Provincial Politics – Page 76

Better Living with Bitumen.

August 14, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Reading an apologist for Alberta’s tar sands exploiters the other day, we learned that the little town of Hardisty, Alberta is the hub of a North American maze of pipelines. This town of 550 people can store up to 25 million barrels of diluted bitumen before sending it east, south or west by pipeline or rail car. The only question you are not allowed to ask is why it is not refined into synthetic crude oil before being shipped.

And that is the crux of Alberta’s problem. They can confuse people as much as they like by calling them ‘oilsands’ but The Athabasca and Cold Lake fields are among the largest deposits in the world of what we know as tar sands. That tarry substance that has been called ‘pitch’ in earlier times is actually bitumen. If you refined all that bitumen into synthetic crude oil before you shipped it, the entire province would be several metres deep in carbon deposits known as bitumen slag. The worst of it is that bitumen slag is very light and the first strong breeze coming across the Rockies could blow that carbon into Northern Ontario.

And you can be sure that Saskatchewan and Manitoba farmers would be less than thrilled having to plow their fields wearing breathing masks and protective goggles. How they would protect the livestock is a different matter.

And that is why they want to call that stuff in these new pipelines ‘crude oil.’ It is really diluted bitumen. There are various types of diluent material used but they are usually oil based as that can help move the heated mixture through a pipeline at higher pressure. It is this higher pressure that worries us the most about these pipelines.

Normal, relatively safe, oil and gas pipelines have been in service for many years. There have been some spills but they get cleaned up and life goes on.

Not so with diluted bitumen. On water, this stuff floats along a bit because of the diluent and then gradually sinks to the bottom where it can stay for ever. Ask the people on the North Saskatchewan River near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan how that works for them. And that was a small bitumen spill. The people along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan had billions spent trying to clean up their river. It will take that ecosystem many years to recover.

The simple facts are that Canadians would better off paying those nice people in Hardisty, Alberta a CEO’s pension for the rest of their lives. That damn bitumen is best left in the ground.

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She could use her married name.

August 7, 2017 by Peter Lowry

The question was: What would help Brian Mulroney’s daughter win a seat in the Legislature in the next Ontario provincial election? The obvious answer is to use a different name. It might be a quarter century since Canadian voters turfed Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives (then led by Kim Campbell) and left the party with just two seats in parliament, but the odour lingers.

But Caroline Mulroney has other concerns. She is mother of four pre-teens at her and her husband’s estate in Georgina between Barrie and Toronto. She is a principal in BloombergSen investment firm but seems to lack political savvy. For example, it is not the amount you spend on an announcement but the creativity, competence and thought you put into it.

Her timing is bad because the provincial party is currently mired in claims and counter claims about the problems created by the party’s leader and his team in attracting and nominating candidates. Throwing a name candidate such as Ms. Mulroney into the melee seems unfair to her.

And since not much happens in York-Simcoe riding without the blessing of Conservative MP Peter Van Loan, we wonder what is going on?

What really turns us off in this announcement is that her husband Andrew Lapham is an executive of New York’s Blackstone investment firm that has fully functioning offices around the world but apparently not in Toronto. Maybe Ms. Mulroney intends to keep her husband in the background.

The believable aspect of Ms. Mulroney’s candidacy is her claim that York-Simcoe voters tell her they want change. Since voters in that area both federally and provincially have been represented by Conservative politicians for the past two decades, we can understand that desire for change.

But knowing she grew up as a child of privilege and went to University in Boston and New York does not warm us to her compassion. Her philanthropic efforts show little depth of understanding in societal needs.

What really turns us off is her glowing description of Ontario Conservative leader Patrick Brown. Her father addressed the Conservative caucus at Queen’s Park a year ago and told them how important he thinks it is for caucuses to support their leader. Brian Mulroney probably knows a thing or two about that problem.

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Murray dumps Wynne.

August 3, 2017 by Peter Lowry

“Don’t let the door handle hit you in the ass on the way out, Glen!” The good news is that Ontario Environment Minister Glen Murray is leaving the Wynne cabinet in Ontario. The bad news is that his new job is as executive director of Alberta’s namby-pamby Pembina Institute. It should suit him.

It was not as though he was doing anything useful in Toronto. From the time in the Ontario Liberal leadership when he dumped his supporters in the gay community a week before voting on delegates, Murray’s self interest has been apparent. He was assuring himself a cabinet position while fouling the voting for convention delegates.

Some people are describing his departure as a rat leaving a sinking ship but there is a long way to go before the Ontario election scheduled for June 7, 2018. If Wynne and her Liberals had any competition, they would worry.

