Category: Provincial Politics

“Here’s Another Nice Mess.”

by Peter Lowry

You hardly expect the conservatives at Queen’s Park in Toronto to go after their own government but premier Doug Ford will be hard pressed on this goof. It is right there in the playbook for a Laurel and Hardy short film out of the 1930s. Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk laid the indictment out in a 93-page booklet and she has almost defied the provincial police to ignore the substance of her report.

What is missing in Lysyk’s indictment is the direct route of the malfeasance to the premier’s office. It looks like Doug Ford is getting the credit from his developer friends but it is some guy named Ryan Amato who might do the time. It seems that Amato is chief of staff for the housing minister. It is quite a story he is reported to have told Lysyk about going around collecting the material from the developers as to what part of the Greenbelt they wanted for development. I’ve seen that twist in politics too many times in the past. When doing something that you know is wrong, you line up the fall guy in advance.

But what puzzles me is that these developers knew what they were doing. They knew the politicians were lying to the public. There would never be geared-to-income homes built in the Greenbelt. Yet, I know some of these development people and I know that some of them even have a conscience.

What is starting to niggle at me is the question of what is going to happen to Ontario’s housing needs if this outrageous scheme gets the challenges it deserves. Is anything going to get built?

There is certainly no way we should worry about the billions in the Greenbelt that have been speculated on. First of all, this is obviously not serviced land. Somebody has to be at the local municipal engineer’s elbow today directing attention to the needs of providing roads, sewers, electricity, water, cable or fiber optics for some of these proposed homes. Do you want to bet on how long it takes for today’s farmland to be ready for some lucky families to be moving in?

Oh yah, I have heard about the time limits on getting there but I am also well aware that extensions can be arranged for friends of Mr. Ford. And there will certainly be lots of funding available for re-electing the Ford conservatives.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry             

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Filling the Field.

by Peter Lowry

In yesterday’s discussion of the Ontario provincial liberal leadership race, there was no dismissal of the part being played by the other three candidates. In any race of this nature, the political mind automatically sorts the candidates into their pole positions. While much of the news media attention is devoted to the obvious front runners with the higher profiles, you ignore the also-rans at your peril.

If they can raise the entry fees, these candidates can buy into higher party positioning and future cabinet roles. You would not bet your kid’s college funds on the chances but with to-day’s fund-raising figures, a hundred thousand is not that difficult.

And I think all three are worth it. Yasir Naqvi has already proved his loyalty and strengths for the party and I see him a worthy caretaker, but not a leader. He was an adequate Ontario party president.

But whomever in the Ontario party followed the stupid federal decision to eliminate annual membership fees was not doing anyone other than Justin Trudeau a favour.

(As an aside here, I have no proof of my membership in the party other than the hundreds of fund-raising e-mails I have received in the past several years.)

I had been wondering what moved Ted Hsu, MPP for Kingston and the Islands. It was premature for him to jump into this race before he had more of a track record with the party, though I welcome his confidence to step forward. As the race moves on over the fall, I am going to pay attention to this candidate’s long-term vision for the party. It could be very interesting.

The final candidate is Don Valley West MPP Adil Shamji. It is probably a good thing that we are getting more doctors involved in politics these days. After the pandemic, we need to have more expertise at hand in making the decisions about the long-term impacts of changes in medical services. And besides, we always have enough lawyers in politics but my GP and I are both convinced that you get the most experience in politics in the cut and thrust of doings at the Ontario Medical Association.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Picking a Liberal Winner.

by Peter Lowry

Sorry, there will be no Morning Line from me on the current liberal leadership contest in Ontario. The opinion piece in the Toronto Star by Bob Hepburn last week tended to sum up the situation. The timing of this race is awkward and over extended. And it will not end well with a ranked ballot.

If the liberals had timed the announcement party for some time in September with a single winner-take-all ballot, or even a run-off vote for the top two, in the event nobody had more than 50 per cent of the vote, it would be a happier situation.

But that is water under the bridge. Anyone who has studied ranked ballots knows that the method can result in surprise conclusions, that make few happy.  The conservatives had to throw one of their contestants under the bus to break the pattern in their last leadership.

This will be the first really honest liberal leadership in Ontario in 50 years, and I guess I should be satisfied with that. And nobody has an ethnic group ready to be signed up en masse, to tilt the scales.

Since the conclusion that both Bob Hepburn and I have come to is that the real race is between Bonnie Crombie and Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, I would like to see Nate in the driver’s seat to remove Doug Ford from Ontario politics.

