Category: Provincial Politics

You sometimes wonder about politicians who get in trouble and keep going back to the guru’s who helped get them into trouble in the first place. It is like having a train wreck and continuing to send locomotives down that same track, hoping one of the locomotives will make it. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has even gone back to the same locomotive driver. You would think that her friend Ed Clark, the former banker, had already proved that he is no train driver.

Look what Clark did for the Ontario Liberal’s before: His solution to providing capital funds was to tell them to sell off the majority of Hydro One, Ontario’s electricity distribution system. Hydro One had been created by Premier Mike Harris prior to his intent to sell it off—but wiser heads prevailed at the time. Clark’s argument was that privatising would sharpen up Hydro One’s efficiencies and improve profits for the shareholders. Instead it has given Ontario electricity users an additional target for their anger.

Clark might have let his bias against crown corporations cloud his thinking. It can be a very false assumption to think all crown corporations are less well run than their private sector counterparts.

But then Clark also came up with the scheme to use a form of water torture to introduce beer, wine and cider into Ontario grocery stores—a few at a time. This must have been the stupidest, most anal plan anyone could come up with. It seemed to be designed to annoy, confuse and frustrate the consumer who might want to pick up a six-pack while shopping or maybe include a decent bottle of wine to go with dinner. It is not working and the grocery stores involved have looked stupider than the politicians.

What is really annoying about this is the elitist attitude that it reflects. The politicians and their chosen consultants are patronizing Ontario consumers while looking after their corporate friends at George Weston Ltd.

Maybe Ed Clark has never been in a corner convenience store—maybe his chauffeur goes in for him? He probably does not understand why people would like to walk to the corner convenience store for a six-pack.

And maybe that is what is wrong in this province. We need politicians who can understand why a citizen might enjoy walking to the corner convenience store for a six-pack.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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

It is only when you note the time and money devoted to preserving the French language in different parts of the world, that you start to wonder. Is the English language so pervasive that nobody worries about it? Only the dictionary publishers seem to have a vested interest so they can produce new editions periodically.

But why do we get the feeling that the English language is going downhill in a bucket and nobody cares? If you wander around the United States for too long, you will be convinced that the Americans are separating it into about six distinct languages, with hundreds of regional dialects thrown in. While in Canada, the late Don Harron, turned listening to rural Ontario accents into a comedic career as the raconteur and writer character of Charlie Farquarson.

Getting on topic here is tough. What started this rant was our complaint last week about Canada’s parliament not knowing the difference between a phobia and bigotry. The difference is simple: a phobia needs help and bigotry needs a spanking. A phobia is a morbid fear while bigotry is usually just based on ignorance.

It was very difficult to watch our federal politicians arguing over the wording of a simple motion (having no more authority than a ‘Like to Have’) rather than dealing with the real problem. And by the way folks, there is little you can do about bigots until what they are communicating passes from freedom of speech into a hate crime.

But there was no argument in the Ontario Legislature. The Liberals there put the same motion as their federal counterparts before that house and the two opposition parties got immediately in line to pass it. This was almost a welcome relief after the rancorous debates earlier in the Legislature over electricity distributors’ cut-offs and pricing. All we usually hear from Queen’s Park is about electricity costs and that nobody seems to have a clue about what to do about it.

At least with this motion, the New Democrats jumped to agree to the Islamophobia motion as they had nothing else to do. Patrick Brown of the Ontario Conservatives supported the motion with his usual hypocrisy. When it costs nothing to look good, he is in favour of it. He is unlikely to know whether the wording is correct.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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

Conservative Leader Patrick Brown will do anything to get himself elected premier in the next Ontario election. Making blatant use of Ontario’s doctors is just another sleazy tactic for an unprincipled political manipulator. And he is appealing to their greed.

Truth and honesty be damned. Brown wants to use a radicalized Ontario Medical Association (OMA) as a surgical scalpel to emasculate the Ontario Liberals. He has always used doctors in his political gamesmanship and now he has the entire profession locked in battle. They are playing his game.

It started last summer when, after three years of inaction, the Ontario government offered the OMA negotiators a settlement. Brown immediately announced that he would have offered arbitration. That was what his supporters among the doctors wanted. It was the easy route for politicians as they had to go through middleman negotiators anyway. And Brown knew it was an easy solution to load on the taxpayers. His organizers urged the doctors to reject the Liberal government’s offer. And they did.

