Category: Provincial Politics

Secrets of the speech writer.

by Peter Lowry

There seems to be a wealth of expertise today on why the Ontario liberals failed us in the June election. One of the more recent apologists was a speech writer who tells us he has spent, probably too much, time at Queen’s park. His article made me wonder about how speeches are being crafted today.

There are certain basics about political speeches that I am sure never change. One of the first basics is understanding your audience. If you do not know your audience, you are better to say hello, introduce yourself in simple terms and then keep quiet and listen.

Writing speeches for somebody new is always a special challenge. I was criticized more than once for asking a lot of seemingly inane questions. What I was doing was listening to how the person talked. I had to be able to hear in my mind, the person saying every word I would write.

You also had to convince the new client that you will rap their knuckles if they dare to change any of your phrasing. You spend a good deal of time seeking to preserve what is built into the speech that makes logical clips for the broadcast media.

But I would never recommend to a political client that they think or talk like Doug Ford. The one thing you can count on is that most people are smarter than the younger Ford brother. Doug is no business genius. He is just a salesman, albeit a good one. He knows to repeat the winning slogans as his brother taught him. What he also tried to pick up from his late brother was Rob’s commitment and street smarts. Rob connected—maybe with people you are not interested in—but he built Ford Nation on their loyalty. You should never be critical of a guy with his own mob!

The speech writer is knowledgeable enough to know that politicians should not be going around giving lectures in civics. Nothing seems to turn off voters faster. And he thinks they should explain to voters why they care about them –also a good idea.

But the problem now for salesman Doug Ford is delivering on what he has promised his customers. They delivered the votes he wanted. He now has to deliver the goods. A good speech writer cannot always solve that problem.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Patrick Brown is back.

by Peter Lowry

The wife was worried with my unrestrained laughter over breakfast. “Brown is back,” I finally managed to tell her. It was word in the Toronto Star that Barrie’s own Patrick Brown is running for chair of Peel Region that had sent me into paroxysms of laughter.

She did not think it was funny at all. Her first question was “Could he win?” I thought about that for about half a minute and nodded. “Yes.”

It is the same area in which Brown launched his scheme to win the leadership of the Ontario conservatives. The Hindu temples that he used as base to link all areas of sub-continent immigrants in Ontario are in the Brampton area which is the heart of Peel Region.

While I am sure my old friend Hazel McCallion, former mayor of Mississauga, could make short work of a putz such as Brown, you have to remember she is 97. He has a good chance in a large field of mediocre candidates such as those already nominated.

A four-year sinecure as Peel chair, paying about $175,000 per year plus lots of expense money, would please Mr. Brown no end. He could even use it as a calculated catbird seat for his future ambitions in Ontario politics.

Brown’s ‘tell-nothing’ book should be out in time for the October 22 election. It will probably be a rather fictionalized version of events leading to his downfall as Ontario conservative leader.

But neither can it include discussion of the reports from the young ladies who caused his downfall. That is the stuff of a lawsuit with CTV television. I expect the Bell Canada lawyers are going to be digging into that problem soon enough and Mr. Brown might have an undisclosed, but still handsome sum, to put aside for a rainy day.

I understand that Patrick has a ‘fiancé’ these days to keep him out of bars where underage ladies might be skulking in wait for him.

Just what he sees as the opportunity in the Peel regional chair eludes me. Admittedly, Paul Godfrey, went from regional chair in Toronto to some heavy wheeling and dealing in the newspaper business that has left him in a quite respectable position in which to retire.

But like in any other skulduggery, it is always a question of following the money. Running for regional chair is not an inexpensive undertaking. From the lakefront in Mississauga to the northern tip of Caledon is not a hop, skip and jump. There are about 1.4 million residents in that area and it keeps growing. You do not run for chair on a ward-healer’s budget.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Voting reform or disaster in B.C.

by Peter Lowry

Our friends on the left coast must be already smoking something serious. I am stunned by what they are suggesting as the choice for reformed voting in British Columbia. While the proposition is obviously designed to push people to proportional representation. I would suggest that they consider the better option—for the NDP framers of the vote to “get stuffed.”

The only seemingly sensible option of the three proposed systems of voting is plain and simple mixed member proportional (MMP) voting. While it is a solution that can make unaware people happy, it is at least understandable. You have much larger electoral districts where you can vote for an individual. Your vote also is counted to allocate 40 per cent of the legislative seats to unelected party lists. Many people already vote just for a party, so there is nothing particularly creative about that.