Mind you, I still like Bonnie Crombie. She has a lot going for her. If my friend Hazel McCallion liked her, she must be a smart person. The only thing that stopped me was that remark about Kathleen Wynne being too left wing. And I hardly think she was kidding. There are no ‘ifs ands or buts’; Ontario needs a progressive to lead and rebuild our medical capabilities, build homes that people can afford and stand up to those who would profit outrageously from inflation.

I just want to make sure that Nate’s team has the right music to march to in taking over Queen’s Park. I want to help him knit his platform into a single idea. I want to see him with a team of people with big hearts taking over on behalf of every man, woman and child in Ontario. Its their province.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Mixed Complaints.

by Peter Lowry

This is something I complained about a year ago. These people who think they are doing something good by saying they are protecting Lake Simcoe and they want to stop the Bradford Bypass and block Highway 413 are a bunch of amateurs running in circles. Judging by their ill-thoughtout news release in Barrie Today recently, I truly wish they had professional help. Their movement desperately needs focus. 

And Barrie Today is hardly helping them by running the group’s news release without professional editing. How many of the readers of Barrie Today would immediately know that construction just north of Bradford on Yonge Street is probably one of the bridges for the Bradford Bypass? If a person paid attention to all the bridge work and road widening related to Highway 400 over the last ten years, they would know that is all related to the growing traffic.

It might frustrate some NIMBY’s (Not In My Back Yard) that they cannot prevent something for the common good. Highways 400 and 404 in Ontario has been developed over the past 70 years to improve access to Ontario’s summer and winter playgrounds in the lakes-regions of Central Ontario. The cottagers, tourists and skiers have created an economic bonanza for Ontario. The Bradford Bypass is critical to splitting the streams of traffic, both commercial and tourist and Ontario residents. Those roads should not only be linked through the Town of Newmarket.      

If you want to complain about the very idea of the proposed Highway 413, I am with you 100 per cent. This plan was discarded by the last liberal government of Ontario for very good reason. The highway was not needed. The ministry of transportation is always busy looking at possible solutions to traffic needs. In Ontario and in most sensible jurisdictions, we do not build highways to satisfy the greed of our developer friends. Most of these builders are upstanding citizens and would not dream of getting insider information of where highways are going to be built.

Judging by the amount of time it takes to plan, design, get approvals and funds for a major highway project, combined with the mysteries of municipal approvals, you could be sure that if you were a young person when you got the inside information, you would be a very old person before profiting.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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No Rest for the Wicked.

by Peter Lowry

It hardly seems like Ontario premier Doug Ford’s summer is going as planned. The conservative populist is neither conserving much of what he rules over nor has he improved his popularity with Ontario citizens. And it just might be driving him to a point of showing signs of paranoia.

And that would be the last thing we need, a premier who becomes convinced that people are out to do him in. We are going to have to come at this problem with care.

There seems to be no question that he does not trust others. Why just the other week, he accused his attorney general, Mr. Downey of re-instituting the King’d Counsel title for use by Downey himself, and other deserving conservative lawyers, without telling his boss. You get the feeling that Ford is regretting his failure to stay in university and make something of himself. Instead, he sold labels for his daddy’s firm.

I am a layman when it comes to psychiatry but I have seen someone with paranoid symptoms close up. These are people who can be very defensive and easily offended. You sometimes have to walk on tip-toes around them.

But what I cannot fathom is this defensiveness for some of Doug Fords plans for Ontario. Ford certainly does not know how to respond to a response such as “that is a really dumb idea.” And he is getting it too often these days.

And he is always getting even with the people he thinks have disrespected him. One of the first things he did when moving into the premier’s office at Queen’s Park was order the city of Toronto to cut their number of planned members of council in half—even though the campaign had started. It appeared to be a pay-back for the treatment he received when at Toronto city hall. He made the job of the elected councilors almost impossible to carry out effectively.

When he decided to promote the proposed highway 413 that the liberals had rejected because it was not needed and ran through some of the better farming country and wet lands of Ontario. If you ever want to see a fat guy dig in his heels, tell Doug it is a highway to nowhere and not needed.

