Provincial Politics – Page 92

Ontario Premier Wynne wins India.

February 3, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Patrick Brown MPP eat your heart out. You are no longer India’s darling. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has won the media wars in the world’s largest democracy. In homophobic India, a lesbian politician from Canada was a big hit. It never occurred to us Canadians that Kathleen Wynne taking her husband Jane with her was unusual.

But all of India is not as gender friendly as Mumbai which is known as the gay capital of the Sub-Continent. The Indian news media were delighted that the Canadians were invited to the Sikh Golden Temple in Punjab. They were sure the Sikhs would refuse to honour their visitor with the traditional robes during the visit because the Sikh religion abhors same-sex liaisons.

Obviously Ontario Sikhs put in a good word for Ms. Wynne and no international incident took place. After all the clothing she modelled for the news media was just inexpensive cotton. It just made her look like somebody’s granny.

But, at the same time, it was insensitive of the Premier to not pay attention in the briefings by her staff. The staff would have known about the controversy that would surround the premier’s partner coming on the trip. While we would never say that Jane should be left at home, her relationship with the premier needs to be treated as casually as it is in Toronto.

India still has a way to go to finally rid itself of the last of the caste system and to better control the extremes of religion that are found there. And we can hardly expect the burgeoning news media there to not play up the novelty of Ontario’s trade delegation.

But we should try to remember that the premier’s trip has important objectives for Ontario business. Canada can make many products that are needed in the Indian market and, in turn, they have many products that are of interest to us. Improving trade is very important to both economies. While a person such as Ontario Provincial Conservative Leader Patrick Brown might need his connections in India to improve his political gravitas, Wynne’s objective is trade to improve Ontario’s economy.

Admittedly, the payoff for the premier to take this trip is the better relations with the business community people who join her and the publicity the trip generates. From the Sikh Golden Temple to Mahatma Ghandi’s tomb, it is a win-win situation for Wynne. There is no question but that Patrick Brown only uses his connections with India for purely personal purposes.

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Patrick Brown where are you?

February 1, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Patrick Brown MPP needs to decide whether he is his provincial party’s leader or its chief apparatchik. In politics, an apparatchik is a person who usually toils in the background of a party coming up with and implementing strategies and tactics with which to win power. Watching Mr. Brown at work in politics over the past ten years has been a constant series of lessons in sleaze, distain for voters, abuse of privilege, careless accounting, hypocrisy and dissembling.

And besides, the man lacks personality. The first time we met him he offered to shake hands and it must have been an involuntary reaction that we snatched our hand away. Knowing nothing about him at the time, the reaction surprised us as well as him. We were told later that he has a limp and unconvincing handshake.

Very early in his public career, the young Mr. Brown must have realized he is a poor public speaker, with little to say that has not been written for him. To overcome this limitation, he chose to insinuate himself with local charities and piggyback himself on their needs. He spent record amounts of public funds sending cheap and unconvincing mailers to constituents promoting his party and this or that charity. You met the occasional ignorant Barrie native who would actually say “Mr. Brown really supports local charity.” That was all they knew about him.

The fact that Brown spent close to nine years in Ottawa as nothing but another vote for Mr. Harper tells his story. He was just another drone. He spent all that time contributing nothing. The only times he thought for himself, he voted for extremist religious motions that went nowhere.

It was when his friend MPP Tim Hudak crashed and burned as Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader in the last provincial election, Brown saw opportunity. One of his perks in Ottawa had been many free trips to the Indian Sub-Continent. He knew the size of the Indian Diaspora in Ontario was five times that of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party membership—and nobody had to be a Canadian citizen. All he had to do was hire organizers at Hindu temples and Muslim mosques. It was all in a day’s work for an unconscionable apparatchik. And nobody even checked if these people paid their own membership.

And today, in new, properly tailored suits and a Toronto salon hairstyle, Mr. Brown is living the life of Riley in Toronto. He has writers and female staff to hide his limitations.

But where do you find him? He is interfering in the campaigns of the Conservatives who are running in a Barrie Council by-election and he is in Whitby-Oshawa behind the scenes of the by-election to replace his provincial opponent Christine Elliott. Once an apparatchik; always an apparatchik!

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Justice denied: The Yatim trial.

January 27, 2016 by Peter Lowry

At one time the Toronto police force was among the most respected in Canada. It had the overwhelming support and trust of the citizens it served. That is no longer true. The trial of Constable James Forcillo for murdering Sammy Yatim has told Toronto citizens that the police consider themselves above the law.

The lesson of the trial is that it is alright to shoot a drugged young man for not doing what the police were telling him to do. He was given less than a minute to comply with instructions to drop a penknife and come down out of the streetcar. The jury decided that it was alright to shoot Sammy Yatim three times—and kill him.

