Provincial Politics – Page 51

Peaking early; Peaking late, in politics.

March 18, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is something like a fertility cycle. If you are too early or too late, that little sperm has lost an opportunity. It is like that time in a political campaign when unfertilized minds can be receptive to a particular message. It is only the entire costly campaign that is at risk.

It has always seemed to me that there is a point in campaigns when there is a peak of receptivity. It is that point when a maximum number of the uncommitted voters minds close around a particular political failure or inspiration. (Though inspirations are rare.)

Sorting out the last federal election, I think the receptors shut down prematurely. Canadians were tired of the arrogance of Stephen Harper’s conservatives and the last half of that tedious campaign became just so much blather.

And what us politicos need to always keep in mind is that, non-political people have little tolerance for discussing politics at most times. To actually catch them at the right moment is rare.

It is probably the reason some historical figure came up with that silly warning to never discuss politics or religion with strangers. Mind you, I love encouraging strangers to talk politics. If the person does not know you, nor think you can do anything for them, you can get an honest opinion. Honesty is a rare and precious commodity in politics.

Though what you usually find out from strangers are rather superficial views of political events and trends. It most often reflects the recent items heard or seen on You Tube or Facebook as well as the evening news. It might not always pay for you to argue with a person’s opinion but it can become part of your memory bank on the subject. The strongest arguments that voters get to help convince them are the ones that trigger their own experience and knowledge.

Reading a review of a book by a political scientist the other day, he makes the astute observation that if we want to make better political decisions, we first have to want to. Since the solution would involve going beyond their comfort zone for many people, he is not optimistic.

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Did they forget to tell Jagmeet?

March 16, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It seems strange that the NDP apparatchiks around their leader Jagmeet Singh have forgotten to tell him something important. He certainly has enough French to understand that Québec Solidaire is a separatist party based in Quebec. It might share the orange party color and the left of centre politics of the NDP but from that point they go their separate ways.

The confusion with this started when newly elected MP and party leader Jagmeet Singh announced that Alexandre Boulerice would be the party’s deputy leader for Quebec. Boulerice is the MP for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and was first elected in the Orange Wave of 2011.

Boulerice followed up on Wednesday by announcing that Nima Machouf will be the NDP standard bearer in the riding of Laurier—Saint-Marie in October. The riding is currently represented by NDP MP Hélène Lavadière, who is stepping down after holding the riding since 2011.

The only problem with this is that Nima Machouf is also a member of Québec Solidaire. She is not only a member but her husband, Amir Kadir, was a member of the National Assembly for Québec Solidaire from 2008 to 2018.

My guess is that the rest of Canada would be caught off guard if it had to deal with a group as left of centre politically as Québec Solidaire—if they were ever in a position to call the shots in Quebec. As unlikely as it might be that they might win, I see an appeal to their proposal of calling for a constitutional assembly to plan the future of the province. I believe they would have to agree if the rest of the country asked to join with them in planning an improved country—conditional on a national referendum afterward to approve of the proposed plan.

Just think of what could be done!

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Fighting the Beer Store fight.

March 15, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Have you seen the opinion pieces running in what is left of Ontario’s small-town papers? These are warnings forecasting higher prices for beer if we change the way it is sold? This is old-fashioned protectionism for the beer store’s unionized employees. Frankly, with some grocery stores already offering beer, that horse has left the stable.

What this public relations effort is telling us is that the beer workers union is assuming the recent on-line survey by the government is telling them to go ahead with a broader array of sales outlets for beer. As a populist premier, Doug Ford would be inclined to support sales through convenience stores.

What should accompany this decision is a better direction for the present beer stores. There is a strong movement to separate the recycling efforts of the beer store from case sales. It would serve the public better if the Beer Store management decided what business it is going to emphasize. By a better divide between the two businesses, the merchandising and sales of beer could be greatly improved.

Ontario beer drinkers are frankly tired of the poor merchandising and bad smells of recycling depots doing a part-time job of selling beer. It would hardly surprise me if many of the 447 stores in Ontario need to be condemned as unsanitary.

Is it just part of their bad service that they challenged 3.7 million customers last year? If the company’s employees can only guess that somebody is underage or drunk once in every 34 tries, they should get out of the age and sobriety guessing business. It would certainly improve their service for the other customers.

And while we should never constrain the choices people can make as to their favourite suds, most customers come to the store to get a specific brand in a specific quantity. There are lots of ways to improve the service for them.

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‘Take that, John Horgan.’

March 13, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The Toronto Star’s Calgary apologist, Gillian Steward, thinks maybe Alberta premier Rachel Notley can frighten her former ally, B.C. premier John Horgan, into approving the Trans Mountain pipeline. It seems that the Alberta premier has committed $3.7 billion to lease 4,400 rail tanker cars to carry diluted bitumen to Burrard Inlet. The objective is not just to carry the tar sands output but to show the B.C. premier that rail is not as safe as pipelines.

