Provincial Politics – Page 85

The losers are lurking.

October 28, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It must be Halloween in the air. Losers from the last federal election are gathering. There will be a provincial election in 2018 and the Conservative losers from the last federal election are jockeying for nominations in provincial electoral districts.

The first of these Conservative nominations was for the upcoming bye-election in Niagara West-Glanbrook and former St. Catharines MP, as well as current provincial party president, Rick Dykstra lost to a young Brock University student running on a social conservative platform. While that electoral district might not be a Liberal stronghold, any campaign manager who cannot figure out how to defeat a home-schooled 19-year old social conservative should not be involved in politics.

In another age-related skirmish, defeated Conservative finance minister Joe Oliver, in the blue trunks and 76-years old, who lost in Eglinton-Lawrence last year, wants the Conservative nomination in York Centre where incumbent Liberal MPP Monte Kwinter, in the red trunks, is 85-years old. They should both do quite well in the riding’s retirement residences.

Another comer for Conservative party leader Patrick Brown is the famous former MP Paul Calandra. Many Canadians will remember his distress on crying in the House of Commons over his failed attempts to mislead the House when answering questions for his leader, Stephen Harper. He is from Markham but we are unsure where he might find a provincial electoral district suitable for his dramatic talents.

Even more interesting as a provincial possibility is the right-wing Bob Dechert from Mississauga. Dechert was the chap who, when serving as foreign affairs minister John Baird’s parliamentary secretary, was exchanging flirtatious e-mails with a lady who worked for the People’s Republic of China as a foreign correspondent (nobody admitted she was a spy). It was reported that it was the correspondent’s husband who broke into her e-mails and published them on the Internet to the considerable embarrassment of all concerned.

There are more hopefuls in the offing. One of the best bets is MP Tony Clement. He is a bit miffed with the federal scene since he found that nobody wanted to fund his run for the federal leadership. He has to be considering heading back to his halcyon days on the Mike Harris team at Queen’s Park. Not that working for Patrick Brown would be all that much fun but he is no heavy hitter in Ottawa.

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What goes around, comes around Mr. Brown.

October 25, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The social conservatives in the Niagara Peninsula had a surprise the other day for Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown. It was not the surprise he wanted. He expected his pal party president Rick Dykstra to easily win the nomination in the provincial electoral district of Niagara West-Glanbrook. Dykstra was defeated.

The local party’s selection of a 19-year old Brock University student will add some interest to an otherwise dull bye-election set for November 17 to replace former Tory leader Tim Hudak. Sam Oosterhoff, the surprise Conservative candidate, ran on a platform of being against Brown’s newly found resolve to support the Ontario sex education curriculum. It seems the young candidate believes in parents having the final word on sex education. Mind you, it is reported that he did not agree with the pro-life stance of some of his young supporters.

It ends up with the young candidate learning what it is like to be half pregnant. Since that is impossible, he—like Brown before him—needs to make a clear choice. If he wants the social conservative vote, he has to say “I believe.” That will cost him votes among the fiscally conservative. Winning the votes of both sides of the coin might be beyond his young experience.

Even Patrick Brown in his years in Ottawa never found that balance. On the only two free votes that pitted social conservatives against fiscal conservatives in Ottawa, Patrick Brown came down fully on the side of the anti-abortion, anti- rights social conservatives. These were not issues he ever brought to his electoral district in Barrie.

Brown’s advice to his young candidate should be that politics is nothing like the political science he is studying at Brock. Real politics is adversarial. It is hardly theoretical, nor is it philosophically based. It is cronyism and an old-boys’ network. It is a world of privilege and entitlement for the select few. And like in federal foreign affairs, it is all about business. The real decisions for Queen’s Park are made by lawyers and bankers working on Bay Street.

It was Bay Street that said sell off some of Hydro One. It was Bay Street that said let Loblaw sell some beer and wine. It was Bay Street that said let Woodbine Entertainment have a full casino and entertainment centre. The politicians at Queen’s Park are just a side show.

