Provincial Politics – Page 4

Do we give Del Duca a chance?

March 14, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Having never met Ontario liberal leader Steven Del Duca, I have not had much on which to base an opinion. All I know is that he never impressed me much in Kathleen Wynne’s cabinet. As transportation minister, he stuck his foot in it when he appeared to be pushing Metrolinx to approve another GO station in his riding. Nor did he appear to be doing much when he was moved to the economic growth and development portfolio.

But I was never at the cabinet table and that leaves me with little to go on.

For now, we can give him a chance. He has been in office for a year and the pandemic has gotten most of the media attention during that time. The bit of media coverage he received is to his credit. Not being in the legislature makes it tough to get coverage.

Del Duca has a lot of ground to cover this summer and fall. He has to be in full campaign mode next year for a June election. He has considerably more political experience than Doug Ford and he is probably smarter. That will hardly help if nobody knows him.

The better he becomes known, the harder Andrea Horwath of the new democrats will go after him. He is the blocker in her mind. She can hardly afford to lose any progressive votes to him. This will likely be her last run.

But he has to show how he can help take Ontario forward. The days of the pandemic will be behind us and he has to make it clear that a vote for Ford will take us back to the penny-pinching days of conservative premier Michael Harris. Ontario needs growth and progress and a liberal government can make that happen.

I make no promises but a liberal government in Ontario has the chance of being progressive and recognizing the need for quick rebuilding of the economy of Ontario, along with the rest of Canada. Good planning can make that happen.

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Feeling the sting of Ford.

March 13, 2021 by Peter Lowry

It reminds me of the story of the dog and the scorpion. “It’s my nature,” explains the scorpion before they both drown. In Ontario, we are seeing the nature of premier Doug Ford that is taking Ontario into a corrupt past.

In the same way as Donald Trump found to by-pass a reluctant Congress with presidential orders, Doug Ford has found that ministerial zoning orders (MZOs) save time and money for his friends in the development business. It also means they have more profits to put into Doug Ford’s re-election next year.

As developers can tell you, when you help get a Ford into politics, driving through the morass of environmental assessments, municipal council zoning and local community activists is easier. An MZO can put all that aside. And time and legal fees set aside is all just profit.

As developers say “We have found a friend in Ford.”

The only problem is that careful zoning, protection of wetlands and the planned development needs in Ontario are being set aside by these MZOs. It is the properties with the quick profits that are now getting the attention of Ford’s developer friends.

And Ford does not understand the problem. His one-term experience in city hall in Toronto only showed him the resistance side of zoning and planning. He and his brother saw it as a bother to their comfort position.

And to say that Doug Ford is ignorant of the rationale behind this careful and painstaking planning is only half the problem. The Ford family flotilla creates a large wake as lesser conservatives get to join in on the party.

Maybe if Ford had more time on Toronto city council, he might have come to understand what was behind all the back and forth of planning and zoning. He only saw it as a bother. Nobody is excluded from politics because of their limited education but Ford does seem to revel in his lack of a questioning mindset. We have seen it in his handling of the pandemic. There have been days when he might have listened to the experts. And there are days when he obviously did not.

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When is Day One of this plan?

March 8, 2021 by Peter Lowry

It is sad to admit that I am not overly enthusiastic about the Ontario NDP’s environmental plans for 2035. Most people tend to be skeptical of plans for when they are in their 90s. Those of us who realize we are getting older every day, tend to be more interested in plans that start today.

And people who put off environmental issues for tomorrow are damn stupid anyway. The world cannot wait. Just consider this weird winter we are experiencing in the northern hemisphere. Here we are, enjoying another spring-like day in early March, in Ontario. We are supposed to be in the throes of a miserable winter. And was it not just a couple weeks ago when Texas had a wallop of snow in a lot more than the Panhandle? While our weather forecasters go crazy, you would think that we should all be a little more concerned.

But here are the Ontario new democrats, sounding like the liberal governments of Dalton McGinty and Kathleen Wynne. The only difference is that the liberal incentives for electric-vehicle subsidies maxed out at $14,000 and the incentives became somewhat meaningless when applied to luxury vehicles.