The spa he has arranged for at our Ontario Place islands at the Exhibition Grounds is a disgrace and a very bad use of what is supposed to be a park and why he would want to put a half-sized science centre with it is beyond my understanding. Maybe this would be a good time to upgrade the mental health services at Queen’s Park.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Playing the Race Card.

by Peter Lowry

You go after this subject with some trepidation. I have always been proud of our multi-racial Canada. I abhor racists and their writings. I have also been paying close attention to this current leadership of the Ontario liberals. I admired Yasir Naqvi when he was attorney general of Ontario. I also like Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s progressiveness as an MP and Bonnie Crombie’s outspokenness as mayor of Mississauga. I have yet to meet the other two contestants and therefore have not commented very often on the ongoing race.

Whether Yasir Naqvi wrote the op-ed in the Toronto Star or not is not relevant, he signed it. It was saying some unnecessary things. As a child and as a young man in Toronto after the Second World War, I listened to many of the frustrations of my friends had in dealing with the old-country complaints of parents who raised their children here. It sounds like Yasir’s parents were very supportive. There were parents who regretted their decision to come to Canada. I admired those young people who could keep peace with their parents while enjoying the greater freedoms of our society.

In my view, we are all Canadians. Instead of promoting religious, ethnic or racial barriers, we are one.

I hardly care when your ancestors came to this bounteous land. They could have come 15,000 years ago, a century ago or last week. I wish we could make it easier for people to make the adjustments necessary. I remember an artist acquaintance who emigrated to this country from Austria and told me that to make money, he had to dig ditches. Oddly enough, he wasn’t complaining. He was proud that he could do it. He soon returned to his art and was very successful.

But I do have some prejudices. I abhor religious schools. They work to divide peoples and I object to that. I always believed in the old adage: You go to your church and I will go to mine but we can walk to them together.

I think that the ‘black-lives-matter’ group in Canada hurts our black citizens. I am appalled at those who want to tear down old statues or rename streets because they think it might make up for errors in the past. I would never want to elect a Catholic or Anglican bishop, a Hassidic Jew, or an observant Sikh to any position where they might put their religion ahead of the needs of their electorate. They have too many conflicts to serve.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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From a Trickle, To a Torrent.

by Peter Lowry

Watch out Doug Ford, the liberals are going to get you. You pulled out all stops to win the two provincial by-elections last week. Local radio ads for your government must have run heavy in Toronto and Ottawa. You did personal canvassing with the media in tow. It was a hell of a time to campaign in that heat.

But you might as well have stayed in Muskoka. The liberals took both ridings. And what else can you expect? People are getting to know you. They are getting to know you are a phony. You don’t care about the people in Ontario. You only care about Doug Ford. Do you dare call another by-election? Unless you change the numbers needed to be recognized as a party again, the liberals will gain some more strength soon. You are not going to get through the next three years unscathed.

And, you, premier Ford, are going to learn that premiers have to answer to the people. As an old con artist (P.T. Barnum, maybe) was accused of saying, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Every day, more people in Ontario are realizing that you disrespect them by lying to them. They are realizing that you are just a huckster, selling them out. You lied about protecting the Greenbelt. You bluffed your way into the premier’s office, promising to do a good job for us. Do you remember the foolishness of “a buck a beer”? You are letting us down. You are stupidly denying the problems of global warming. You are debasing Medicare to help your friends in making money. You are not interested in the problems of the sick. You see them as an opportunity for someone to make money.

And, you obviously have no interest in higher education. You turned a private schooled person loose as education minister. You were out there making promises to throw money at fixing things but somehow much of the money was never spent.

Recently, your attorney general tried to sneak in a new generation of conservative ‘King’s Counsels.’ This was stopped 37 years ago by a premier who said it was just a cheap sop for lawyers. And you bald-faced told the media you did not know about it. Are you telling us that it was never on a cabinet agenda? Liar, liar, pants on fire!

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Rape of the Greenbelt Begins.

by Peter Lowry

It seems redundant to tell you what Ontario premier Doug Ford’s word is worth: nothing. The Ontario Greenbelt is now the happy hunting grounds of his close friends, the developers who befriended him when he was spending some disappointing times at Toronto city hall with his late brother Rob.

And it seems to be no coincidence that one family in the development business and their employees have donated almost $300,000 to the conservative party in Ontario in recent years. I would not like to say that that the money came from the company—because that would be illegal.

But if it oinks like a pig, and smells like a pig, and has four little trotters like a pig, it just might be a pig.

It makes sense though to congratulate the De Gasperis family that seems to have a major interest in TACC Developments that has ended up with what looks like more than 400 acres of the former Greenbelt lands to develop. That would make TACC a very large—and very profitable—development company indeed.