That was when the archaic and unwieldy structure of the OMA started to come apart. It finally resulted in the six-member executive deciding to step down. While still serving on the Board, they have left the doctor’s organization without management control and direction until a new board is elected this month. This vote has the potential to radicalize the board and bring a more demanding (read greedier) executive into office.

This all fits the behind-the-scenes strategy of Patrick Brown and his close friend Walied Soliman who is the lawyer for a group of radicalized doctors. It is working. It is pitting medical specialties against other specialties as each fight to increase or maintain unrealistic fees for their services. The Ontario government has hardly helped in this as it has had to arbitrarily reduce fees for some specialties to reflect changes in technology.

This action by Ontario doctors is not only going to dig much deeper into the taxpayers’ pockets but it is going to end the farce of the OMA being anything other than a union. It has put doctor dissatisfaction with their payment ahead of the quality of service that Ontario patients have come to expect.

While your doctor bills the province for his or her fees, it is unfair to suggest that it is all income. The assumption is that even a family doctor with an average staff to pay and reasonable office costs is going to be in the $200,000 per year tax bracket. Those years of medical training and their cost are soon compensated.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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

There has been a reluctance here to comment on the current leadership race for the Alberta Conservatives. It is not as though the outcome does not seem obvious but our best insight into Alberta Conservatism died last year and she is irreplaceable. It has left a serious sinkhole in our understanding of the Alberta political landscape.

But we still dislike, distrust and detest all that front-runner leadership candidate Jason Kenney stands for. We actually have more respect for Brian Jean and his Wildrose Party. It is just hard to believe there are people further to the right than Kenney. How a fat and fortyish bachelor can sell his questionable sexuality to religious extremists is the wonder of it all?

Kenney survived in Ottawa over the years under the umbrella of Stephen Harper. He was hardly the more flamboyant of the Bobbsey Twins but he must have chosen Alberta for his political future for a reason. Anyone who believes that pumping bitumen out of the Alberta tar sands is good for the environment has got to be gullible as hell. Or is that just simple greed?

That is what Kenney really understands: human weaknesses. He must have exhausted every argument with Stephen Harper to get him to see the value to kissing up to newcomers to our country. This had too long been a strength of the Liberal Party. Liberals were welcoming; Conservatives were less so.

His best student during those Conservative years in Ottawa was the new leader of the Ontario Conservatives Patrick Brown. That putz had less of a challenge to win the Ontario leadership than Kenney is facing in Alberta.

But the sleazy tactics and sneaky tricks of the Kenney campaign are decimating the field of candidates. Here we are six weeks from the leadership decision and he is still forcing out challengers. His tactics are not only driving Conservatives out of the race but even to other parties.

Someone asked how to stop him? What they need to remember is that sincerity can counter sleaze. Truth can overcome fiction. Decency is more acceptable than deceit.

And what people need to better understand is that God or nature gave Alberta lots of oil, gas, coal and tar sands. Those highly polluting natural elements are there as a challenge. If you build your economy on them, you will eventually come to the curb on empty. If you build your economy on renewable resources, you will build a future.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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

There are few things funnier than a Toronto Star editorial that lambastes the Ontario government for all the wrong reasons. And nothing deflates the pomposity better than getting their facts wrong. We are looking at the Star editorial demanding an end to the proposed increases in community college presidents’ salaries. What would really help here would be if the Star could just contain its mock outrage.

First of all, the Star should check and it is quite possible that our community college presidents have had their salaries frozen since 2010. That would be seven years, not five. And what is pertinent is how their jobs have been changing throughout that period.

What also strikes us as we look at this situation is that not all community colleges are equal. The Toronto-centred interests of the Toronto Star are well understood but the Toronto-centred focus of the Ontario government is an absolute disgrace.

The critical lack of a university base in central Ontario, for example, has put a serious onus on Georgian College to work with multiple universities to bring degree courses to its wide-flung geography. Nobody would have believed you if you had said that was part of the job 20-years ago.

What we know today—and what Minister Deb Matthews knows—is that Ontario’s community colleges are terribly underfunded and not all can count on international students to fill the gap. Major adjustments have to be made in funding based on the need to look after our Ontario students. If the disparities continue, the province will have to pay some of the presidents three times the salary just to take the job.