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Stepping up to the political plate.

October 18, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It brought back memories. Having spent New Years of 1980 up north in the winter wonderland of the Huntsville area, the family were barely in the door before the phone was ringing. There was an election on and we could hardly escape it. The first caller was our old friend David Smith. We had supported him since his first aldermanic bid in Toronto and he wanted to know if he could run federally in our electoral district

This all comes to mind as we see that Toronto Councillor Shelley Carroll is now making a bid for that seat provincially. It is the standard progression up the ladder from school trustee, to councillor, to provincial legislature or to Ottawa. Our friend David Smith served in Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet as well as briefly in John Turner’s. It was Prime Minister Jean Chrétien who put him in the senate. David had taken over the national campaign role as our friend Keith Davey succumbed to the vagueness of Alzheimer.

There was no doubt in the campaign of 2015 that the experience of Senator Smith was sorely missed. There were lurches and missteps in the Trudeau campaign that could have been prevented with more experienced hands at the helm. You can ignore some inexperience during an easily winnable campaign but the mistakes will be more serious in 2019.

We started out about the declaration of Councillor Shelley Carroll. She wants to run in our old provincial riding. It is like the declaration of North York Councillor Elinor Caplan for that riding in 1985. Party Leader David Peterson expected yours truly to run there and was less than pleased when we stepped aside. The family considerations that prevented us from running are as private today as they were then.

Carroll has been on Toronto Council for the past 13 years and has been at different times budget chief and representative to the Police Services Board. If still living in the electoral district, our first question to her would be for clarification of how she sees the responsibility of the Police Services Board in regard to the police actions during the 2010 G-20 Summit meeting in Toronto. If her intention in running for provincial office is to make the desperately needed changes in policing policy, she would certainly have our support.

That electoral district is made up of very stable neighbourhoods and has had both Conservative and Liberal representation over the years. Candidates have to know those neighbourhoods and communicate effectively. Winning there in the next provincial election will not be a Sunday walk in the park.

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Pardonez-moi M. Lisée.

October 14, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Paul Wells of the Toronto Star offers it as evidence that sometimes a journalist can make something of himself. Besides an ass, we assume.

Wells was writing about Jean-François Lisée who won the leadership of Quebec’s Parti Québécois last Friday. We all had a good laugh at the PQ last time when they chose millionaire Pierre-Karl Péladeau. We might also have a good laugh at this one. Lisée might have more political smarts than the scion of the Péladeau media empire but his fingerprints are all over the former PQ leader Pauline Marois’ controversial Quebec Charter of values.

The bigotry and xenophobia of the charter sent the last election in Quebec skittering off the rails for the PQ. The arguments about the charter split the PQ and their opponents. The province ended up with a majority Liberal government under Philippe Couillard.

Mind you, we should wonder about Lisée’s political smarts as he came into politics from an academic and journalism background to advise then leader Jacques Parizeau prior to that PQ government launching the 1995 Quebec referendum. He continued in an advisory capacity with Parizeau’s replacement Lucien Bouchard. He left the Bouchard government in 1999 because Bouchard was not interested in putting another referendum before Quebec voters.

Paul Wells tells us that Lisée is formidable. He also tells us that he thinks separatist referendums are fun. Mind you, he equates it to “playing chicken in traffic” type fun.

But Well’s admiration for his friend Lisée could be very misleading to the readers of Canada’s largest circulation English-language daily newspaper. No doubt we would all prefer to wait for the more expert analysis of national affairs writer Chantal Hébert. Despite being born and educated in Ontario, Chantal has been weighing Quebec politics for most of her adult life. Her opinion is respected.

Lisée has only been in the Quebec National Assembly since 2012. He survived the Liberal sweep in 2014 that cost Marois her seat. He claimed in the heated race to replace Péladeau that he would not push for another referendum until his second term as premier.