Personally, I have wanted to go electric in my driving for quite a while. If that jerk Doug Ford had not come to power in Ontario and cancelled all the electric vehicle subsidies, I would probably be driving an electric car today. The practical concern in this has been that I want to be able drive about 600 kilometres between plug-ins. As it is, I am driving an import with a carbon-producing motor about the size required to power a lawn mower. It is only a small bow to environmental concerns.

One new part of the NDP environmental plan is the promise to retrofit five per cent of the provincial-owned buildings each year into being environmentally friendly. That might be a fine idea but they will probably find that it is better to start from scratch. They would likely save more by tearing down older, environmentally wasteful buildings and building new environmentally friendly ones.

And, as you would expect of any party eager for power, they want to create a youth corp. This one would be dedicated to greening the province.

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Uneasy sit the bums at Ford’s cabinet table.

March 6, 2021 by Peter Lowry

That is a tough one. The quote from Shakespeare is something about ‘Uneasy hangs the head that wears the Crown.’ It just seems even better when you are referring to the bums that sit around the cabinet tables of scary martinets.

And, of course, we are talking about their anatomical bums and not that they are bums. The first is something everybody has to sit on. The second is someone with nothing better to do.

In this sense I have been evaluating two prize examples of Ontario premier Doug Ford’s cabinet. They are Merrilee Fullerton MPP for Kanata-Carleton in the Ottawa area and my MPP Doug Downey from Severn, Ontario who was parachuted into my riding of Barrie-Springfield-Oro-Medonte. Both of these people lounge around premier Ford’s cabinet table.

Merrilee Fullerton is minister for long-term care. That seems to be the ministry that has the record for pandemic deaths in Ontario. It might seem appropriate for a retired doctor to take responsibility for all those deaths but there are many of us who question why. Our particular concern is that the highest rate of deaths from covid-19 in Ontario are at for-profit long-term care facilities.

So far, the province has shrugged off its responsibility for all those deaths in the for-profit homes but some inspection would have helped to pin-point the problems. You would think that even a doctor could have deduced the problem when there were twice the deaths in the privately-owned facilities.

Doctor Fullerton’s colleague, Mr. Downey, at the Ford table is the attorney-general of Ontario. Back when he was just a ward-healer for Severn Township, life must have been quieter for this Doug. Laying on his reputed legal expertise for the entire province is more of a challenge. So far, he has been making a name for himself in political fund-raising and in laying on the patronage.

Downey has set some records in raising funds in this riding and in getting his party an increased per vote allowance from the last lop-sided election in Ontario. At the same time, he is putting restraints on third party advertisers who might or might not support the conservatives. He has also given patronage for lawyers a new emphasis by asking for more qualified lawyers be in the potential judges lists—probably to assure there are conservatives to appoint.

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Welcome to the two per cent.

March 5, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Checking the score cards on vaccinations the other day, I found I am in the top two per cent of Ontario residents. It is embarrassing. Ontario only has about four million more people than the State of Israel. Yet Israel can get the first shot of vaccine into the arms of 90 per cent of their population before Ontario reaches two per cent. That does seem embarrassing.

There are probably more than a few reasons for this difference. For example, Ontario has about 50 times the land area. Any farmer can tell you: you find eggs faster in a smaller chicken coop.

There was also the deal with Pfizer-BioNTech whereby Israel was used by that company for a mass test of its vaccine. That is why Israel had a large, early supply. The results of the test have been positive. And you could hardly expect Canada, with five times the population, to get a deal like that.

It was the same with the United Arab Emirates which is at about 60 per cent of the population having a shot of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine. A small population and a large supply of vaccine will do it every time.

And if you think a country as advanced as Canada should have its own vaccine, we might yet. We have a start-up still working on it. We might have had something earlier but Brian Mulroney, as prime minister back in the 1980s, sold off our Connaught Laboratories. Conservatives do not seem to believe in preparing for future pandemics.

You can hardly blame Justin Trudeau for the delays in Canada getting vaccinated. He is doing a good job of getting us a variety of vaccines. And the federal government is paying for it. The troublemakers are the provinces that will always blame Ottawa when they do not do their jobs properly. The worst are Alberta and Ontario.

Mind you, I am still trying to figure out what use there is in having retired generals running the distribution system for vaccines, using people who will not salute when given an order.

And now I hear that I might not get my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine much before May. So much for being an early adopter.