But it was not alright to shoot him six more times. That, the jury opined, was attempted murder—even though Sammy Yatim was already dead. It took the jury six days of deliberations to come to that conclusion. You can just imagine the arguments in the jury room over that stroke of genius.

What is particularly galling in this situation is that the Toronto Police are closing ranks around their still-being-paid fellow constable Mr. Forcillo. It seems that police union boss Mike McCormack believes in the Nuremberg Defence. What that means is that Forcillo says he was only doing what he was trained to do. That means his defence for murder is that he was doing what he was told. To accept that defence, the courts would be denying international legal principles more than half a century old.

The best weasel of all in this fiasco is the stand taken by current Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders who claimed that the verdict showed that Toronto police are responsible to their public. He went on to say that the police are considering changing how they train officers. And if that is how they have been training police then more than Chief Saunders should be fired.

The disappointing note in all of this is the impact it is having on many of the youth in our cities. The message they are getting is that the police believe they can use lethal force at their discretion.

You can compile a long list of misdeeds by police but you need to remember that real reform starts at the top. We have many effective and competent police officers in Canada. They are desperately in need of good leadership.

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Sub-Continent votes won’t help Brown.

January 17, 2016 by Peter Lowry

He must be joking. Toronto Star writer Martin Regg Cohn tells us that there is some sort of contest going on for the votes of the Sub-Continent Diaspora in Ontario. If Opposition Leader Patrick Brown and Premier Kathleen Wynn are really in this contest, it seems like a foolish expense for a larger portion of less than four per cent of the voters in Ontario. While former federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney thinks the Conservatives discovered ethnic voters in Canada, the truth is that all major parties have strong roots in the major New Canadian communities.

Looking back over the past 50 years, the Toronto base of the Liberal Party kept in touch with the ethnic media, analyzed readership and viewers in the various ethnic groups and helped candidates communicate with substantive groups in their electoral districts. As early as possible in each election we would arrange a meeting with the ethnic media for the party leader and made sure that candidates met the people from ethnic media with concentrations of that ethnic group in their riding.

Even today, Patrick Brown has no deep connections with the Hindu, Sikh or Muslim communities from the Sub-Continent. His relationship with Indian President Narendra Modi goes back to when the fundamentalist Hindi Modi was chief minister in Gujarat (an industrialized Indian state with almost twice the population of Canada). And for the Star’s Regg Cohn to oversimplify the extremely complex religious infighting in India to say that Modi has been rehabilitated is like saying the Pope will be welcomed as the new chief rabbi of Jerusalem.

Brown bought the Progressive Conservative Party leadership in Ontario by the simple expedient of hiring organizers from the Sikh and Hindi temples in Ontario and having them go out and sign up members of the party. The feedback from the Sub-continent émigrés was that payment of the party’s ten dollar fee was optional.

It was obvious to any knowledgeable political apparatchik who was not born yesterday that Brown used the immigrants to win the position at the lowest ebb in membership for the Conservatives in Ontario. These are hardly going to be active supporters.

And for Regg Cohn to appear to be so gullible as to be impressed by Brown’s accomplishments is a bit frightening. Brown hardly made a brilliant move in finding out about Wynne’s planned trade mission to India and getting ahead of her with a few of his caucus members. India has the largest population of any democracy in the world and it is an immense market. If Ontario was not sending trade missions, the voters should be asking why not. Wynne will also get her few moments of fame in India.

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What? Ontario politics corrupt?

January 14, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The reason this writer has retained a membership in the Ontario Liberal Party for many years has nothing to do with approving what is going on. It is the belief that the change that is so desperately needed has to come from within the party. Nobody can effect the reforms needed from outside.

Any long-term reader of this commentary can tell you that we are not pleased with many of the politicians at Queen’s Park. Why would we approve of hypocrites? Why would we condone corruption? It is not that there are not a few good people in the three parties represented in the Legislature. They are just not the ones running the asylum.

There is not a party leader at Queen’s Park that does not deserve to be impeached by their party. Nobody has brought more dishonour to the Ontario Liberals than Ms. Wynne. She has used corrupt practices to manipulate her party and the political system in Ontario. She has let underlings and hanger-ons take the blame for her transgressions. She refuses to reform the system where parties can sell out to the highest bidders.

Leader of the Opposition Patrick Brown bought the leadership of his party from the Sub-Continent Diaspora in Ontario. Most of his supposed new Conservatives have no understanding of his party or what it stands for. And when has he ever spoken out about the corrupt practices of Ontario politics?

And as for New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath, does she even know what is wrong? Why are her supposed union supporters making deals with the Liberals to run advertising during elections to support the Liberals?

For agencies created by the Ontario government to be giving political donations to the government that created them is by any definition a corruption of the intent. For any third party political advertising to be allowed during election campaigns is blatant interference in the election process. For businesses and unions to be allowed to make donations to political parties implies corruption.

