks as though we need to be sure we are on the same side when it comes to understanding ranked ballots in voting. Some people think they are a good idea. I would like to question that.

Start with how ranked ballots are designed: you have a sheet of paper listing the names of all the candidates and there is a box beside each name in which the voter can mark their preference. If there are ten names, there should be ten boxes in which the voter can number their selections from one to ten.

In the first counting run, the number of choices numbered one are counted. If any candidate wins more than 50 per cent of the votes, that candidate wins, the same as in first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting.

If no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the votes, you are now going to eliminate the candidate with the least number of votes. And you are going to add the second choice of that losing candidate’s votes to the remaining candidates. This process of adding the losers’ votes to those left standing continues until somebody gets 50 per cent or you simply run out of votes.

But think about that voter, whose first choice has been eliminated. Was this a mainstream choice? Obviously not. That person’s first choice of candidate was a loser. Why would their second choice be any better? In fact, the entire process of counting ranked ballots is a process of adding losers’ choices to the front running candidates.

This is why in selecting from large numbers of candidates, a ranked ballot system is really a process of diving down in the group to find the least contentious candidates.

The civility that proponents of ranked balloting claim can be very phony as candidates work their opponents for that precious second vote.

The increased diversity that ranked ballots are supposed to enable is happening anyway as more and more of us see how the inclusion of racialized and diverse backgrounds strengthens our political process.

There are many claims for different types of voting. No system is perfect nor is there any ideal solution. Open minds can look at alternatives and closed minds will get nowhere.

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Dougie Dumps Ranked Ballots.

October 22, 2020 by Peter Lowry

You have to hand it to Ontario premier Doug Ford. He rarely gets much right. He just knows what he hates about municipal politics—anything that the downtown Toronto councillors like. This includes changing the voting from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to ranked ballots.

The change had been allowed under provincial legislation but to-date only Cambridge and London, Ontario had taken the step away from FPTP voting. Some Toronto councillors were hoping the city could make the change to ranked ballots as early as in the upcoming 2022 municipal elections.

The provincial government explained their decision with the curt statement that “Now is not the time for municipalities to experiment with costly changes to how municipal elections are conducted.”

While some of the proponents of the change were claiming this was an anti-democratic move by the Ontario conservatives, nobody other than the legislature had ever voted for it. Ontario voters took a look at what is called mixed member proportional voting in a referendum linked to the provincial election of 2007 and defeated the suggestion by a vote of about two to one.

The problem with changing how we vote is that FPTP is a known and trusted system that has been used for hundreds of years. It would take extensive, and probably expensive, selling of any alternative system before voters would accept it.

In the view of this writer what people seemed to be asking for in discussing the subject of change is that they want to be able to be sure candidates have a majority of their voters supporting them. This can best be achieved with run-off elections. In these circumstances, when no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the vote, the top two vote getters have a run-off and a second vote is held.

With the growing interest in Internet voting, run-off elections would be inexpensive and easily run.

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The Temptation to be Tory.

October 16, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It appears that the leopard is still unable to change his spots. At least conservatives such as Ontario’s Doug Ford and Alberta’s Jason Kenney fail to stray long from their expected courses. Mean buggers, both of them. They are conservative to the core.

Take Jason Kenney. Since college in San Francisco, Jason Kenney has been a misogynist and an in-it-for-himself politician. This is the Kenney who has devoted his life to manipulative politics. This is a petty politician who blames the federal government for all the ills of the Alberta economy. This is a politician who blames the federal government for the problems of the Alberta health care system. And yet he fights with the doctors over billings and fires hundreds of nurses and healthcare technicians. It appears that he thinks the covid-19 epidemic is just a federal problem.

This is a petty politician who puts Alberta taxpayers’ money into failing pipelines and pipe-dreams about Alaska railroads. Kenney seems to have no understanding of how a better economic future of Alberta needs to be built.

At least Kenney can cater to the greed of some Alberta voters for a resource economy while Doug Ford, in Ontario has the problem of keeping and building on a once robust industrial-financial-resource based economy. Ford sees his role as putting up a fight against those promoting a carbon-free environment and better land-use planning. It is hard for him to say ‘no’ to developers who want to build on the Oak Ridges Moraine. In the meantime, he is squeezing teachers and healthcare staff who take up so much of the attention of the Ontario government.

There is no question but that Ford and Kenney have very different objectives than the federal government. They are conservatives.

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Ford cures covid-19 numbers.

October 7, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Premier Ford of Ontario has a salesman’s way with numbers. You want fewer people with covid-19 from the coronavirus, he gives you lower figures. He can even flatten the curve.