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‘Dougie did it!’

March 3, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Mother did not like those words. The youngest of my brothers was Douglas. Of the six kids, he was mother’s pride and joy. She hated to hear the words, ‘Dougie did it’ from everything such as a raid on the cookies to blood splatter. I think she stopped blaming the rest of us when her Douglas got his doctoral degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I was thinking of that the other day when the Doug of Ford family fame and premier of Ontario stuck his foot in another barn yard plop. This is the new Highway 413 that is being proposed for the area west of Toronto.

This proposed toll highway is also known as the Toronto West corridor and goes from about nowhere to nowhere important. It is supposed to go from one of the most crowded highway corridors in Ontario, which is the Toronto to Kitchener stretch of Highway 401, to the most crowded stretch of Highway 400 in the City of Vaughan.

It is enough to make you wish that premier Doug had not fled higher learning after only two months of Humber College. He wanted to be the super salesman of his father’s decals.

Highway 413 might just be the most useless highway Ontario has ever wanted to build. And here we all thought that Highway 407/412 was going to be the last of the toll roads in the province. To keep giving away highways to private interests to bleed us for money is ridiculous. I have never understood a toll road that costs you more than that new SUV you buy every few years.

About the only excuse for the billions to be wasted on the project is as a favour to premier Doug’s developer friends. The proposed route of the highway is through some of Ontario’s most prosperous farmland, greenbelt, the Paris-Galt moraine, crowded urban development and supposedly protected wetlands.

Reading about this disaster reminded me to call my brother Doug in Ohio to see how he was doing in the pandemic. He used to be pastor of a village Presbyterian church in that part of Ontario. Times, premiers. pastors and highways change.

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Kenney opts for debt over taxes.

February 28, 2021 by Peter Lowry

It seems obvious that premier Jason Kenney of Alberta is a strange sort of conservative. His and previous conservative regimes in Alberta have managed to piss away another fortune in resources royalties because of their fear of balanced taxing of the voters of Alberta.

It is hard to compare the handing of health care and the provincial budget but Jason Kenney’s incompetents have screwed up both. Instead of working with the medical profession to fight the pandemic, Kenney fights with the doctors. Instead of introducing a harmonized sales tax with the federal sales tax, Kenney would rather stick the province with unconscionable levels of debt.

It was not that long ago that the former premier Peter Lougheed in Alberta was warning the citizens about abusing their resource funds but his latter-day conservatives have ignored his warnings. When you compare what the Norwegians have done with their sovereign fund from their off-shore oil, it paints a picture for Alberta of what might have been.

But it is now time for Albertans to get in line with the rest of the provinces. The province can no longer consider the rest of us as suckers to go along with sales taxes. Those who can afford the biggest and latest in SUVs can pay their share of the both the sales tax and the carbon tax at the pumps.

And Kenney can hardly continue to waste taxpayers’ money and his hot air on promoting pipelines. They are not going to happen. The resistance to pipelines is growing. A critical example is the dual line (Enbridge Line 5) that has been pumping gas and oil across the Straits of Mackinac since 1953.

After the experience Michigan had with the 2010 Enbridge spill that was impossible to clean up on the Kalamazoo River, the state realized a similar spill in the critical area of the Straits of Mackinac would be catastrophic. It would not only have a disastrous effect on Michigan’s economy but would seriously harm the main source of fresh water for five other states as well as Ontario and Quebec.

While Enbridge might have the best of intentions, the Michigan authorities are increasingly dubious of Enbridge’s tunneling solution under the straits.

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Andrea Horwath has an easy job.

February 25, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Other than being insulted occasionally by Ontario’s premier-in-training, the new democrat’s Andrea Horwath seems to enjoy her continuing role as leader of the opposition at Queen’s Park. The biggest complaint we have heard about her recently is that they never answer the phones in her riding office in Hamilton. You would think with a $4 million budget for the opposition offices at Queen’s Park, she could get her phones answered.

But she is going to have to enjoy her role for now. It is due for a change.

What Horwath and the new democrats do not seem to understand is that what ever supposed electoral successes they have enjoyed over the past twelve years of her holding down the leader role, it was never her accomplishment. Horwath remains an unknown and uninspiring leader of a party mired in the past. Every gain she has made in the elections, during her leadership, have been courtesy the liberal party and its hapless leadership.