Ontario voters need to take a long hard look at how politics has become so corrupted in their province. Political party members particularly have to understand that we can no longer support the status quo. Unless the demand for reform comes from within the political parties, it will only get casual lip service. It is up to party members to put some teeth to change

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Brown takes fellow Tories for a ride.

January 10, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It was the picture of Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown on an elephant with one of his Ontario Conservative caucus mates that has already won picture of the year for us. When you think of how many times Brown has visited India on the Canadian taxpayers’ money, you would think the people of the sub-continent would have learned that he is about as useful as teats on a sacred Brahmin bull.

But the Indians laid out the red carpet for Mr. Brown anyway. It is not as though he is good looking. He hardly has much social repartee. He does not have much appeal to women. He is no longer with the federal Conservatives and they are out of power anyway. He has no trade deals to make. It must be that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi figures that a guy this persistent must have something going for him. And for all they know, he might be there as an advance man for Premier Kathleen Wynne. (We hear she will be in India later this month.)

She had better come soon if she wants to also meet Prime Minister Modi. When you consider that the extremist Indian Prime Minister has less charm than Stephen Harper, he might not have a long time left in office.

But Brown is reported to have brought along four of his fellow Tory caucus members so that they could come home and tell others how royally Brown is treated in India. For a minor opposition Member of the Ontario Legislature to be welcomed in the offices of the Prime Minister in the largest democracy in the world must have come as something of a surprise. After all, how creepy can it be for Prime Minister Modi of India and Patrick Brown Ontario MPP to be kindred spirits?

They are both manipulative politicians. They play the rules to their advantage. Their real agendas are those of extremists. They scratch each other’s ego and back.

Where did you think Brown got the idea of using the more than 100,000 immigrants from India to swamp the membership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party? Though nobody seems to care where he got the money to pay their memberships.

But you have to feel sorry for Brown’s caucus members who went with him to India. Being jerked around on a sofa atop an elephant’s back is enough to make a hardened sailor throw up.

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Waiting for Woodbine.

January 7, 2016 by Peter Lowry

It was last July that Toronto City Council finally agreed that the Woodbine Entertainment facilities in Rexdale could become a full-fledged resort casino. Now we wait. It is hardly going to happen overnight. It is just that we have high hopes for Woodbine to become the premier casino resort location in Canada.

Of course, we are biased. We have always loved Woodbine. The racing cards are always exciting. They serve wonderful food—from fine dining to stand-up service in the concourse, Woodbine has always meant a ‘Happy Meal’ to us. And the slots there have been a poor stopgap while we waited for the real action.

It is not that we are going to take all our action from Rama. We live 30 minutes away and Rama is our turf. Woodbine will be an option though just an hour down Highway 400. We will welcome Woodbine as a special treat. Horse racing might be dying off but we still love the opportunity to challenge the tote.

And we think the civility of the horse people mixed with the whales of the casino environment will create a charmed world. Not just world-class but unique. It will shame Monte Carlo. It will set a new standard over Vegas. It will challenge Macau.

It is very simple. Woodbine knows how to respect people. Rama is pretty good, though at times, a bit inconsistent, but the dealers and pit supervisors, craps crews and servers are, on the whole, friendly, courteous and well trained. Compared to the service at those lower-class dives in Niagara Falls, Ontario, you really can appreciate Rama.

Mind you, our favourite is that little Casino du Lac-Leamy in Gatineau, Quebec. It is too small for a really good time but we often enjoy a brief visit when in Ottawa. It is certainly classy compared to that dump in the old Expo grounds in Montreal. And as for Windsor, Ontario, the casino there treats you well but it seems to us that the architect had never seen a real casino. That place does not feel right.

But everyone compares casinos to Las Vegas. You can do that if you wish but we were in Vegas back when the town had some class. We were there back in the golden era when the Desert Inn ruled in Paradise, Nevada. And then they let in all those day-trippers from Los Angeles.

We think Woodbine Entertainment can bring back that “D.I.” style.

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The indestructible Premier Wynne.

January 4, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Readers of Babel-on-the-Bay have gotten the impression that we do not approve of the Ontario government of Premier Kathleen Wynne. The truth is there is a small possibility that she might gain some traction with us if she did not call herself a Liberal. As it stands, she has nothing to commend her beyond the fact that her opponents are far worse news.

But it is Ms. Wynne’s approach to any improvement in how Ontario functions that can really rile a real Liberal. Take some of the things with which a real Liberal might agree such as improved pensions or expanded alcohol distribution.

The main concern with pension plans is the administrative costs involved. To add a separate Ontario plan to the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) adds needless expense to the taxpayer. If the federal government refuses to update the CPP then the answer is to take over the federal plan á la Quebec Pension Plan. Paying for two government plans should not be tolerated by Ontario taxpayers.