But in that same race for the leadership, he defended the Quebec Charter of Values and the Quebeçois jingoism that it represents.

Frankly, in our opinion, English-speaking Canadians have little reason to trust M. Lisée nor should they.

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When the crisis is the candidate.

October 12, 2016 by Peter Lowry

There was an interesting op-ed in the Toronto Star a while ago by a former New Democrat strategist claiming that political crises cannot be managed. He boiled it all down to the simple statement that you have to bury a crisis before it buries you. He was getting some reluctant nods to his thesis until he complimented Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown on his management of the recent sex-education reversals in the Scarborough-Rouge River by-election.

It seems ludicrous to congratulate the source of the problem for solving the problem. If there is a crisis management problem in the Conservative leader’s office it is the Conservative leader. Patrick Brown created the problem on the sex-education file and always has been the problem.

Those of us who know Brown and have watched him weasel around problems of his own creation over the years know him for what he is. He can be a dishonest and duplicitous politician. He tells you what he thinks you want to hear. He looks like a small town nerd and he is one. He is an embarrassment to the voters in Barrie and will likely prove to be more of an embarrassment to the Ontario Conservatives than his predecessor Tim Hudak.

Why the Ontario Conservatives allowed him to steal the leadership from a much more capable candidate, MPP Christine Elliott, is the question? It is easy enough to prove that many of his sub-continent Conservative party sign-ups did not bother to pay their own memberships. If you can buy a political party for just a few hundred thousand, why not? (And why do you think the federal Conservatives recently raised their membership fee to $25?)

But giving the Trudeau team a ‘B’ for its crisis management of the recent moving expenses kerfuffle is missing the entire point. Trudeau failed to support two of his key people. He told them to make restitution that looked like an admission of guilt. That is not crisis management. It is crisis capitulation. It could come back and bite him hard any time.

You have to agree with the NDP writer though that the best crisis management is still prevention. The real responsibility of the people looking after this is not to manage crises but to train managers to watch for signs of trouble. They are an organization’s first line of defence.

Over many years in public relations, you can get many desperation calls from organizations that are in trouble. The temptation is great but you know that they will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis until the attitudes of the people responsible are changed.

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Protecting public assets.

September 28, 2016 by Peter Lowry

What government, municipal, provincial or federal, has not looked longingly to selling off public companies as a fast way to some ready cash? The government can promise to do nothing but good with the money. The only problem is that once the asset is gone, there is no more revenue from it beyond its corporate taxes.

But there are exceptions. There are assets that can be sold off and improve their revenues to the government. It was hoped that the lotteries component of Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) could be one of these assets. The objective of dealing through a service provider, is that the government would gain from the company’s creativity, experience and knowledge of the business. The government would still get most of the revenues generated but would share a reasonable operating profit with the purchaser.

It is obvious that none of the three major companies bidding on the OLG operation was offering enough money to the government to make the deal worthwhile. The government lottery operations might not be as creative and aggressive as private enterprise but the government apparently still likes the return it is getting.

This would not necessarily be the case if the Ontario government sold off the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). It is obvious to any business analyst that the parts of the LCBO are worth far more than the whole. Private sector wine merchants are long overdue in Ontario and the government gets the licensing revenue as well as the alcohol taxes. Selling six packs of beer is a bludgeon to upgrade and improve Ontario convenience stores.

And if the LCBO is really the largest importer of wines in North America, that business could be worth more than all the stores combined. All it has to do is look outward beyond the province, instead of inward. It could become a giant in the business.

And there is a huge recycling business in the province that can be separated and stop interfering with how customers buy their beer.

But instead a smart sell-off the Ontario government wants to sell off some of Hydro One that is already infuriating customers across Ontario because of the electrical distribution operator’s sloppy billing practices. Premier Wynne hardly needs more of Ontario’s rural electricity users hating her.

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How far Bill Davis’ party has fallen.

