Provincial Politics – Page 90

In Ontario there is the Brown Way.

March 25, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Last weekend Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown was in Barrie to stoke the local loyalties. He reminds us of the busker with the sticks and plates. This is the entertainer who can keep more and more plates spinning on sticks. And if he makes it look too easy, he just adds more sticks and plates.

The only difference is that Brown is the kind of guy who breaks the plates and does not care. His rich friends will get him more.

But Brown is also alienating people and that is not something that mere money can fix.

Take the recent race for his party’s presidency for example. He had to buy off the competition. Brown needs his old friend former MP Rick Dykstra in the party presidency to protect his back. How he bought off Jag Badwal, who also was also vying for the job, we will find out eventually.

The other obvious problem is the Ontario caucus. Brown has few friends in the group. These are people well versed in the situation at Queen’s Park and many resent the way Brown stole the leadership. Swamping the legitimate membership with immigrants from India and Pakistan was hardly doing the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario a favour. These instant members were brought out to vote and then they went home, never to be seen again.

But there are just too many other problems for Brown to handle. In most, he is ill-equipped to handle them. How he will get his caucus members to like him is a challenge of major proportions. He is hardly a likeable person.

His main problem is the news media. He cannot patronize the Queen’s Press Gallery the way he patronized what passes for news media in Barrie. The Ottawa Gallery had mostly ignored him when he was an MP but that is not possible for the Ontario Gallery. They tend to have their claws out for him.

But they like him in Barrie. The hard core Conservatives in Barrie fawn on him. His choice as Member of Parliament to replace him, Alex Nuttall, might be the biggest lapdog you have ever met. When Brown says jump, Nuttall is already in the air before asking ‘How high?’

The major question the media are raising about Brown is what his policy direction might be? There is a simple answer to that question: Whatever will help get him re-elected.

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Doing Ontario up Brown!

March 15, 2016 by Peter Lowry

To this long-time political apparatchik, it was an interesting example of the art of remaking a politician. Ontario viewers of Global Television Sunday morning had an opportunity to see the training effort in action. It was almost a before and after—that might have been recorded hours apart. It was new Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown showing off his new tricks in one interview and losing them in the next.

He is obviously being trained currently in how to speak on television. The whiny adenoidal voice was gone in the first interview. It was on Tom Clark’s West Block show. You could see how up-tight he was during the introduction. He was frowning as he prepared himself to speak. He spoke in a lower voice. He was carefully scripted. It was hardly the Patrick Brown from Barrie that we know.

It did not even seem to be what Tom Clark expected. Brown was actually talking seriously about climate change. He was promoting a straight carbon tax as opposed to the Ontario government’s more complex cap and trade plan with Quebec and California. To Tom Clark’s obvious surprise, Brown was saying that federal Conservative candidates interested in the Conservative leadership contest next year need to get on board on addressing climate change.

But the same Patrick Brown did not fare as well on the Focus Ontario show with Toronto news anchor Alan Carter. Carter has an extensive background covering the Ontario Legislature and it was obvious that he had been briefed by some members of the Conservative caucus who despise their new leader. Carter asked the right questions to throw Brown off his game.

The whiny voice came back and the higher pitch returned, the answers where hesitant and disjointed, and Brown looked like he was checking for the nearest exit. It was obvious that he had not got to the speaking lessons about handling hostile questions.

His problem was that he was taken off his script of attacking the Ontario Liberals. The funniest line to anyone who had watched him in Ottawa over the years was the one when he said, “I’ve always cared about the environment.” He certainly kept that passion well hidden from his fellow parliamentarians. Obviously Tom Clark had never noticed him when he was in Ottawa as a back bench Conservative. He never did anything.

Carter also seemed sceptical about Brown getting religion over environmental issues.

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It’s a slippery slope for Ontario Liberals.

March 11, 2016 by Peter Lowry

If it was just the arrogance of the Wynne Liberals, maybe we could be more forgiving. It is the piling on of confusion and corruption that makes them so different from the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa. The Trudeau Liberals are progressives. The Wynne Wimps are regressive. Canadians have a fairly good handle on where Trudeau and Company in Ottawa want to go. There is just no telling where the Wynne Wimps are taking Ontario.

The Wynne crowd are certainly confusing the voters. They are ignoring the concerns of the electricity customer in selling off shares of Hydro One. That was an idea that the Harris Conservatives originated and dropped. Maybe they realized it would cause constant pressure to raise electricity rates to consumers.

We can understand the need to fix the pensions situation in Ontario and it makes sense to tie it all up with the structure needed for the Canada Pension Plan. It would be even better if Finance Minister Sousa and his friends did a better job of selling their plan. The decision to delay the start for a year to get it together with the federal government was seen as a weakness instead of a necessary improvement.