The secret is in the number of tests. He has it all figured out. He has found that he who controls the number of tests can make the numbers of covid-19 casualties go up or down. He can even tell you if the curve is flattening or not.

It is simple statistics. If you do 100,000 tests of people who have an incidence of one case in every 1000, you will have close to 100 cases. When you complete only half the number of tests, you are more likely to have half the number of cases of covid-19.

And if you want everyone to have a happy Thanksgiving in Ontario, just close those testing centres in high incidence areas of the province. That could be as simple as telling people to book an appointment for a test and when they call, leave them on hold until they give up.

But please do not ask Premier Dougie how many people are celebrating Thanksgiving at the Ford Household this coming weekend. Until the premier has checked with his wife, he has no idea how many Fords will gather at the premier’s household.

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Condemning the Ford government.

October 3, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Only the other day, I was saying: The objective is to run the government in accord with their dogma. They are not running it for you. The front page Toronto Star exclusive by reporter Bruce Arthur this morning tells the story. Despite all of Doug Ford’s bluster about ramping up the covid-19 testing in the province, insiders are telling us that the government has been giving us smoke and mirrors.

They lie to us. Since early April there has no political support for ramping up testing. It was a trick, some in the Ford government learned in the dying days of the Harper government in Ottawa. It was open knowledge that at the time when Tony Clement was president of the treasurer board and no matter what was announced from which minister’s office, the funds were controlled, and, in many cases, held back by treasury.

The promise by Premier Ford was that the number of covid-19 tests per day targeted over the summer was 100,000. When you think of all those parents who lined up with their children to be tested in August—it was to no avail.

If you can read all the copy Arthur produced this morning, you will come to the conclusion in the final sentence. The province will be able to process 100,000 tests per day this coming January.

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Mr. Ford is enjoying the game.

October 1, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Doug Ford has come a long way for a guy who made his mark selling labels for his father’s printing company. Today, in the midst of a pandemic, he is immersed in the multi-billion dollar health and education business of the Ontario government. And with no effective direction or even opposition to the Government in Ontario, our hospitals and schools are teetering on the edge.

If the second wave of the pandemic in Ontario reaches anywhere near the depths of what the experts are forecasting, we are in serious trouble. In the rush to get the province out of its multi-tiered lock downs, Doug Ford’s conservatives have trapped the province in an under-funded, under-manned health care system and a rapidly changing education system.

What we are seeing today is desperation. While trying to rely on the medical profession for its expertise in medicine, we find that this party, has little, if no, expertise in running the government.

The government is faced with the same problems in both education and health. They could be in need hundreds of teachers and medical personnel and are reaching into the pool of retirees. The only problem is you can only reach so far back. People who have been away from the system for five to ten years are likely to be well past their ‘use before date.’ They have not kept up. There should have been up-dating sessions for the past five months.

The situation faced by teachers is its own circumstances. Faced with new computer-learning and often larger classes, teachers are digging in their heels. While the government is assuming that the youth of the students will limit the number of casualties, they had not realized that the average teacher is more vulnerable.

The Ford government is a reactionary government. The only plan is to try to balance the budget while only spending what has to be spent. The objective is to run the government in accord with their dogma. They are not running it for you.

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It’s not about Alberta, Mr. Kenney.

September 25, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It is a shame that the voters in Alberta have not told Jason Kenney the hard truth. He has to understand that he took responsibility for Alberta’s economic problems when he became premier. If he is unable to solve those economic problems, then the people of Alberta should find someone who can.

Kenney thinks he can just blame the rest of Canada and the prime minister for all Alberta’s problems. Why?

Kenney called the liberal government’s throne speech “A fantasy plan for a mythical country.” There were many who disliked the speech. They would really like to know what is fantasy about it? Instead of counting the words in the throne speech, Mr. Kenney needs to understand that the federal government has to address the current pandemic on behalf of all Canadians.

We understand that Mr. Kenney is not as worried about the pandemic. He just wants the federal government to cover more of Alberta’s health costs. In the meantime, Alberta can continue to have one of the highest per capita incidences of covid-19 and he is not concerned about that?

Is Mr. Kenney just going to accuse the federal government of not taking action on the pandemic? Is this what he claims is fantasy land? Or is he desperate for the federal government to pay for all his health care costs?

It is not as though Mr. Kenney is unaware of the responsibilities of federal and provincial governments in Canada. And it is no surprise that more and more newspaper writers in the province are calling for new thinking about taxes, and the roller coaster ride that Albertans have endured because of the poorly managed energy industry.

The voters in Alberta have to start asking Jason Kenney what he is really doing for them.

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