Provincial Politics – Page 5

Betrayal of the Father.

October 20, 2023October 19, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It was the balance that Pierre Trudeau brought to the use of language in Canada that his eldest son betrayed. In Bill C-13’s enactment by parliament in June of this year, Justin Trudeau forgot that his father had declared that the English and French languages were equal. You do not protect one language by downgrading the other. You do not promote one by restricting the other.

Justin Trudeau panders to those pathetic politicians in Quebec City who have to use the “Not Withstanding” clause to cover off their foolish attempts to force Canadians living in Quebec to use only French in their daily lives. There is no need for an additional federal law that encourages that bigotry.

I always found that for every French-Canadian who wanted me to speak French there were probably five francophones who wanted to practice their English on me. All in all, I am sure that if they had tried, I would be fluent in French. As it is, my French makes francophones cringe.

I always think of the Quebec City legislature as the fools who tried to take all the life out of Montreal and chased a quarter million anglophones out of Quebec during the 30 years from 1970 to 2000.

In the 1960s, my oldest brother had taken his family to Quebec to accept a promotion to Alcan’s head office. He became bilingual in that position but on his retirement twenty years later, he and most of his family moved to Ottawa.

What always seemed indicative was that there was also a smaller but companion emigration of francophones to other parts of Canada. While the politicians tried to offset this emigration with immigration from French-speaking countries, they continue to show their rejection of English. For example, by forcing unnecessarily higher fees for English language students from outside Quebec at the few English-language universities and colleges in Quebec.

Somehow this whole business with language in Quebec reminds me of an old adage about taking a horse to water. You still can’t make him drink.

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Consent of the Governed.

October 18, 2023October 17, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Ontario residents have come to regret the lack of education of their premier. He is obviously not the only conservative politician these days who neither knows nor understands this basic concept of democracy. “Consent of the governed” is a concept that can be dated back to the late 13^th century in response to the Divine Right of Kings (and Popes).

Consent is not just in free elections. It is not just at the ballot box. As in the Hippocratic Oath of physicians, it applies to all acts of the politician in office. Which brings us to the obvious ignorance of Premier Ford and his government.

From the time Mr. Ford took office, neither he nor his cabinet seemed aware of even the thought of the needed consent of the governed. As one of his first acts in the premier’s office six years ago, Mr. Ford ordered the city of Toronto to reduce their counselors to half of what they considered adequate to serve their constituents. Did he think to ask Torontonians if they wanted the increase in service by the city?

Services to people are at the core of services provided by our provincial governments. Core services include hospitals and schools. Provincial responsibility includes inspections of equipment such as trucks, industrial machinery, elevators, amusement rides, building materials and municipal services such as providing safe water and safe disposal of waste. It also includes planning and building of highways.

The building of the Bradford bypass to link Highway 400 and Highway 404 has been going on for many years and the final link is in progress. To add a spurious Highway 413 to this building program is an attempt to please developers who have bought up land around the purported future highway 413 intersections. Studies of these highway developments include research into the needs of the people in the area and their travel habits. Those studies are part of the consent to be governed and should be public information.

Provincial governance is not subject to whimsy. What else would you call it when a provincial government takes time and staff resources to re-institute a patronage tool for lawyers, that was done away with over 30 years ago, to give loyal conservative party members a fallacious title such as King’s Counsel. It makes you wonder if these politicians have enough to do?

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The Tory Trap.

October 12, 2023October 11, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Only the Ontario liberals could fail to look ahead. They decided to have a leadership contest, so leisurely, it is putting the party to sleep. They need to wake up and understand the provincial political situation. Instead of having the time for this wrongly planned leadership, the party could still be running a leadership race in the midst of a provincial election.

This possibility has been evident since the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) tossed the Greenbelt ball to the federal Mounted Police. It was deemed too political a situation for the police controlled by the provincial government.

The watch dogs of the Ontario legislature might have no teeth in their arsenal but they can write scathing reports. Their reports on the Greenbelt scandal make the best ‘whodunit’ reading. They did not report malfeasance lightly. And they showed a clear path of blame to the premier’s office at Queen’s Park.

We have all watched as the scapegoats were selected and led to the slaughter. The public was offered the underlings who could be rewarded for their loyalty later.

But the game is not over. Scapegoats are not the prize that the RCMP will accept to prosecute. They want bigger targets. And we all know who are the best friends forever of Ontario’s premier. Arranging for your BFFs to be put in a position to make more than $8 billion in such an egregious manner could be considered a criminal offence. And it could only be carried out from the premier’s office.