And if there is a serious derailment of bitumen-loaded tanker cars, it will be John Horgan’s fault. While the logic of this might confuse some readers, Steward goes on to list some of the recent accidents that might or might not have involved bitumen. She takes special note of the run-a-way freight train near Lake Louise that headed west with nobody at the controls. The killing of three Canadian Pacific employees and the derailment of 99 cars and two locomotives was horrific enough but if I was on the Transportation Safety Board, I would be having loud discussions with CP management about what the hell they think they are running?

What is just the icing on the cake, among all the failings of the CPR, is the ridiculous sight recently of two CP Rail trains colliding in the rail yards in Calgary. What were they doing? Practicing?

With hundreds of thousands of barrels of diluted bitumen being shipped south, east and west from Alberta every day, people are soon going to learn the difference between bitumen and crude oil. Crude can be cleaned up. Bitumen becomes part of the environment.

It sometimes appears that John Horgan and his NDP government in B.C. are the only adults in Western Canada. They have stood with the aboriginal groups, they have approved liquified natural gas shipping that can be done safely and they have shown their concern for the remaining Orcas in the Salish Sea. They are doing their job in a responsible manner. Others should do likewise.

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Reefer Madness in Ontario?

March 9, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is too bad premier Doug Ford’s younger brother died. The late Rob Ford might have been a wealth of information about the marketing of street drugs. As it is, it will take years to straighten out the mess the Ontario conservatives are making of legal retailing of cannabis.

But then, almost any street person in Ontario can easily explain the problems. It is the same as any successful retailer knows. It all comes down to location, location and location. In any city, the most important locations (other than around high schools) are where you find the highest traffic from local universities and colleges.

For example, there are three shops in the planning for London. The best guess is that the lucky retailer midway between Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario will get more than 60 per cent of the business in the city.

What boggles the mind though is that Toronto—with seven times the population of London—will also have just three legal outlets besides the Ontario on-line store.

This mess is a combination of the conservative’s political interference in the earlier planning for government-only stores, the lottery system for selecting privatized outlets and the rules and regulations set up by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO).

But now we learn that this great system for Ontario cannot get enough product to supply the few stores they will have by this summer. You can be assured though that the private, unlicensed and less controlled market will be making plenty of product available while the government- controlled retailers struggle with unreasonable government regulation and constraints on production.

And the entrepreneurial, less-publicized, private market should give daily thanks to the politicians who legalized marijuana in Canada and are building a market for them. While the legal stores are setting a lower retail price point, the ‘free’ market can make far more money on the increased volumes.

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How great is it going to be?

March 3, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Do you really want to trust a politician who insists on telling you how great it is going to be? When the Ontario government announced its health care reforms this week, everyone was left wondering just how they were going to accomplish these great results. That was all we got, no details, just the objective.

Ontario was promised a new super agency called Ontario Health and other than the superlatives, that is about what there is to know about it. Many years ago, we had a super agency and it was called the Ontario Ministry of Health. It was also a super agency. It found though that it needed to keep creating other agencies to do the things that the ministry did not have the people, nor the expertise to do. It even created what were called Local Health Integration Networks (LHIN) to make the service more assessible. Now the LHINs are being absorbed into the super agency—probably because they spend too much.

Frankly, the Ontario government might have been smarter if it had delayed the announcement until it knew better what it was doing. I expect there would be a long wait for that.

What is particularly disappointing in all of this B.S. being washed through the corridors of Queen’s Park is the role of super MPP Christine Elliott. As minister of health, hers is not an enviable position. She has been handed her talking points about this new super agency and come hell or high water, she is going to read them through.

Every time reporters ask her about some problem in health care, she goes into a lengthy discussion of how bad the situation is now and the promise that the Tories are going to fix it. She has absolutely no idea how it will be fixed but, according to Ms. Elliott, you can be sure that the Tories will fix it.

And at the same time, the Tories are going to save money. Everything will be paid for with money saved by the wily Tories.

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When compromise is the problem.

February 23, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Nobody should celebrate too soon about the compromise solution to paying Ontario’s doctors. After more than four years of arguments, back-stabbing and threats, nobody is particularly happy. The three-member arbitration board did not have to find the money, so they could be generous. And they were. The doctors got what they wanted and they can go back to fighting among themselves for the spoils.

But why does it feel like there is still another shoe to drop?

Oh yah, I really do not think that Dougie and the gang at Queen’s Park are going to take this solution lying down. They are hardly about to bleed another few billions into the doctors’ pockets. Do the math for yourself. There are some 23,000 doctors in Ontario set to making a rather generous $12 billion plus per year—requiring almost a quarter of our health care costs.

And you were wondering why Dougie and the gang were putting the screws to families with autistic children? These purported politicians who told you that they were going to save the taxpayers money have been bleeding money since getting into office after that rout of the liberals. Dougie puts the president of partially-public Hydro One on a strict diet and yet pays his friends more than they ask for. And the government is now faced with open-ended payment for the doctors.