At 50, Montreal-born Glen Murray has been trying to decide where he is headed. He was elected three times as a Winnipeg councillor and served six years as mayor of Winnipeg before coming to Toronto. The one political loss he suffered over the years was a stab at a federal seat in 2004 in Manitoba. It was not a good election for Liberals in the west.

He won a seat in the Ontario Legislature in a by-election in February 2010.

As a politician, you can see his appeal for the Pembina Institute. You would think that a Calgary-based environmentalist organization would do very poorly among the local tar sands exploiters but that is not the case. The institute seems almost apologetic when it explains the harm bitumen can do. It must also be the only environmentalist organization to refer to bitumen as ‘crude oil.’

(Bitumen is the tarry substance in the tar sands that can be refined into ersatz crude oil at a substantial carbon footprint. It has to be diluted with a carrier and heated to send it through a pipeline at high pressure.)

Glen Murray’s seat in the Ontario Legislature will remain vacant until after the June election next year. It should not make too much difference.

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It’s the wrong argument on minimum wage.

August 1, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Arguing about how many in Ontario work for a minimum wage is silly. Governments always seem to be trailing the curve on this problem. It is the people who are falling behind who need to get ahead of the poverty line.

Can you imagine a serious writer suggesting that a higher minimum wage is unnecessary because so many of the people earning minimum wage are younger people who live with their parents? They actually say that these young people do not need an increase. It makes you wonder how you would word the means test for that theory?

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the spawn of George Weston telling us that their $33 billion enterprise under the Loblaws and Shopper’s Drug Mart names will lose as much as a third of its profits because of raising the minimum wage in Alberta and Ontario. Well, we certainly do not want to deny the Weston family another hundred million or so in profits do we?

The far more serious complaint is how long this increase is to be dangled in front of people in need? It is taking the Ontario government until the beginning of 2019 to raise it to $15 per hour. And it might not be a good bet if the Brown Conservatives accidently win next year’s election. Brown is careful who he says it to but he does not approve of any increase.

The reason most economists support higher minimum wages (certainly above the poverty line) is that the people getting the benefit of this money are most likely to spend it sooner. Increasing the minimum wage has been known to have a beneficial effect on the economy.

It has always been clear to me that the company that treats its employees the best is the winner. For example, there are two very large retail outlets at the south end of Barrie. They are easy to distinguish. One pays most employees the minimum wage. That store does not have happy, helpful employees. The store seems dark and the shelves are not well stocked.

The other store is bright and clean. Its employees are always eager to assist and make that extra effort to please the customers. This store is reputed to be paying its employees a basic $21.50 an hour. The place is always busy.

One of those stores is called Walmart. The smart one is called Costco.

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Jagmeet Singh: Not just a pretty face.

July 29, 2017 by Peter Lowry

The New Democratic Party’s federal leadership race is getting a little more heated. With less than two months to go, the race has taken on some disturbing aspects of the last Conservative leadership in Ontario. It is turning into Jagmeet Singh’s race to win if he is using the same tactics as Ontario Conservative winner Patrick Brown.

Brown looked at the almost one million recent immigrants in Ontario from South Asia (mainly Hindu, Sikh and Muslim from the Indian Sub-Continent) and signed up almost 40,000 temporary Conservatives. It is even easier for Jagmeet Singh to organize among this group than Brown and Singh can add another 30,000 potential supporters in B.C.

You can also assume that more than 50 per cent of the 100,000 plus NDP members are already from British Columbia and Ontario. And with all votes counting instead of balanced across the country, it is winning in those two provinces that matters.

And Quebec voters would be the least likely to support a party headed by a turbaned Sikh—no matter how much GQ Magazine admires and approves the rest of his attire.

The main difference between Conservative Brown and New Democratic Singh is that Jagmeet is a hero among the Canadian Sikh community. He has also supported Sikh candidates for the NDP across Canada.

Jagmeet (at 38) also has more life experience than contemporary Patrick Brown (at 39). Jagmeet has had considerably more experience and success as a lawyer than Brown, has proposed more bills in the Ontario Legislature than Brown did in both Ottawa and Queens’ Park and Brown would hardly want to even arm wrestle with a trained athlete such as Jagmeet.

Oddly enough neither Brown nor Singh has much to say about their policy direction. Brown does not seem to have any and Singh seems to be hoeing to the standard New Democratic policy book.