And, wonder of wonders, some of these developers, being in position to make such profits, are BFFs of the premier. Some of them had befriended him in the four years he spent on Toronto City council being taught politics by his late brother Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto at the time.

The evidence goes back to when Doug Ford was first running for election to Queen’s Park. The news media reported that Mr. Ford had a secret meeting with some of Ontario’s developers. He was reported to have told them that he would open up the Greenbelt for them. All the Mounties need to do is to get one or two of those developers to turn state’s evidence and they can go to a judge for arrest warrants.

Doug Ford’s resignation would be expected before he goes to trial. The Ontario election would quickly follow.

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Alberta Waste Management.

October 11, 2023October 10, 2023 by Peter Lowry

One of the tasks, the federal government leaves to the provinces is waste management. It is a task that nobody worried about very much back at the time of confederation. One thing you can say about waste management, it gets to be a bigger problem every day.

In Alberta, the province not only has problems with waste management, they also have a problem with management waste. How much, for example did Jason Kenney waste on pipelines that never happened. And how much has the current premier wasted bitching about the federal government’s “disastrous energy regulations” that might—or might not—bring us to net zero a dozen years from now.

And just why does this remind us poor benighted easterners of a slogan saying something like “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark.”

But when we see an advertisement paid for by Alberta taxpayers that says “No one wants blackouts in -30˚.” Who would suggest such a thing?

What really drives me crazy is the federal government has blown over $20 billion on the Trans Mountain Pipeline to ship Alberta bitumen through the Straits of Georgia. Do the poor easterners get to hear any thank-you for that ridiculous expense?

All we get are advertisements promoting that sham of carbon capture from the tar sands exploiters. I was delighted when I saw that the Competition Bureau was going to study the advertising campaign that has been trying to mislead the Canadian public. The joke is that you create more carbon to ship and store the original carbon. It is a constant cycle.

One of the advertisements paid for by Albertans was the one about the hard choices families will face between paying for winter boots for the kids or their mortgage. Does this sound like sensible discussion of the subject? It could better be described as scaremongering.

And this is the province that currently has declared a moratorium on low-cost wind and solar energy projects. Go figure?

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Ford’s Frailty.

October 10, 2023October 9, 2023 by Peter Lowry

In seniors, frailty is a set of symptoms pertaining to the approaching end of life. In politics, it is the weaknesses other politicians will recognize as the key to defeating a politician at the polls. Premier Doug Ford in Ontario has all the symptoms. It does not guarantee that he will be defeated. It still needs the agent of his demise.

The agent who can best defeat Doug Ford is currently running for the leadership of the Ontario liberals. Her name is Bonnie Crombie. This is not to downgrade her opponents for the job of Ontario leader. They can each bring a special skill set to the task. What they are less competent to do is to understand what makes incumbent Doug Ford run. That is Ms. Crombie’s home turf.

In a recent opinion article in the Toronto Star, a writer posited that the “Greenbelt scandal won’t bring down Ford.” The writer’s opinion appeared to be based on a collection of opinion polls that claimed that people distrust politicians anyway. It seemed that the writer was telling us that since all politicians are crooks, they were expected to try to get away with stunts such as Ford tried with the Ontario Greenbelt. What the writer ignored, first of all, was his own recognition that municipal politicians had a somewhat better reputation with the poll respondents.

And that is Ms. Crombie’s lucky charm. She is a successful municipal politician in addition to her term as an MP in Ottawa. She understands the special place that developers hold in our city halls across Canada. She knows that Doug Ford’s only previous political experience was under his late brother Rob’s tutelage at Toronto City Hall. His best friends in politics are developers and their lawyers. There is little he can put over with Ms. Crombie.

It is also why he wants the Ontario liberals to choose someone other than Crombie as their new leader. It is also why he is unlikely to be accommodating in letting her get elected to the legislature in a by-election after the December announcement of the new leader. Ms. Crombie knows how to ask the right questions in the legislature.

And there is a second corollary to the low expectation of politicians. Mr. Ford must have missed the lesson that said: “Don’t get caught.”

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Alberta’s Arithmetic.

October 9, 2023October 8, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Canadians must be embarrassed by the arithmetic we are hearing out of the premier’s office in Edmonton. Nobody would expect the premier to be a world class mathematician but for her to make such a fuss and make such a fool of herself is to be unfair to the sensible people of Alberta. If we get to expect people from the province to be unable to add two and two, it will cause a surge of hiring only people from out of the province to be cashiers or bookkeepers.