September 23, 2016 by Peter Lowry

We can admit it now but could not when he was Premier of Ontario, Bill Davis is a decent guy. As much as he likes to pose as the bastion of the right, Bill has always liked people and is a caring, compassionate person. If he was much younger and leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives today, Kathleen Wynne and her neo-Liberals could pack their bags.

But Bill Davis’ party has fallen on hard times. The triumvirate of leaders, Harris, Hudak and now Brown have not helped. John Tory, who as a young man attended Bill’s breakfasts at the old Park Plaza Hotel, might have been an exception during his brief stint as Conservative Leader but his timing against Premier ‘Dad’ Dalton McGuinty was bad. And he blew it by going against the hard core right of his own party by offering more support for parochial schools.

The present leader Patrick Brown is causing further splits in the party by denying his roots as a religious right conservative. He has managed to get all factions of the Conservative Party angry with him for his constant flip-flops. He can hardly deny his vote against women’s rights and against same -sex marriage when he was a Member of Parliament. Attending Toronto’s Pride Parade this year only showed what a hypocrite he can be.

Current public opinion polls are useless as no Ontario voters outside of Barrie really know anything about Patrick Brown. And those voters do not know much. Bill Davis must be appalled at the thought of a person such as Brown sitting in his old office at Queen’s Park.

But the more serious problem is that Premier Wynne and her caucus are not doing the job. They lack direction, attention, discretion, determination and intention. They only use half measures when bold steps are needed. They use band aids instead of solutions. They have no discernable leadership or philosophy.

It hardly adds up to anything better than Patrick Brown running Bill Davis’ old party or the New Democrats under the hapless Andrea Horwath.

But as much as Ontario voters might think The Wynne Liberals are less than productive, they have absolutely no idea how bad Brown would be.

When Bill Davis was premier, there was a certain trust that he earned. That would not be what Ontario would get with Brown. Brown is a manipulator with the personality of a nerd. Women tend to lose interest in him very quickly. Men just do not like him. He really does not belong in the same party as former Premier Bill Davis.

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No guts, no glory, no re-election.

September 21, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Ontario’s Liberals have to stop whistling past the graveyard. That American idiom means that they are ignoring sure destruction. And nothing said it better than the recent rebooting of the Legislature with a joke of a throne speech read by the Lieutenant Governor.

It was no throne speech. It was a stop-gap to oblivion. It put another band aid on electricity rates and solved nothing. The problem quite frankly is that there is no one in the Legislature capable of running this province. There are no leaders. There is no direction.

Does anyone have any idea what Ms. Wynne’s political stance might be? We already know that the Conservative leader will go whatever way he can find some votes. And that silly New Democrat leader is nothing but a nebbish. Welcome to a province where the only option for the voter is to vote for ‘None of the above.’

The only policies we have seen Premier Wynne espouse are the ones she steals from other parties. She takes on the pension problems brought forward by the NDP and then steals their pledge to take the tax off electricity charges. Only—typical of her—she only goes part way. She gets lucky and dumps the pension problem to the Trudeau Liberals and then just gives a tax rebate on run-away electricity charges.

There is nothing any other party can think of that the Premier cannot find a way to handle conservatively. We should not forget the former PC Leader Timmy Hudak took the lead in suggesting liberalizing beer sales until somebody convinced him to turn off that tap.

But what Wynne is doing is ludicrous. She is actually allowing less than ten per cent of the large grocery stores to sell warm six-packs of beer. Not in this town though. The only place to buy beer downtown in this writer’s city of more than 135,000 is the province’s most disgusting beer store.

And the other day, Kathleen Wynne announced her ‘Liberal’ stalwarts to run the 2018 Liberal election effort. If these are the same Pat Sorbara and Vince Borg who wandered the halls at Queen’s Park some 30 years ago, we will not get our hopes up.

One of these days Ontario might finally have a government of grown-ups that will realize that selling off how you distribute electricity is a no-no and selling off the Liquor Control Board stores is the golden goose that can continue to pay off in gold.