It is the second and third options that baffle people. The proposition of dual-member proportional voting does not seem to have been tried before. It simply means that the candidate with the most votes wins the electoral seat and the person with the second most votes might or might not be allocated a seat somewhere on a proportional basis. I remember how much fun we had with the various tricks we used in Toronto aldermanic elections when they were for two-member wards. You would not believe how easy it was to cook that choice.

I have never heard of a system such as rural-urban proportional. Whomever dreamed this up certainly did not think farmers were very smart. They actually want to have the farmers vote for mixed member proportional members and the cities and towns to vote under a single-transferable vote. As B.C. voters have already rejected single-transferable voting twice, I am sure they would continue to give that sillyness a wide berth.

But once again we have the people who framed this foolishness passing the buck when it comes to promoting it. They are actually going to let two sides of the question duke it out and the government will give them $500,000 each to cover their expenses.

What has me more concerned is the idea of a mail-in ballot. I would feel more confident of an Internet ballot and a mail-in option for those who lack the Internet access.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

By Golly, It’s Ford Folly.

by Peter Lowry

After spending some time checking out the line-up of found-ins referred to as the Ontario cabinet, we have an uneasy feeling in the middle of our back. This is supposed to be the people’s cabinet. We are not sure just who the people are to whom this refers.

The cause of concern was the report from the Toronto Star’s bureau chief at Queen’s Park that none of the new cabinet ministers were being allowed to appoint their own chiefs of staff or communications heads. All such decisions are coming from the new premier’s office. And since the premier himself knows nothing about those skills, all decisions are obviously being made by the premier’s staff. And this implies that premier Ford himself did not have too much to say.

The day that Christine Elliott, with years of experience, does not know whom she would want in her office backing her up, there is something wrong. If the premier’s staff think they can push the new minister of health around, they are in for early trouble. And in her other role as deputy premier, she has to be read in on much more than the premier’s staff.

The same can be said for Vic Fedeli, the new minister of finance and former North Bay mayor. Fedeli is more of a right-wing ideologue than a populist and he will have a tough time fulfilling many of Doug Ford’s conflicting promises. If he ever says he has saved six billion somewhere, you will know you are hearing fairy tales.

It seems we have let the fox into the hen house when Ford’s people picked Caroline Mulroney to be attorney general of Ontario. We have the unusual situation of a member of the New York State bar being given the top legal job in Ontario. Luckily, she is not connected with our education system as her three children attend private schools. Her weekend home is an estate in Georgina (part of her electoral district of York-Simcoe) while during the week, her and her family are in residence at their multi-million dollar home in Toronto’s Forest Hill area.

Mulroney has also been named as head of francophone affairs. She was educated in French as a youngster in Ottawa when she lived in the prime minister’s residence on Sussex Drive. What she might know about francophone affairs she could only have learned from her father. She went to American universities and worked and married in New York until she and her husband and children came to Toronto.

There will be more to come on Ford’s Folly.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Let’s settle this silly supposition.

by Peter Lowry

According to Toronto Star columnist Bob Hepburn, political guru David Herle says the results for the liberals would have been worse if Wynne had not announced that they would lose. I must be missing some common sense. Since most of my Canadian readers are fairly knowledgeable about politics, I would like their help here.

Those of us that follow such things closely know that towards the end of the campaign, Kathleen Wynne and the Ontario liberals were going downhill. It was not the time to capitulate. It was a time to get smart.

As campaign manager for the party, it is supposed that Mr. Herle has to bear some of the blame for the loss. That campaign was not his finest hour. He spent more than a million dollars each to get seven liberal members elected. This is not cost-efficient campaigning.

But only now does Herle admit that he had no idea of how to fight Ford. He should have asked some of us old has-beens! We knew Ford from when he was on Toronto council. We watched the blow-hard lose to fellow conservative John Tory in the mayoralty race four years ago. We followed him closely in that farce of a conservative leadership contest. Beating him is as simple as you take one hard run at the son-of-a-bitch and then you ignore him. He was not the reason that the voters should have chosen Wynne.

Herle never gave the voters a convincing reason to vote liberal. Out of a ten-million-dollar campaign budget, you would think he could at least come up with a decent slogan!

Doug Ford’s “For the People” sucked but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. Nobody ever gave us a reason to vote for Wynne. All we wanted was a single compelling statement on her behalf.

I guess Mr. Herle was counting on the more intellectual voters who preferred not to have a Trump-Lite such as Doug Ford in Ontario. We got news for you campaign manager: There seem to be only enough intellectuals in Ontario to elect seven liberals. The rest of us hoi polloi had to fend for ourselves.