But the Wynne Wimps want to get all their publicity from their faltering half steps into beer and wine sales in grocery stores. All they have accomplished to-date is to look silly with their over-hyped and confused approach that pleases nobody.

And giving the credit to a former banker for these ideas seems to be convincing the public that they might as well dump Wynne and elect the banker.

Not that any current political leader in Ontario is worth anything. Both Wynne and the current Progressive Conservative leader won the leadership of their respective party with questionable tactics. Neither has shown any talent for leadership before or after.

And speaking of leadership, the Ontario New Democrats have a similar problem. If someone would just look interested in the job, the NDP immediately would dump their current leader.

With three ineffectual leaders set to square off in two years, the province is in trouble. Ontario has serious problems in education, employment, health care, highways and municipal needs. Those problems need solutions from real liberals.

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The meanness in means tests.

March 6, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Neither Finance Minister Charles Sousa nor Premier Wynne really understood what they were doing in the recent budget. They were offering half measures. They insulted both students and seniors. They tried to buy votes with lies. They thought they could buy support with half measures.

The most grievous insult was to our young. These are people with their lives ahead of them. And they were demeaned by politicians trying to buy their support but tying them to the apron-strings of parental control. They were putting the parents to a means test and that was only the first mistake. In using the parents in this way, the politicians were treating the students as though they were still young children.

Higher education might not be a right for all but the only fair way to decide who should have it is the student’s academic drive and potential. Whether the parents can or cannot afford to fund higher education should not be the deciding factor. Civil servants cannot be the arbiters between parents and their children when they do not agree on the same career objectives.

And speaking of objectives, seniors are wondering what the Ontario Liberals have in mind with an annual payment of $170 to be eligible for the Ontario Drug Benefit? Look folks, the operative word there is “benefit.” Why are you taking it back?

And with dispensing fees already ranging from less than $2 to over $11, why does the Ontario government decide to raise it a dollar to a supposed $7.11 per prescription? Even if it is only a difference of an average of maybe $300 a year for seniors, where does the government think the extra money will come from? You would think the time the premier and her finance minister spent in grocery stores promoting beer might have shown them the steep rise in grocery prices lately.

And a means test for seniors is just as mean as a means test to determine if their grandchildren can go to college.

Is there some magic to a senior couple having an income of more than $32,300 per year? Are you suddenly rich and can give more of your riches to the Ontario government? At a time in people’s lives when their savings and pensions are beset from rising prices and falling markets does the government think it can take more?

A word of advice to the Ontario government: Help our young people to get the education they need and want and leave our seniors a little gold to enjoy their golden years.

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Ontario Conservatives look for leadership.

March 5, 2016 by Peter Lowry

They can scrub him, fix his hair and dress him properly but it hardly adds to his ability to lead. Patrick Brown might hold the title of Ontario Progressive Conservative Party Leader but does not make him one. Leadership is more than winning the leadership job by signing up more people from the Sub-Continent than there are members of the Conservative Party. Leadership is more than political tricks.

A leader frames objectives for those he or she seeks to lead. A leader voices the challenges and rationale of success. A leader carries a flag of courage for all to see. A leader also accepts the challenges of non-believers. A leader seeks to take new ground. A leader contributes. And a leader draws followers into the fray.

In nine years of being a Member of Parliament, Patrick Brown led nobody anywhere. While in a position of trust, he did not earn trust. In a position of authority, he authored nothing. He hid behind local charities to keep his name prominent and contributed nothing substantive in Ottawa or in his community. In the very few free votes in the House of Commons, he consistently voted against women’s rights.

But Ottawa was an end game for him. He had run out of options there. There was nothing brilliant about using his connections in the Sub-Continent (paid for by Canadian taxpayers) to sign up more new immigrants from there than there were members of his provincial party. It was a tactic for someone who could not compete fairly.

And nobody was questioning the legality of his sign-ups. The party rules are that everyone must pay their own membership. It was common knowledge among people from the Sub-Continent that paying the $10 fee was optional. To some, the $10 was a small gift. To others, it was $10 from the family’s food bill. Only the organizers knew the true figures.

And the new leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives hardly cared. He was well funded and nobody questioned the accounting.

Brown bought the leadership but not all of Ontario’s Conservative caucus are willing followers. The MPP for Simcoe North who knew him best, Garfield Dunlop, quit to give Brown his seat. It also meant Garfield did not have to stay in his caucus. His key opponent for the leadership, Christine Elliott, never returned to Queen’s Park. You hardly blame her with all the squabbling that is going on there now.

It is now ten months since Patrick Brown took over the leadership of the Ontario Conservatives. What leadership?