Whether either of these two men is at all ready to lead their respective parties anywhere is a very large question mark. The knives will be out for Brown after the next election in Ontario in June 2018. Jagmeet Singh would be wise to ride out that election as Ontario Deputy Leader and be ready to take over as Ontario leader when Andrea Horwath steps down. In the meantime, he can study where the NDP’s future might be.

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The marriage of Alberta’s Alt-right.

July 28, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Can you not just visualize Stan Laurel, in the person of Brian Jean, saying to Oliver Hardy, in the person of Jason Kenney, “Well here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into.” The mess they are into is a new provincial party in Alberta that could earn the enmity of the rest of Canada. It is an extremist version of a United Conservative Party of Alberta that few decent Albertans will want to support.

Former MP and former leader of Alberta’s Conservative Party, Jason Kenney has led Alberta’s once powerful Conservatives into a marriage with the Conservative offshoot Wildrose Party. It is a marriage without principles. It is a marriage without niceties. It is nothing more than a disgusting grab for power. It is so blatantly dishonest that it could make Donald Trump blush.

And yet nobody misses the similarities to Donald Trump’s policies. This is a party that is defiant on climate change. It wants to dig and use more of Alberta’s coal, not less. It is vehement about there being no cap on tar sands exploitation. It wants more pipelines. It will get rid of all carbon taxes. And it will cut Albertans’ taxes no matter what.

Instead of learning something from the roller coast ride that Alberta has taken on the price of oil, this party only believes in fossil fuels. They are ostriches serving the bidding of tar sands’ companies.

Brian Jean is the Member of the Legislature for Fort McMurray—Conklin and knows first hand of the best wishes and support from the rest of Canada during the fire storms of last year in that part of Alberta. Yet, he told Conservatives after the vote that their new provincial party will “send a message to all of Canada that Alberta is done apologizing for our industries and our way of life.”

That is not just a straight forward ‘Up yours’ to environmentalists and other concerned citizens. Brian Jean and Jason Kenney have no understanding of God’s word to Moses that one should sock some away during the good years so that you can survive the lean years. They are mean and vindictive zealots who take their bitterness out on those members of society least able to speak for themselves. Please do not let these men speak for all Albertans.

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Brown’s battling beginnings.

July 25, 2017 by Peter Lowry

It is getting so bad that even PostMedia writers are wondering when Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown is going to show some maturity. They are starting to question Brown’s ability to run a political party. He is certainly not getting the nomination process right.

Many want to write it off to the vulnerability of the Wynne Liberals. The only problem is that Brown has no leadership skills and he sends the wrong signals to the party. He is the guy who stole the party leadership through signing up thousands of new immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent. Nobody thought to ask if all those people had paid their own memberships.

And so why should people who want to run as Conservative candidates want to play fair? Conservative Party nomination meetings all over Ontario are turning into fiascos. There have been claims of ballot box stuffing, illegal memberships, party officials’ interference, incompetent meeting management and candidates who might or not be the type of Tory they say they are.

It is such a mess, we are starting to wonder what is going on in Barrie, a town which Brown has always pretended to run. We have it on good authority that Brown will be the candidate in the electoral district of Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte. The last federal election in this riding had the Conservative winning by 86 votes. They lost the city but won the rural vote. There are lots of us who are laying in wait for Brown. We will roast him.

Brown is so arrogant that he is running his former executive assistant in the new companion riding of Barrie—Innisfil. Shawn Bubel who worked for Brown over the years is running for the nomination in that riding that includes the south half of Barrie. He has the same weakness as Brown as a candidate in that he lacks the life and business experience that makes for a good politician. People who have run businesses, met a payroll, worked daily with people and shown real leadership have a far better understanding of peoples’ needs than people like Brown and Bubel who have devoted themselves to political manipulation and using people.

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Change the future; Not the past.

July 23, 2017 by Peter Lowry

It seems to be the rage these days to want to tear down icons of the past. Why are we wasting so much time, rhetoric and effort in this pursuit? What can it gain us if we do not look to our future?

There is a framed front page of the Toronto Globe from 1893 hanging over my computer as I write. It features a story about a distant relative, Sir Oliver Mowat, then Premier of Ontario. My old friend Bob Nixon, when he was Leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, once referred to old Ollie in a speech as “that myopic little man.” In his day, Sir Oliver worked very hard for Ontario. Why criticize him just because times have changed?

Similarly, I have a picture of Sir. John A. Macdonald prominent on another wall. Sure, Sir John was a drunk and a racist, he was also a damn effective politician in his day and Canada is here to prove it.