Kathleen Wynne drove the campaign bus that transported loyal liberal voters to the NDP. Wynne should have been slicing and dicing Andrea Horwath from the beginning. That do-nothing blob was sucking up all the hot air and sailed through the campaign to plaudits and to Her Majesty’s loyal opposition.

Mr. Herle, I guess you are fired.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

From Penny Dreadful to false news.

by Peter Lowry

If you think false news is new news, you are only about 300 years behind the news. Watching the efforts of past politician Patrick Brown to communicate with his constituents during his time in Ottawa, I used to think of his efforts in terms of the penny dreadful publications that originated in England in the early 1800s. They had the same lack of accuracy and quality and the same misleading enticements to want to read the following edition.

Most of the early penny dreadful material was fictional about highwaymen or vampires and so was much of Patrick Brown’s efforts. He seemed to accept anything without question from the party offices or as quoted from questionable sources. What was most annoying was his use of local charities to promote himself. He was doing a disservice to the charities but they could hardly say ‘no’ to him.

He used to make fanciful claims about what he did for charities in Barrie. He even used to take the credit for the Royal Victoria Hospital summer hockey event, saying he thought of it and started it, until enough people said “No, he did not.” He used to politicize the event to the point of needlessly polarizing the community.

But this is not to say that all of Patrick Brown’s schemes were not effective. He was easily re-elected for three terms as member of parliament for Barrie. When Brown saw the handwriting on the wall on the conservatives’ chances in 2015, he made the jump for the brass ring in Ontario. By signing up close to 40,000 immigrants from the Indian sub-continent (with or without payment), he swamped the then low membership of the Ontario conservatives and took the leadership—for a while anyway.

But we should hardly be surprised that the two city councillors—acolytes of Patrick Brown—who were there to fill in for him in the new electoral districts for the 2015 federal election, are following in his footsteps.

Messrs. Brassard and Nutall, both MPs for different halves of Barrie, sent out a penny dreadful the other day to announce that they are playing hockey down at the cenotaph on July 1. I, for one, just have better things to do than sit in the hot sun watching a mediocre game of shinny by people who are supposed to be adults.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Do polls prove their point?

by Peter Lowry

Reading a recent newspaper article about the pollsters congratulating themselves on their accuracy in the last provincial election was enough to make me ill. The more serious question on that provincial election was whether the polls followed the voters or did the voters follow the polls?

Opinion polls, focus groups and voter profiling used to be handy tools for campaign management but in the hands of the news media, they have been weaponized. Various media outlets seem to have their own tame pollsters to support their editorial stance. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) even has its own compiler who takes all the polls and comes up with an average. This brave soul also tries to forecast the number of seats in an imaginary legislature.

The problem with this is that 19 times out of 20, the pollsters manage to get certain things wrong. They say they are adjusting their algorithms to compensate for some of the errors. In that case, I suspect the errors must be growing faster than their corrections.

We have always known, for example, that the NDP vote will be exaggerated. Early in the campaign, it is the parked votes of people who are not sure of how they will ultimately vote. Later in the campaign, people just lie.

And they never have been able to determine who among our young people are likely to vote. The campaign manager that fails to develop a strong youth movement for the candidate is not very good at the job.

But who is likely to vote by election day is always the key question. And when you are dealing with 40 per cent or more non-voters, what can any opinion poll really tell you?

The guys who do surprise me are the interactive voice response (IVR) pollsters who use high volumes of calls to try to correct their built-in errors. Who do you think answers the hard-wired phone in a household replete with children and youths? If I was a four-year old picking up an IVR call, I would have just as much fun as an adult playing with the phone buttons.

Campaigns keep changing. You can never judge by what happened in the last election. As I always found as a campaign manager was that three or four afternoons with carefully selected poll sheets could give me the best idea of what was happening. It gave you direction.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

LDP 03: A favour from Ford.

by Peter Lowry

If a stronger, more democratic political party is to rise from the ashes of the Ontario liberal party, we can thank premier-designate Ford for one bit of help. Ford has refused to fund the liberal MPPs in Queen’s Park as a political party. It means those who want to have a new and invigorated replacement party can make more of the decisions with less confusion for the public.

Without the funding, staff, the right to ask questions in question period and the trappings of a party in the legislature, the grassroots of the party are on a more equal footing to say what the party should be. We want the elected members to have a say but not to drown out the grassroots.

This is a far cry from the situation under Kathleen Wynne. The Ontario liberal party was a top-down, one-boss organization. It allowed Wynne to get the party into the mess of charges in Sudbury over her manipulation of a bye-election. If the party had been allowed to conduct an open and democratic election of their candidate, there would have been no such charges.