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On political suicide.

March 2, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It is not that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is not smart. Never having the opportunity to meet her and talk with her, it is not even fair to say she is politically stupid. It just seems that she comes at political questions from a very narrow perspective. And that could be because of limited political experience, bad advice or lack of judgement.

Politicos need broad political experience for success. Wynne’s North Toronto electoral district is about as bland and predictable as they come. It elects right-wing Conservatives and right-wing Liberals. It elects reactionaries. She got involved in politics of the area in reaction to Conservative Premier Michael Harris’ forced amalgamation of Metropolitan Toronto. It was one of the very few actions of the Harris government that made sense. The only mistake was that Toronto was never given a workable form of governance. It remained the ugly stepchild of the province.

Wynne has done little more than throw money at the City Of Toronto since becoming premier. She obviously has no concept of what the city needs. Even her advisors keep telling her to throw more money.

There is one thing for sure: Wynne gets bad advice. Kicking a quadriplegic and his wheelchair under the bus in Sudbury so you can appoint a former New Democrat for a by-election was a desperation move that was unnecessary. Nobody can figure out what Wynne and her advisers were trying to prove. It was the unnecessary kind of move such as her advisor David Peterson used to make in his brief stint as premier.

Wynne seems quite sanguine about her staff being investigated by the police for her errors in judgement.

But it is her reliance on former TD Bank chief Ed Clark that is hanging Wynne out to dry. Clark’s idea of selling off part of Hydro One is guaranteed to put pressure on electricity pricing across the province. His piecemeal approach to liberalizing beer and wine sales through grocery stores is a sad joke.

And now we have a “Liberal” budget to discuss. People have quickly seen her Cap and Trade environmental plan as nothing but a crude cash grab. The new plan for a seniors’ drug plan has most seniors outraged at the price increases. And the feeble attempt at a means test for university access will be a bureaucratic nightmare.

If Wynne had any real political experience, political smarts or political judgment, she would hardly be in the mess she is in today. It raises serious concerns about the next provincial election.

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In search of Ontario’s liberalized beer sales.

March 1, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It was a pilgrimage. The objective was to experience booze in an Ontario grocery store. There was no such grocery store in Barrie. Our city is too unimportant to the Ontario government to have beer in grocery stores. Last weekend we stayed in Toronto and early Sunday morning set out to see beer in a grocery store. Only the beer was disappointing.

We loved the store. We went to the huge Loblaws down by the Lakeshore in Toronto’s East end. It covers most of a city block. Where we went in there was a sign as big as the store name that said: BEER HERE. We were eager to see this.

Where we went in was a sushi bar that would be large by Tokyo standards. There was a delicatessen of great dimension. There was a restaurant for immediate gratification. There was a bakery that specialized in wonderful breads. The wife kept trying to pick up exotic fruits and vegetables as we made our way into the depths of the store.

But we both succumbed in the acres of meats. Thick barbeque-ready strip loins were on sale and we could not resist.

What surprised us was a display behind glass of large slabs of beef going through the aging process. It started with the red and marbled beef that most North American housewives want to buy and went through four stages of aging to the dark and less appealing appearance of properly aged beef–and with flavour you cut with a fork.

By the time we got to the grocery area, the long lines of shelving looked like a lengthy journey. Looking up and down the many aisles, beer was not in evidence. We finally traversed the dairy aisle that was a city block long. We saw brand names we had never seen in Barrie. We saw prices we hope we do not see in Barrie.

But we finally found beer. It was by accident. It was a couple minutes after 11 am and a store employee was moving large black screens away from two end-aisles. The screens said that beer could not be sold before 11 am on Sundays. It also says a great deal about the ignorance of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) that makes the rules for how you sell beer.

One end-aisle had several craft beers and the other end-aisle had some popular Ontario brews available. It was a miserable display. They were not even refrigerated. If we really wanted beer, we would have gone to Ontario’s disgusting Beer Store. We would not have had to walk as far.

And do not get us going about the restrictions on the grocery/beer checkouts.

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A conservative budget from Premier Wynne.

February 27, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Patrick Brown, eat your heart out. As leader of Ontario’s Conservative Party, it is no fun having all your good potential tax moves made by conservatives in liberal clothing. The Ontario budget read so dutifully by Finance Minister Charles Sousa the other day made a mockery of liberalism and usurped traditional Conservative space.

Imagine if you are a senior in Ontario and eking out your remaining existence on about $3000. a month in pensions and federal government largess. You have just been slammed with a 70 per cent increase in annual drug benefit fees and another dollar per prescription of co-payment. These are supposed to be your golden years if the God damn provincial government would leave you some of the gold you have left.