Face facts. How long would Tim’s stay in business if you go in for your morning double-double, give the cashier two five-dollar bills and you get a twenty in change?

We are talking here about that looney-tunes premier in Alberta who is threatening to have Albertans to dump the Canada Pension Plan and have their own Provincial Alberta Pension Plan. I wrote about it when she first told us, thinking that she was saying it for laughs.

Okay, so maybe she thought people who said bigger was better, were talking about something else. The truth is that when it comes to pension funds, the big ones are the ones that can handle the money better in the ups and downs of stock markets.

Big makes better in this type of endeavour. And what makes it even better is that if there are any serious downturns, the whole thing is backed by a federal government on behalf of more than 30 million Canadians. In this big is better world, Quebec went their own way but being about twice the population of Alberta, it has done alright.

The important concern in this matter is if Alberta taxpayers accept the stupidity of their premier’s claim that Alberta is entitled to 53 per cent of the funds in the Canada Pension Plan. It might have something to do with the age of Albertans as opposed to the rest of Canada’s population. It could also be as simple of someone inputting data and getting a fly speck confused with a decimal point and some computer going crazy. It is no excuse for this foolishness.

The simple facts are that Alberta, with less than 20 per cent of the participants in the plan, is hardly entitled to 53 per cent of the funds. Give that premier a good shake.

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The Second Ottawa Convoy.

October 6, 2023October 5, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Since they could afford to fly, there are no trucks parked on Wellington Street in Ottawa this week. This convoy from the west is made up of senior executives from the Alberta oil industry as well as entrepreneurs and other Alberta industry leaders. We are told, they come in peace.

They are not exactly there to deny the comments and stratagem of Alberta premier Danielle Smith, they just smile a lot when her plans for a separatist Alberta are questioned. They have already been welcomed by prime minister Justin Trudeau. They might not want to publicize their meetings with conservative leader Pierre Poilievre—no doubt their names are prominent on the Ottawa cowboy’s donor lists.

This convoy seeks, they say, collaboration. They are selling the friendly face of Alberta. They have named the convoy as “One Alberta, One Canada” We are not overly sure just what that means but they say it with a happy face.

While the group was put together by Alberta’s oil industry, chambers of commerce, and Alberta economic development agencies, its natural leader is the executive chair of Cenovus Energy, Alberta’s largest company in the tar sands extraction business. His name is Alex Pourbaix and he seems to be central to all the interviews by eastern news media.

It is a chance for him to pump the unproven carbon capture plan of Pathways Alliance. This is a consortium of various tar sands companies who want the federal government to fund their sketchy plan. What is cramping his presentation is the advertising campaign by the Alberta provincial government saying that the federal government’s clean electricity plan, that is coming soon, will increase the cost of electricity. That is very brave of the Danielle Smith government to suggest that will be the outcome of a plan they have never seen.

But easterners are coming to expect this type of presumption from Alberta’s united conservatives. Their recent display of erratic arithmetic to claim they own more than half of the funds in the Canada Pension Plan must have taken a lot of chutzpah.

But more and more, you get the impression that Alberta premier Danielle Smith and the leader of the opposition in Ottawa, Pierre Poilievre, have the same speech writers.

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Liberating Liberalism.

October 4, 2023October 3, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Listening to the candidates for the leadership of the liberal party is not doing much to promote liberalism. You get the impression that Ted Hsu MPP is the only one enthusiastic for a liberal government in Ontario. Bonnie Crombie might be the front-runner yet her ‘Big Tent’ approach might be more practical than liberal. Yasir Naqvi reminds me of the support the liberals always got from the more recent Canadians because it was liberals who always supported newcomers. Nate Erskine-Smith MP is probably the one who best understands liberalism.

But we will miss Adil Shamji as he was the candidate who best looked up to liberalism for the benefits to our citizens. Maybe one of the key questions for the remaining debates in the leadership contest is to question the candidates on their liberalism.

We could probably count on Ted Hsu for the intellectual answer to the question. He is the candidate most likely to recognize the freedom and democratic benefits of liberalism. He obviously sees liberalism as less demanding on the individual.

While Yasir Naqvi MP is obviously the most dedicated to liberalism, his is a more visceral liberalism. He sees it as not only standing for human rights over other political parties but core to the democracy in our Canadian society.

Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie’s approach to liberalism is similar to my late friend Hazel McCallion. Hazel always took a somewhat conservative approach to running Mississauga. It helped her get the job done. She would have had a laugh when Ontario premier Doug Ford dreamed up his ‘strong mayor’ policy. She would never have needed Doug Ford’s support for anything she felt she needed to get done. The only thing she could not get done was to convince me to move to Mississauga. I was too loyal to my liberal roots in Toronto.

I think Nate Erskine-Smith’s approach to liberalism would be the most complex. He comes from the more gentrified part of Toronto’s east end. Based on his time in England, he probably has a more complicated story to tell about the origins of his liberalism. His reputation as a maverick member of parliament also is the question.

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Carry On, With Four.

October 2, 2023October 1, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It is a long trudge to the December decision for the Ontario liberals. You can well appreciate the decision of Adil Shamji MPP to step aside from the contest for the leadership. Likability is not the measure Ontario liberals are applying to the current leadership contest. Winning is what is churning their decision. It is obvious the decision has been made.

The debate in Stratford on Sunday was the “We all love farmers event.” It is actually about time that the liberals called the bluff of the conservatives in usurping the support of farmers across Ontario. It is obvious to most people involved in agriculture that the Conservative party and the Ontario Landowners organization have been taking them for granted for a couple generations.

I think, if you wanted to pick a winner in this event, it was Ted Hsu MPP. This candidate is the surprise of the contest. While he lacks the experience needed to become leader of the Ontario liberals, He is by far one of the smartest people, I have ever listened to in Ontario politics. What a novelty that would be to have some brains in the premier’s office!

I always liked Yasir Naqvi. The MP for Ottawa Centre was always a go-getter in my estimation, but he lost a few points attacking Bonnie Crombie. He obviously won a few points when he attacked Doug Ford for his attack on the promise of Ontario, so maybe it balanced out.

But I really don’t think Yasir will do it again. He saw that he had gotten to Bonnie when he thanked former mayor Hazel McCallion for the homes being built in Mississauga.

Thankfully, Bonnie had to wait to answer his dig. When she did, it was a soft approach. Anyone who knew Hazel, would know that she would never leave Mississauga in the wrong hands. Hazel did not make up her mind overnight but when she endorsed Bonnie, it was with the obvious appreciation of Bonnie’s skills.

The disappointment for the day was in Nate Erskine-Smith. Everyone has an off day but Nate needed more enthusiasm for the debate. He knows that Bonnie Crombie is winning.

There are more debates planned. It would help in the upcoming debates to have a professional on the sound so that the audience are not having to change the sound levels they are getting and the candidates can hear the debate moderators.

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Before the Fall.

September 26, 2023September 25, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Last Friday (September 22) there was a large picture above the fold of the front page of the Toronto Star. It was captioned: ‘It was a mistake’. It was a picture of a steely-eyed, stony-faced Ontario premier Doug Ford. This was not a picture of a contrite and apologetic premier. It was a picture of an old-fashioned salesman plotting to get even.

Ford is not finished. Not by a long-shot. All he feels is that he was off his game. He has to get back on that horse! Some voters still love him. And he knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Behind those slitted eyes, there was a mind churning out possible solutions to this problem.

Maybe Ford is confident that the ‘commie’ Toronto Star will soon collapse on its own. It is unlikely to continue to be a negative influence on his Greenbelt plans.

In the meantime, he has ministerial zoning orders (MZOs) to keep his developer friends happy and loyal to his cause. He has probably already told them not to unload their Greenbelt properties on the market too quickly. They might not have an $8.2 billion tax write-off but maybe there are other incentives that can be fed to them.

Ford’s major problem is that he could not afford the loss of any more of his cabinet members or back benchers. When it looks as though Caroline Mulroney in transport, Sylvia Jones in Health and Paul Calandra in municipal affairs and housing are the backbone of the cabinet, you know Ford is in trouble.

Caroline Mulroney has to get the Highway 413 moving or all might be lost for some of Ford’s favourite developers. Her problem is that the conservatives are also going to have to keep the money flowing on the Bradford By-Pass. Two ministers from Barrie will be in trouble if the work on all those bridges through Barrie slows down.

Ford seems to be unable to keep too many balls in the air. His office staff is supposed to be the traffic cops for his government and they are not doing a very good job of it.

They seem to have left Stepen Lecce to face the music with the Ontario teachers by himself. He is loosing the battle with them. And Sylvia Jones thinking she can handle healthcare is a sad joke.

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