This is also when Ontario beer drinkers should recognize the money-grubbing approach that the Ontario government is taking to expanding alcohol sales in the province. When only 15 per cent of Ontario’s larger supermarkets have been allowed to pay for the privilege of selling beer under stringent rules and at considerable extra cost, the Wynne government is still fixing the prices.

Our main complaint about Premier Wynne is that she is a reactionary. She first got involved in provincial politics to try to stop Premier Mike Harris from amalgamating Toronto into the present day city. That is what reactionaries do: they wait for someone else to propose something and then they object. Anyway that was what drew her into provincial politics.

And yet Mike Harris’ plan to sell off portions of Hydro One are now being embraced by the money-hungry government. She is more than willing to sell the golden goose.

Her next stunt, when elected to Queen’s Park was to finagle the rules to gain advantage at the convention electing the replacement for Dalton McGinty as premier. Reactionaries are very proud of how they twist rules to their advantage. The timing of her deal with now Minister of Transportation Glen Murray threw his supporters into the pool of real independent voters, corrupting the vote and giving her an advantage.

And she continues to mock the rules to keep her and her party in office. She will let flunkies take the fall for her when she bends election rules such as in the Sudbury by-election. She continues to think she is indestructible.

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And one determined dipper.

January 2, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Over the years we have realized that most of our regular readers of Babel-on-the-Bay are among the more progressive liberals. We certainly enjoy a healthy level of readership and get a good number of supportive e-mails from them. The practice of rabble.ca picking up some of our commentaries has also led to some very interesting (but less complementary) notes from New Democratic Party supporters. Their e-mails are not always as positive since we wrote in early 2015 that the Orange Wave in Quebec had become something of an undertow.

One of the NDP readers sent us an e-mail last week after Babel-on-the-Bay made another plea for a merger of the Liberals and the NDP to create a Canadian social democratic party. We were told that “As usual another bloody liberal telling the dippers how to run their party.”

We can assure you that if we were telling the New Democrats how to run their party, it would be far more successful than it is today.

Back when we were welcome at Queen’s Park and took responsibility for much of the Liberal Party’s public relations from Toronto, we considered the opposition parties part of the public. We did not have to be a card-carrying member to learn the ins and outs of the various parties. Back before Google, you had to know everything about the leaders and their key people. Some became friends. You hardly write political commentaries not knowing the key people, their party history and how the various parties operate.

But it is hardly our intent to tell any party (other than the Liberal Party of Canada) how to do its business today. There is nothing we want from politics today but peace, order and good government. (And if you recognize that as the title of a book, it was.)

No party is perfect. There are wide gaps between party objectives and accomplishments. We find to-day’s ideologies frightening. We despair for ignorance. We are concerned about the public attention level, interests, savvy and tolerance.

But we were writing about the e-mail from the NDP guy. His title for the note was “bollocks.” That is a term more common to Great Britain than to Canada. We assume it was in admiration for our cojones in suggesting the wedding of Liberal and NDP parties.

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Looking Back: Alberta’s Orange Crush?

December 28, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It was the second most important political turnaround in Canada this past year. It was not so much that the Alberta New Democrats crushed anyone but the Conservatives of Alberta got their comeuppance after 44 years in power. The Conservative dynasty created by the late Peter Lougheed was in a train wreck.

There was no doubt but Jim Prentice, the supposedly wise and winning new Premier, was the cause of the Conservative cancelation. In a legislature with the official opposition even further to the right than the Conservatives, he brought the Wildrose Party Leader and eight of her colleagues over to the Conservative side. It might have worked if he had absorbed the entire Wildrose but all he did was anger the hive. A get-even Wildrose party proceeded to split the right-wing vote in the May election, guaranteeing the New Democrat win.

And to add insult to the loss, it was Wildrose that won the role of Opposition because of the vote split. Jim Prentice was hardly interested in continuing to lead a third-place party and quit politics.

But it was Prentice himself who had to take the blame. He actually made statements that inferred to Alberta voters that they were to blame for the problems. That was not acceptable. Prentice had to recognize that Alberta governments had been pandering to the companies extracting Alberta resources and they in turn were absorbing much of the costs normally paid for by the provincial taxpayers. At oil prices below $40 per barrel of crude, you can hardly make money out of the tar sands.

Alberta obviously needed better politicians to manage a troubled economy. It was also obvious that some of the provincial mud was also spattering Calgary’s favourite adopted son Stephen Harper. The surprise win by Rachel Notley’s New Democrats might have provided a short term lift to Thomas Mulcair’s federal party polling but it was recognized as an Alberta phenomenon.

Despite Jim Prentice’s failure to communicate with Albertans before they tossed his party, Prentice left them a serious mess. The day is now past that Alberta can be proud of not having a provincial sales tax. That day is coming. Notley has had to walk on egg shells with the deficits her party is building up for future generations of Albertans. So far, she has been golden.

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