Maybe somebody told Premier Wynne that seniors never change their life-time voting patterns. Just try us Ms. Wynne.

When Babel-on-the-Bay wrote that tongue in cheek commentary about university students turning to prostitution to pay the exorbitant fees for a higher education, we obviously had no idea that the budget would wade into the subject (higher costs not prostitution).

But how can the Ontario government be so stupid as to make a mess of funding higher education? This is just as bad as their silly incremental approach to booze distribution. They do nothing but half measures and make a mess of just doing that little. Do they have any idea of the size of the bureaucracy that will be needed to sort out all the claims and counter claims of such an ignorant method of funding higher education?

First of all, it has to be marks that entitle our young people to enter college or university level programs. Whether their parents have or have not got the money is irrelevant. The government can neither award nor penalize students for the wealth of their parents. And stop charging us outrageously for parking on campuses that belong to all.

It seems the government wants kudos for scrapping the fees for Drive Clean emission testing. That was always an annoying tax. The only problem now is that the government is giving the “testers’ a greater incentive to find something they can “fix.” This is another fine example of corporate care over consumer care.

And another thing: you can stuff the projections on a balanced budget wherever you like but it is nothing but silly guesswork. The budget will balance whenever revenues rise to meet expenditures. Any householder knows that.

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Finding out the truth on Cap and Trade.

February 26, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It is like you are saving the world one added tax at a time. Only politicians would believe that the refineries and gas providers would be constrained from polluting by a tax on the end users. And why is the consumer tax imposed before the supposed industry caps are even attempted?

Ontario’s new Cap and Trade deal in combination with California and Quebec is nothing but a tax grab before the federal governments get into the same larcenous act. And if you believe that there will be some savings from electricity for Ontario users down the road, you probably also believe in the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and Santa Claus.

And yes, it is the perfect time for the government in Ontario to impose the new gas taxes. Both gasoline and natural gas are at the lowest price levels we have seen for many years. When prices for regular gas normalize at the pumps within the next couple years to something in the range of $1.36 per litre, the government is hoping we will not notice the more than six cents for the province’s cap and trade tax and we are paying GST on top of it.

What is annoyingly syrupy about the entire deal is that Premier Wynne and her minions are posing the entire tax with the virtue of saving our planet. It seems our cap-and-trade tax money will be used to replace normal tax money to pay for virtuous objectives such as greatly expanded public transit around metropolitan areas and particularly Toronto.

This is the smoke screen that is being thrown up while we wonder just how realistic some of the environmental objectives might be. The problem with the idea of reducing greenhouse emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 is that God knows how few of us will be here then to demand our money back.

This entire scheme smacks of corporate care not consumer care. In Ontario, we still have the potential for corruption in corporate political donations and in third-party advertising that makes a joke of spending controls on politicians.

Is it any surprise that we are facing billions in new taxes while our politicians are wrapping themselves in the righteous cloaks of saving the environment? It seems the worst pollution was the words coming from the Ontario finance minister when he read his budget news yesterday.

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And with a minor in hooking.

February 25, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It certainly is expensive to get through university these days and we hear that more and more undergraduates are shopping their bodies to keep themselves in class. And some are doing it in the world’s oldest profession. They might not like to use the word but they are still prostituting themselves.

But can you think of a more worthy objective than to earn a degree in the process? You can hardly blame someone who prefers giving blow jobs to having to pour coffee at Tim’s just to eat Kraft Dinners. It is your choice. And there are many forms of prostitution and a girl or guy can pick their level. Mind you, the day is passed when an undergraduate can earn improved grades by simply leading on the old professor. University is the real TV reality show these days.

And the number of gals and guys who have the gumption—and salable bodies—are growing. The economics of getting a degree are driving that bus. Determination can overcome revulsion and mother’s advice any day.

And this phenomenon is making further hypocrites of our politicians in Ottawa as they dither over Supreme Court demands to take better care of our sex workers. Selling your body is not just the oldest profession but it is time honoured down to the travesty of marriage vows. “Do you Prudence, promise to love, honour and spread your legs whenever Horace wants in fulfilling these vows?”

It is a vast improvement these days that marriage seems to be the thing you do if your relationship can survive three or four years of cohabitation.

But sex as a unique part of marriage went home to mother many years ago. Married sex is like keeping your Ferrari from leaving your driveway. It is safe but can be terribly boring.

But back in university, we need to spread the good word. Whether you find a sugar daddy (or sugar mommy) on the Internet or join the nearest stroll, it is all part of the learning experience. Your first job in university is not to pick your ultimate profession but to learn about yourself. And it is also advisable to learn to respect yourself and your fellow humans. Our human sexual nature travels the path of the seasons of life. These are the learning years.

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