Horwath’s first premier as NDP leader was Dalton McGuinty. He was not called premier dad for no reason. It was not a compliment. He was on his last legs as head of the liberals at that time. He might have been an uninspiring premier but Ontario had gained by the environmentalism his party exhibited.

Kathleen Wynne got a majority back in the 2014 election and took the party further down hill every day she was in office. She actually threw the 2018 election by surrendering before election day. She betrayed her party. She left Andrea Horwath to face off against populist conservative Doug Ford.

You have to admit that Doug Ford might be a faster learner than Andrea Horwath. He makes classic mistakes but the problem is that Andrea Horwath has been unable to capitalize on them.

Ford pointed out last week that Horwath was more annoying than anything else. She is unable to get around that pompous ass of a premier. She needs to stop whining and learn to make fun of him. He can be made a subject of ridicule. It is just that Horwath does not know how.

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The silence of Doug Ford’s lambs.

February 22, 2021 by Peter Lowry

Sometime in the next couple months, the province of Ontario is expected to offer me the opportunity to get one or two jabs with a needle. This knowledge alone is helping to lift me out of some of my covid-19 doldrums. As I am considered to be among the more vulnerable citizens and supposedly have early access in getting the shot(s), I have been waiting for a call.

But my hopes were somewhat dashed the other day by writer Martin Regg Cohn at the Toronto Star. He says that all we are hearing is static about the arrangements. Nobody at Queen’s Park has any information for us.

And we have already heard enough from the prime minister. Justin Trudeau knows nothing about the problems facing a company making something as complex as a vaccine. It is not his fault that there are no Canadian vaccines yet available. He has placed orders with everyone now delivering and soon to be delivering. He has done his job. There are always a few glitches in delivery.

But there is no excuse for the people in Ontario who are supposed to vaccinate us. A delay in product reaching them is no time for them to sit back and carp about the incompetence of the feds. It is an opportunity for them to get their act together and make sure that everyone is ready to get their shot in the correct order.

Many had a good laugh about them bringing in the army. Personally, I would have called in Purolator. At least those people have a better idea of how to reach anybody and everybody in the province. You bring in the army when you want order and discipline, maybe someone shot—or to shovel their snow.

But why are they not spending this time getting organized? Why are they not arranging the place, who’s wielding the hypodermics, and letting us know? And bear in mind that this first squadron of people to be poked are not those you would ask to stand in line for long. These are people with health problems and maybe age working against them. And for goodness sake, do not order them around. They might fight back.

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Waiting for vaccination.

February 17, 2021 by Peter Lowry

It is a stay-at-home vacation.

Using depression medication.

And booze for self-realization.

Gotta get back to civilization.

Need in-person conversation.

The wife came and looked over my shoulder to see what was holding up my commentary for today. She shook her head and said, “I don’t think your readers are ready for that.”

She could be right. I also think people are tired of the ‘Tales of Trump.’ They are annoyed with all politicians who are so useless in a pandemic. They want prime minister Justin Trudeau to get a shave and a haircut. They want conservative leader Erin O’Toole to be honest for a change. They want the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh to grow a pair. They want Yves-François Blanchet of the Bloc Québécois to work for Canada, not against it. They want green leader Annamie Paul to join a real party and do some good.

It is as though politics in Canada these days is living in a Twilight Zone. We are but pawns betwixt the federal and provincial governments. Newfoundland and Labrador cannot even run an election through a typical winter or a pandemic. Quebec just wants to be different and it is. Ontario has an asshole premier who opens up at wrong times, shuts down at wrong times and is really getting us bunged up. The Prairies are our wild west and we still haven’t got a decent premier if you put the three together. And that leaves beautiful B.C. covering our backside.

And no, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I. are not forgotten. I think of them as orphans we adopted years ago and we do not remember why. And do not get me going on trying to make provinces of our northern territories.

Canada has a world-wide reputation that is not always deserved. To those who think we are nice; we are grouchy today. To those who think we are welcoming; do not bet on it. To those who think we are land of opportunity; you better be an old white guy with a million bucks ready to turn into a fortune.

But for me: I am an optimist. I always have hopes that our politicians will rise to the needs of their voters. And how can you not love this lavish land and all its peoples?

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