Provincial Politics – Page 93

The Odd Couple of Canadian Politics in 2016.

December 27, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There is something perversely funny about the coupling of two of Canada’s least likely politicians. This thought came to mind in wondering about the impact of this pair on Canadian politics in 2016. They are the two opposition leaders in Ontario and Quebec. They are politician Patrick Brown from Barrie, Ontario and neophyte politician, millionaire separatist Pierre-Karl Péladeau of Quebecor wealth.

Both delude themselves—which does little harm.

But both have the resources to delude the public—which can do irreparable harm.

And their targets are Premier Kathleen Wynne of Ontario and Premier Philippe Couillard of Quebec—both with majorities and at least three more years in their mandates. That gives Brown and Péladeau a wide window within which to scheme. And do not underestimate the ability of these men to scheme.

Brown is a person who lives, breathes and devotes himself to political manipulation. Péladeau simply buys his political advice. Both are from the extreme right of Canadian politics. Brown is from the religious right wing while Péladeau is from the monied and pampered right. He was having fun in Paris in the years before his father’s sudden death and he seemed to resent the need for him to come home and replace him at the head of the family business.

Brown had finally figured out that his lacklustre performance in Ottawa was not getting him anywhere. He had proved that he was more interested in playing hockey and running marathons than federal politics.

Brown’s hope is that Ontario politics is easier. He bought the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives with other people’s money. It was a simple matter of hiring organizers from the sub-continent who found enough South Asian immigrants to swamp the existing membership of the old Ontario PC Party. And nobody asked him who paid for all those memberships.

Péladeau had an easier time of it. The Parti Québécois was moribund after the smashing defeat of its government under Pauline Marois in 2014. In a nothing campaign, he spend about $400,000 of petty cash to win the leadership.

The only confusion Péladeau has is that his old union-busting techniques from business might not win for the PQ with the party’s reliance on support among Quebec unions. That is almost as confusing as a religious conservative heading up the Red Tory party of former Ontario Premier Bill Davis.

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It’s all small beer in Ontario.

December 17, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Liberals in Ontario got an e-mail yesterday from Finance Minister Charles Sousa raving about beer being here in 58 Ontario grocery stores. He even notes that it is in time for Christmas. (Now would not a six pack be a perfect gift for the Toronto Star carrier?)

But it sure is tough to figure out what all the silly fuss is about. We now have six packs of beer in one out of every 25 large grocery stores in Ontario. So what? When you check the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario rules of sale, you wonder what is left of the grocery stores’ profit?

And judging by the locations of these 58 stores that Charles so kindly sent us, they are few and far between. Can you imagine the repercussions when the Liberal MPPs in the Scarborough part of Toronto find there is no six-pack grocery store for them?

They should not worry. This fiasco will continue with some news on wines in the New Year. There will also be a few more stores licensed.

But they will only sell six packs of beer. And the prices are fixed across the province. Mind you, you can get Air Miles from Metro and Sobeys and PC Points from the Weston emporiums. Mind you, the Weston people have said that 50 per cent of their beer space will be devoted to craft beers. These craft beers are something of an acquired taste and the Weston’s will find the sales will be heaviest in the same-old, same-old Labatt Blue, Molson Canadian and Coors Light.

In time for the next provincial election in Ontario, we might have six packs and some wine available in as many as one-third of Ontario’s large grocery stores. Small stores need not apply.

Yet there is little being said about whiskey and gin. And not a whisper about brandies, sherries and ports—which can often be an important ingredient in recipes of good cooks. Nor has there been mention of those light summer coolers premixed with vodka or rum.

The problem might just be that we have just six-pack type politicians in Queen’s Park when there should be some Scotch or brandy sippers as well. You should ask your local politicians what their preferred beverage might be when the next election roles around. We need more boozers with broader tastes at Queen’s Park. Then we can get their promise to get this province past its temperance union standards.

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A six-pack and a toke for Premier Wynne.

December 15, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The publicity opportunities for Ontario’s premier come thick and fast with Justin Trudeau in the prime minister’s office in Ottawa. The other day Premier Kathleen Wynne got in on the act out at Pearson Airport welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada. And now that we finally have beer in a few Ontario grocery stores, she wants to add marijuana to the mix.

Wynne wants to steer any federally approved marijuana sales to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). Can you just imagine the outrage from British Columbia Premier Christy Clark when the first LCBO store opens in Vancouver?

Alright, maybe Wynne only wants the LCBO involved in Ontario. And that leaves the feds with a problem. Not all provinces have a pickle up their hindquarters about the exclusivity of the province selling liquor. Some provinces are even quite liberal about how they sell booze.

But here you have Ontario’s premier telling the media to come and see her buy the first six-pack of beer from a Weston Empire’s Loblaw store in Toronto. That is designed to prove how liberal the Ontario government can be. Can you not just see the premier and her partner sucking back on President’s Choice beers and getting on a buzz from a toke while watching Toronto’s Leafs lose on Hockey Night in Rogers’ Land?