Many of their planned homes are to be built on what is known as the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Reserve, which is considered to be among the most arable land in Ontario. This is the reason it was designated as reserved for farming within the Greenbelt. TACC and their good friend Doug Ford do not seem to understand that the people who live in their homes have to eat too.

What is amusing about this particular parcel of Greenbelt is the belief of the some of the staff of Ontario’s minister of municipal affaires and housing that some ten per cent of the housing will be designated “affordable.” What ‘affordable’ means seems open for debate.

All we know is that seems to be in a part of Pickering well north of any viable public transportation that might get the transit riders to Toronto where the jobs are. It is also in Toronto that the availability of affordable housing seems in very short supply.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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“We Have Met the Enemy”

by Peter Lowry

Recently the wicked witch of the west told us that her Land of Oz was beset with arsonists who were razing millions of hectares of her beautiful province. She told us that she is going to hire investigators to find these evil doers. If she was older, she might have remembered the sage wisdom of Walt Kelly’s indomitable opossum, Pogo. He told us many years ago that “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

What Alberta premier Danielle Smith does not seem to understand is that those lovely people who pour millions of dollars into the Alberta treasury—for her to spend so frivolously—are the incendiaries. With every barrel of ersatz oil garnered from the oil sands, they push Mother Nature into pushing back with climate change.

What I fail to understand is the willingness of Alberta’s voters to blame all the ill effects of climate change on those damn liberals. Here Kenney and company were draining Alberta hospitals of competent staff and they were still only electing conservative governments. I could have told them that they would end up hating the man for his hypocrisy, and cheap conservative patter. Yet they cheered when he united the right against the NDP.

And I am not saying that all the conservative premiers of Alberta were wrong. Some wiser premiers even warned against the practice of cutting taxes and using the oil revenues to buy votes.

But don’t try to tell Danielle Smith that. That woman is having a ball. She is drunk with her supposed power in that office and she belittles Albertans in the process.

An Alberta writer recently wrote that there would be no way that Alberta could shut down the tar sands operations overnight. And no thinking Canadian in the east would expect that to happen.

But some sensible forward planning is necessary. What is their future in Alberta when the tar sands are stripped of their benevolence? What happens when there is no more production to send down to the ships that will take bitumen to foreign ports?

Nobody expects the premier to suddenly act more intelligent or more gracious. That would be asking too much of her.

(With thanks to L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz books, and Walt Kelly, the cartoonist who showed us the wisdom of Pogo, for helping me mix my metaphors.)

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Does Sir Douglas Do It?

by Peter Lowry

It all started with the conservative Ontario attorney general. He and some of his fellow conservative lawyers in Ontario wanted to be able to use the ‘King’s Counsel’ designation.  It could help fool the public into thinking they were the more important lawyers in the province. They would be allowed to wear silk robes in court. This honorary title had been stopped by the liberal government back in 1985 because it had been abused as cheap political patronage for too long. It cost nothing for the conservatives to reinstitute it and suddenly there were 90 lawyers in Ontario showing off their new ‘KC’ title.

But this left premier Doug Ford out in the cold. He complained to the news media that he had not even been consulted about the ‘KC’ for lawyers. And attorney general Doug Downey KC said that was true.  There was little that Downey could do for a premier who was not a graduand of any college or university.

But when checking the statue of Sir Oliver Mowat outside the Queen’s Park legislature, the premier got some ideas. The Nickle Resolution passed by the federal government in 1917 was to specifically ask the United Kingdom to stop bestowing titles on Canadian citizens.

There were exceptions, of course. There always are. And nobody has ever said that provinces cannot have a system of honours for people of exemplary character and of service to their province.

While, this writer does not like to promote gossip, the rumour out of Queen’s Park is that the province might expand its provincial honours system to include the bestowing of provincial knighthoods. No doubt the editors of a certain American-owned Postmedia chain are champing at the bit to release the story of this new honours system for Ontario.

There seems to be few objections to the conferring of provincial knighthoods for men but the debate continues with the cabinet members who object to women being called “Dames.” We would not be surprised if the objectors where being led by Caroline Mulroney KC. Mind you, we are not sure if this is not because she already has her ‘KC’ title. She got it when she had only been an Ontario lawyer for three days.

But, no doubt, Doug Ford already has the premier’s office staff used to calling him ‘Sir.’

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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