But the current contretemps about historic figures Egerton Ryerson in Toronto and Edward Cornwallis in Halifax are ridiculous. As something of a student of Canadian history, I will cheerfully admit that neither of the gentlemen live up to our standards in the 21^st century.

When Cornwallis was sent by the British to establish a colony at what is now Halifax, Nova Scotia in the mid-18^th century, a standard means of dealing with the local aboriginals was a bounty for scalps. Despite his efforts to make peace with the local bands, he was not knowledgeable enough to deal with the right ones. It was not until he found for himself that the trade in scalps was counterproductive that he again sued for peace with the local Mi’kmaq. Cornwallis was only in Halifax for three years and he can hardly be blamed for everything that went wrong.

And then you have fusty old Egerton Ryerson in Toronto. Yes, he did his best to tell the federal government in the late 1800s what to teach the youngsters in the residential schools but he was neither responsible for the people doing the teaching nor the overall management of the schools.

Ryerson might have been a hide-bound Methodist but he made a major contribution in launching one of the finest public education systems in the world here in Ontario. We should worry more about its future than its past.

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Is there any hope for Horwath?

July 17, 2017 by Peter Lowry

Every once in a while, we are reminded that there are three parties at play for the right to hold the lease on the Pink Palace looking down University Avenue from Queen’s Park. We know lots about the Liberals that currently hold the lease. We know more than we want to know about the Conservatives and their corrupt leadership. What has us stumped is the lack of direction of Ontario’s New Democratic Party.

It is easy to blame NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. After eight years of her desultory leadership, you really wonder about the death wish of her and her party. If she ever had a good idea, the Liberals have stolen it. And she spends most of her time trying to explain why the Liberals are not going far enough or fast enough. Even when she is right, she does not have the political smarts to take advantage of being right.

Earlier this year, Horwath received a letter signed by 34-longtime party supporters in the Toronto area questioning her leadership. Frankly, they could have asked ‘What leadership?’ The very fact that one of those signatures was that of long-time NDP supporter Michele Landsberg, wife of former party leader Stephen Lewis, was serious enough.

You would think that Horwath would take some of this criticism to heart. She seems to have no understanding of the art of leadership. She almost seems to be apologizing for her concerns. Her policies appear to be borrowed from the right wing rather than developed on the left. She seems to lack any understanding at all for social democratic politics and where those politics could take us.

Given the chance to reprise her almost absent-minded campaign of 2014, Horwath will find herself well behind the political sentiment of the province. People are uneasy about the stability of the recently improved economy. The number of jobs might be growing but how many are part-time, lacking benefits and insecure? They see the political situation in the United States as dangling us over a precipice. They are worried about the chances of bringing the continued turmoil of the Middle East to North America.

What all Ontario parties lack is leadership. There is no trust for any of the three leaders or their parties. Leadership polls at this stage are meaningless. The election is scheduled for next June and somebody has to get serious.

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It’s always controversy for PC leader Brown.

July 16, 2017 by Peter Lowry

The leader of Ontario Conservatives has too many balls in the air. Here he is trying to run the strategy, organize the electoral districts, pick the candidates and run the nomination meetings. The only jobs he has forgotten is to show leadership and to help the party choose policies. Since the party seems to have no policies, that last part is easy.

Without policy direction, the party has become a magnet for unscrupulous political candidates with their own agendas. They are looking at the polls that currently show the Ontario Conservatives with the most support from Ontario voters. They are betting on an easy win.

It is also easy to steal nominations. In a party with an unscrupulous leader who stole his position as leader, who cares about the dirty tricks in individual ridings? It is getting so bad that Brown has charged PriceWaterhouseCoopers with the task of keeping things on the up and up. They seem to have gone downhill instead. This might be a task that is beyond the expertise of the accounting firm.

One of the major problems is that it is often Conservative Party officials who are accused of manipulating nomination meetings in favour of one candidate or another. In a Scarborough electoral district, an ethnic Tamil candidate—who was not even a party member until the month before—showed up with large numbers of recent Tamil newcomers and party officials accepted many questionable party memberships.

The same thing happened in reverse in a Hamilton area riding where the Sikh-Canadian candidate has charged that he was defeated by party officials manipulating the election process and maybe doing some ballot box stuffing.

And if you think this is just smoke, you need to check Conservative Party meetings around Ontario. Nomination meetings in Ottawa, Newmarket, Grimsby, Toronto, Hamilton are all being challenged because people are disrespecting the rules.

What the Conservatives should do is forget the accounting firm and hire some Liberal and New Democrat party members to run their meetings. They might at least know a bit about rigging a nomination meeting.

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