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The Blame of Brother Brown.

September 14, 2016 by Peter Lowry

There is a big difference between taking the blame for something than to accept responsibility. And it appears that the Ontario news media are not letting Progressive Conservative Provincial Leader Patrick Brown hide behind that difference.

It all has to do with that letter that helped the Tories win the by-election in Scarborough—Rouge River at the beginning of the month. The letter was in both English and Chinese, signed by Mr. Brown and delivered on the last weekend to as many as 13,000 households. The letter promised that if the Conservatives were elected to a majority in 2018, they would cancel the Liberal government’s updated sex education guide.

It all seems to be about at what age you should call a penis, a penis. Some of the objections to the new sex curriculum among newcomers is that children should not be taught this too young. Mind you, they can learn lots of other names for a penis at play time.

Which brings us back to that putz, Patrick Brown and the difference between blame and responsibility. At first, he denied knowledge of the letter. The only problem was that his signature was used on it. The one thing that is made absolutely clear in any party leader’s office is that while there is a machine available to put the leader’s signature on documents, it is a trust that cannot be violated. Only the leader can be responsible.

But Patrick Brown says he did not see the letter. Was he in a cloistered monastery without Internet at the time? Party President Rick Dykstra saw the letter. Why has he not resigned? By-election co-campaign manager Doug Ford had obviously seen the letter. What is Brown going to do about that? Certainly some people in the leader’s office need to be fired. They should line up the sacrificial lambs.

Obviously Mr. Brown is skating on the blame game. He is accepting the blame for the incident—since it is too late to call back the letters. He is just not taking responsibility.

All this incident really proves is that Mr. Brown is not a responsible person. He can take the blame and fight on—and fight as dirty as he likes. This is his type of politics. This writer might accuse the ruling Liberals at Queen’s Park of stupidity but they at least try to keep it civil. Watching Mr. Brown from his electoral district here in Barrie for the past nine years has been like watching the process of rot.

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Winning ways for Wynne.

September 6, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Ontario’s news media might be a little premature in wringing their hands and writing eulogies for Ontario’s Liberal government. With something like 30 per cent of the voters turning out for the September 1 by-election, the portent is nothing more than the local Liberals need to work a bit harder.

But that also applies to the gang of slack-jawed twits at Queen’s Park. It was obvious that they had written off Scarborough—Rouge River. And how dare they? They desperately needed some bragging rights and just the fact that the Premier had left town said it all.

It is not the economy stupid. It is real jobs. The Liberals have to recapture the momentum. You can hardly leave the field to a putz like Patrick Brown.

And stop the stupid water torture. Did you read that some 70 large grocery stores in Ontario will have beer, cider and a few decent wines on the shelves by Thanksgiving? Why just 70 out of more than 1400 large grocery stores in Ontario? Barrie, a city of over 135,000, does not have a grocery store selling beer. That is not just classed as stupid. It is a stick in the eye to every voter in the city. Is it some sort of death wish?

You either do it or you do not do it! Stop the water torture.

And why add this water torture approach with things the public really do not like? The Wynne government has been told enough times now that the voters are mad about the sell-off of Hydro One. Why keep pulling at that stupid band aid? Either take it off or stop. Quit reminding the voters that you do not care what they think.

And maybe Hydro One management is deliberately screwing up their billings just to show the government their power. For goodness sake, get those people on the same song sheet.

But the coup de grâce will be the planned carbon taxes set for January implementation. The Conservatives will have the following 15 months to arrange an appropriate ceremony to hand the premier her head on a platter.

The public might be smart enough to realize that there is no way the Conservatives would rescind those taxes but the voters will at least get even.

And that leaves the real problem in Ontario hanging in the wind. We have lost too much employment. We can hardly keep replacing real jobs with retail. We need imaginative planning, bold steps and action.

If Ms. Wynne is not up to the task, she should resign and make room for someone who knows how.

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