We will probably hear from the health minister soon that a new bill is coming to put a cap on doctors’ earnings. That could start another round of arguments with the doctors. And to complicate the situation further, it could cause more rifts between the specialists and the general practitioners. It would almost be a blessing to see the Ontario Medical Association become something of an amoeba and start splitting into multiple versions of itself.

And the politicians thought just one OMA was a problem?

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A Corrected Convention.

February 17, 2019 by Peter Lowry

The seven liberal MPPs remaining at Queen’s Park are going to carry a lot of weight in deciding the when and how of the convention to replace Kathleen Wynne as leader of the party. Not only are there possible candidates among them but they will also want to ensure that the process passes the smell test.

The last convention, that chose Wynne, did not. It has to be the last time the old guard will have had control. It has to be the last time the old guard was allowed to make the decision.

And at a time when it is very easy to give the entire membership a vote, it is hard to argue ‘why not.’ We have the membership lists. We can provide members with unique codes for access and we can have live voting across the province. We can also stop people from paying the memberships fees for large blocks of voters. We can have a real ‘One member: one vote’ leadership race.

But the one thing that the new leader must make clear is that a political party in a democracy has to be democratic itself. The party must choose its candidates in the electoral districts without interference from the leader or the central party organization.

The party members must have a full and public say in the policy direction of the party. Party platforms have to be developed in the open. No more surprise announcements by the party leader from somewhere in left or right field.

A political party is not a local service club. It is a cause. It has to be something that people can believe in. Party policy is something that party members need to discuss and get involved in developing. Training members to knock on doors during elections and getting out the vote is a critical part of getting your party’s views and programs understood and supported by the public.

You do not have a real democracy until you put some work into it.

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Ford Follies.

February 14, 2019 by Peter Lowry

This entertainment is settling in for a long run. Ontario premier Doug Ford and his ensemble are enjoying their reviews. You cannot help but compare the show to the old 19^th Century minstrel shows—without blackened faces, though Doug Ford does seem pleased in playing the role of Mr. Interlocutor.

In this minstrel show, the Ontario cabinet is seated in a row with Mr. Interlocutor in the middle. Each routine is a chance for another member of the troop to do his or her stuff. When the minister of colleges and universities announced cuts in student funding in Ontario, Mr. Interlocutor added that there would be no more crazy Marxist nonsense promoted.

That is the way that these routines run. The minister of health will say that big changes are coming in health care. Doug Ford has already hired his pal Reuben Devlin at $348,000 per year to tell him what those big changes will be.

Ford even tried to hire long-time Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion to tell his minister of municipalities what to do about the housing needs in Ontario. Mind you Hazel, being a wise person, said she would prefer to do it for free. At 97, Hazel has stopped saving money for her old age. And then, when she thought a little further about it, she decided she did not have the time. (There is a lot of humour in these minstrel shows.)

The funniest routine that the show came up with last week was the announcement by environment minister Rod Phillips that the province intended to give taxpayers’ money to the polluters to get them to try to stop their polluting ways. Even Doug Ford could not top that one.

Mind you, the environmental stuff is a rolling situation. Phillips changed his mind and is now saying polluters will pay but not as much as the federal government wants. Ontario will now have a carbon tax but want to call it something else because they are still suing the federal government over the carbon tax.

But I am going to have to stop this comparison to minstrel shows. It will get me in trouble.

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‘Super-agencies,’ been there; done that.

February 9, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Health care in Ontario is a machine of many parts. It seems the Ford government wants to start collecting those parts into one super agency. The only problem with this is that there once was a super agency responsible for health care in the province. It was called the Ministry of Health. And it was the ministry itself that created all the disparate parts of the system with which the public is faced today.

Do the parts work well? Not really. Would a super agency work well? Not really. Would a super agency save money? Not in the long run.

But the mystical theory of all conservatives is that the fewer the agencies involved, efficiencies will follow. In theory, they are right. The only problem is that when you make a mistake in health care, you are mistreating people. It gets noticed faster.

When the 14 local health integration networks (LHINs) were established in Ontario, it was an attempt to take critical local decisions down to where they could be made closer to the needs of the patient. This localized arrangement was further structured more recently when local services such as home health services were taken over by the LHINs. If the idea was to reduce the heat on the Ministry of Health, it failed. And if the idea was to cut down on the size of the Ministry of Health, it failed.

The best guess of the Ford government’s intentions is that the 14 LHINs might be reduced to five regional oversight bodies. How this is supposed to save money is not clear to people who know how governments add and subtract. It is definitely not as simple as dividing by 14 and multiplying by five.

The danger that is obvious in this mathematical exercise is that many of the local services could be orphaned again. And woe to the local politician who gets caught in the cross fire. All I know is that for every act of kindness for a patient in Toronto, some sick soul is getting screwed out in the boonies.

It is disconcerting that health minister Christine Elliott—who was supposed to be one of the adults at the cabinet table—keeps talking about some sort of health care transformational policy that is coming.

It is even more disturbing that we hear that premier Ford has appointed his crony Rueben Devlin, former CEO of Humber River Hospital, to come up with this transformational policy at an annual stipend of $348,000 per year.

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