In recruiting these people, they need to understand that a big part of the job today is revenue generation. You cannot do what needs to be done if you are not out beating the bushes for money. You have to negotiate every day with your communities, universities, industries and expanded international opportunities. And then you have to get back to the office to keep the home fires burning. People who can do that do not come cheap.

This is not a nine-to-five job and any college president who does not agree should be immediately fired. Nobody should be getting a free ride here—especially Minister Deb Matthews.

But all this being said, our college presidents are generally doing a great job. They deserve an increase of some sort after so many years of penny-pinching governments. Maybe they will get decent raises over the next few years but nobody is so dumb as to expect the figures the Toronto Star is talking about. We should wait until the boards act. We should leave our muskets over the mantel until we have something real to shoot at.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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

An associate professor at McGill wrote an interesting op-ed last week in the Toronto Star seeking to answer the four major myths about the Ontario-Quebec cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gasses. The only problem with Christopher Ragan’s column is that most of the myths he attempts to debunk are answered with arguments for a straight carbon tax.

The first myth and the easiest to debunk is that it will raise hydro rates. That is wrong because Ontario has phased out its coal-fired generation plants and has only a small percentage of gas-fired plants for back-up. Professor Ragan’s bias is showing though when he refers to the Ontario subsidies for its small percentage of renewable energy sources as “massive.”

The second myth and the most crucial is that business will want to move to jurisdictions without taxes on greenhouse gas emissions. Yet he tells us that his Ecofiscal Commission has studied this question and he finds that less than two per cent of the Ontario’s gross domestic product is at risk of this.

The third myth he mentions is that the provincial government can undermine its cap-and-trade system by the distribution of free passes for some of their carbon emissions. While this is not the case in a straight carbon tax, it illustrates the major weakness of cap-and-trade in that these “get-out-of-jail-free” passes can be handed out behind the scenes without public knowledge.

The fourth myth applies to both cap-and-trade and a carbon tax—that carbon pricing might not work. Ragan uses the old argument from Wealth of Nations guru Adam Smith that “a large collection of small responses to price movements is what makes our market economy work.”

Ragan insists that there is ample evidence from around the world that carbon pricing works. He says though that we should not expect results right away and it will likely only happen as carbon costs rise.

But Ragan leaves us with no clear understanding of where he stands on the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon taxes. We have a right to expect more from academics.

The Ontario-Quebec cap-and-trade system that they have linked with California is the least understood system. It is carried on between industry and politicians and the public is largely left out. Some vague taxes showing up at our gas station on January 1 was a bad idea and the governments involved have done little to clarify the situation.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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

Writing about the problems the Barrie Liberals face in the 2018 provincial election recently, we should have stated the obvious answer. It has been there for the past seven years.

The problem is that there will be two electoral districts covering Barrie for the 2018 provincial election. These are identical to the federal electoral districts and were gerrymandered by the federal Conservatives to ensure that at least a third of the voters would be rural (mainly Conservative) voters. The Conservatives won both federal electoral districts despite the Trudeau sweep in 2015.

In the 2014 provincial election (under the old boundaries) a Liberal won the Barrie electoral district. We have never met our MPP and we can only assume that, if she runs again, she will run in the Barrie—Innisfil electoral district. The new Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte electoral district has been claimed by Provincial Conservative Leader Patrick Brown.

And that will be our opportunity to remove Patrick Brown from Ontario politics. The man has never been anything but a politician and we see him as two-faced, hypocritical, dishonest and unsuited to lead any party. And if you have ever practiced keyboarding by the rhythmic typing of “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party,” now you can believe it.

The person so obviously able to defeat Patrick Brown in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte is Barrie’s current Mayor Jeff Lehman. Jeff is a Liberal who has held together a very Conservative council for the past seven years. He is an economist with an extensive understanding of electrical generation and distribution—one of the thorniest problems facing Ontario. He is one of the best natural political campaigners we have ever seen in action. (Disclosure Note: The writer ran Jeff Lehman’s ground game when he first ran for mayor in the 2010 municipal election.) Lehman is chair of the caucus of municipalities in Ontario with more than 100,000 population. He is not only the best choice for voters as their MPP but he would be an ideal successor as Liberal leader when Kathleen Wynne leaves office.

But we need to take one step at a time. Lehman needs to defeat Brown first. That is not going to happen overnight. We need to overcome the core of organization that has been put together by the Conservatives. Today there is time to plan. Tomorrow will be too late.

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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry

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