But even more serious was the lack of party input on policy. Nobody listened to the people who supported the candidates and stood ready to work hard to elect them. The only person that Wynne was listening to was that former TD Bank head who told her to sell off part of Hydro One. It was one of her stupider moves and helped build voter antipathy towards her.

We probably have a year for this new party to get organized and register it before there might be a bye-election in Ontario. That would be our first chance to show some muscle. Our objective would be to get that eighth MPP to enable our new party to have full rights as a party in the legislature and for us to elect a party leader.

The difference I would suggest is that the leader’s role be better defined than in the past. The leader would be elected by an every-member vote and should be directly responsible for managing the elected wing of the party. The party president and executive might be responsible for the party at large and the vetting of candidates. The party members in each electoral district should be responsible for choosing the candidate.

While the policy directions for the party passed by the members have to be treated as possible directions for the party, the party leader needs to report to the party each year on the progress on party resolutions.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The Ego Has Landed.

by Peter Lowry

Premier designate Doug Ford is in Queen’s Park. His reign of terror in Ontario is moving into gear. Before he has even unpacked, he is terrorizing the civil servants and attacking some of the better programs of his predecessors. Why he is being allowed to do this before being sworn into office will probably become the stuff of lawsuits.

Why the Green Ontario fund has replaced its website with a notice that all its Green ON programs are closed is serious. Since when can a premier designate issue an executive order such as that? You would think he would at least have the courtesy to be premier before issuing orders. This guy is only Trump lite. You would at least expect him to have lists of ‘Things to do—after taking office.’

A friend has a house used by her two adult boys who are somewhat challenged and help in looking after it. Lately, she has been installing better windows to improve the insulation and lower the heating costs. Imagine her surprise in trying to apply for the Green ON rebate.

The Green On funds were obtained by the government as part of the cap and trade program that served as a carbon tax in Ontario. Instead of taxing carbon emissions, Ontario had joined with California and Quebec to cap industrial carbon emissions and have industries that met their targets sell any excess allowance to others who were exceeding the limits. This program produced about $3 billion in the first few years and this provided the funds for the Green ON program of incentives and rebates on energy saving products.

But Dougie thinks he is going to save us Ontario taxpayers lots of money. Just the other day he also ordered the extension of use of the Pickering Nuclear plant until 2024. The best advice of our scientists was that the plant should be decommissioned sooner. They know that there is more to shutting down a nuclear plant than turning off the lights and locking the door.

Pickering was slated for decommissioning before that. It is one of the oldest operating nuclear plants in North America. It will take years to shut down the facility safely and cost a great deal.

But Dougie thinks he knows better. He was bragging to people east of Toronto around the Pickering area of all the jobs he was saving them.

When I lived in Toronto, we sometimes used to make bad jokes about the day that could be coming when the city has two sunrises.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

LDP 02: What is in a name?

by Peter Lowry

One of the responses we received about a proposed new liberal democratic party (LDP) was from a reader who thought we could just join the Green party and be done with it. As much as I have admired green leader Elizabeth May’s hard work and leadership of the Green Party, I see no reason for liberals to join her party.

Just one of the problems is the name of the party. By calling itself the Green Party, it narrows its purpose, if not focus. It tells people that the party is about the environment and tells us nothing else.

The NDP is also very keen on the environment and takes an equally strong stance. Its problem is that much of its rhetoric is still based on the socialism of the 1930s. The party has failed to build an image for the 21st century.

Despite May’s intelligent and well-researched positions on many aspects of governance, she cannot be all-knowing. As a one-person party, May is stretched beyond reason in parliament. Many MPs over the years have admitted to me that it is about all you can do in parliament is keep up to date on one department as well as do your constituency work

Even the liberal party has taken positive stands on protecting the environment—until prime minister Justin Trudeau’s recent offer to buy and ship highly polluting Alberta bitumen through an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline. Not only is government participation in shipping bitumen bad economics but it is enraging a core of environmentally concerned liberals. Justin Trudeau and the liberals will need all of their mobs for re-election next year and will not find all of them.

But the liberal mobs had already felt themselves adrift. For some inexplicable reason, Trudeau had decided much earlier that he did not like his father’s party. As useful as the party had been to him, he wanted a top-down structure that he could manipulate to his choosing. He went from no party membership fee (and no membership) to a large group of e-mail addresses for people to harangue for help in campaigning and to provide the campaign funds. Those of us who think of ourselves as liberals have been cast aside for the gullible and the monied.

After next year, we will need a new federal liberal party as well as provincial.

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Copyright 2018 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]