Mind you, it is just the times that change; not the quality of the actors. Ontario has had to put up with puritanical governments since it became a province in 1867 under the British North America Act of Westminster. If it had not been for the mineral wealth of Northern Ontario, there would still be farms in the premier’s North Toronto electoral district.

We have to assume that there is no alternative to the type of repressive and bad government, Ontario endures. And we are unlikely to see any of the spunk shown by Justin Trudeau and his team rubbing off in Ontario. In the recent federal election, the federal Liberals had nothing much to lose. They went a little overboard on some of their promises but their hearts seem to be in the right place.

While the premier and her partner could well pose for a poster of Ontario Gothic, it would only make an interesting counterpoint to the Trudeau’s pose for the cover of the U.S. magazine Vogue.

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Ontario Liberals: Lazy or Stupid?

December 10, 2015 by Peter Lowry

You would think that the Ontario government would at least look at the results of the last provincial and federal elections before accepting the federal electoral district redistribution in the province. All they needed to do was Google the word “gerrymander” and they would have understood what was wrong with the federal redistribution of the City of Barrie.

And it would have been an easy fix. The provincial government did not have to accept any of the changes by the federal commission. The government decided not to change any of the northern electoral districts because the changes were more of a cosmetic nature rather than fairer.

But by dividing Barrie into north and south halves and adding heavily Conservative rural areas to each half was a blatant attempt to provide a benefit to the Conservative Party. And the line up of local Conservatives at the federal redistribution commission hearings that supported this as a great idea certainly confirmed that it was not a great idea for everybody.

It was when nobody objected at the commission hearing in Barrie that the commission assumed that this was a done deal. And for the Ontario Liberal government to accept this is ridiculous. The current Member of the Ontario Legislature from Barrie was elected in 2014. Her electoral district is all within the city boundaries of Barrie. She is a Liberal.

In the more recent federal election run under the new gerrymandered ridings in north and south Barrie, there was no Liberal sweep. The Conservative candidates won both ridings.

In analyzing the results during the judicial recount in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte it was easy to see that the rural voters mostly voted for the Conservative candidate while the city voters mainly supported the Liberal. You would have thought that the campaign manager for Premier Wynne’s election campaign in 2014 would have told her about the Barrie situation. He was in Barrie for the recount.

Mind you, it might be a bit rude to question whether the Ontario Liberals are lazy or stupid. The third option is that maybe they do not care. Judging by the current beer boondoggle, the carding by out-of-control police, the disaster of selling off shares of Hydro One’s electricity distribution and their general malaise in government, maybe Premier Wynne and her merry men do not give a damn.

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By way of apology to our Barrie Whigs.

December 7, 2015 by Peter Lowry

This is about as close as Babel-on-the-Bay can come to an apology. For the life of this blog, we have tended to disparage a faction of the local Liberals in Barrie. Calling them Whigs was not a compliment. (Whigs are Liberals about 100 years out of date.) This change of heart needs an explanation.

It started by being cold-shouldered by the Liberal candidate in the 2007 provincial election. Being introduced to her by a former federal cabinet minister should have been an immediate entrée but she seemed in no mood for it. She won the election but her organization seemed to be a closed shop. The only opening for us was the supposedly weaker federal riding organization.

While helping with the federal party organization for a couple years while it rebuilt and became solvent, it was a surprise to see the division with the local provincial organization. Part of the problem was the intransigence of the people who were on both boards as they tended to drag their feet on anything progressive.

They were also very angry at Babel-on-the-Bay’s claiming the right to be critical of some of the actions of the Liberal government at Queen’s Park. Instead of healthy dialogue on the issues, they tended to be viciously negative. It was so bad that the only solution was for the writer to leave the federal board lest it come down to people taking sides. The board needed us more than we needed the board.

It was only when there was an attempt by the former provincial MPP to take over the federal organization that the federal supporters rallied and her take-over failed.

The only other point of contention was the gerrymandering of Barrie by the last redistribution commission. The Conservatives in Barrie got behind the idea of adding solid Conservative rural areas to both the north and south halves of the city. Neither the federal nor provincial Liberal factions complained to the commission.

And that was where things were left until earlier this year.

A seemingly lacklustre nomination in the north Barrie area turned into an interesting battle for the Liberal nomination. It was a hard fought contest between a former community college president and a well-known local lawyer. Over a thousand people turned out on the coldest night in February to choose the former community college president by a reported 26-vote edge.

But there still seemed to be barriers to our involvement. What was annoying was that the Liberals subsequently ran a terrible campaign in the north half of Barrie and a good candidate desperately needed help. There was no decent literature. There was no targeted advertising. Communication with Liberal supporters was sparse and ill-managed. The sign campaign was badly organized and slow to respond to requests. We had a hard-working candidate but he was new to politics and had no idea what a good campaign should look like. Even the recount at the end was badly organized for the Liberals. Out of more than 50,000 votes cast in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, our Liberal candidate lost by 86 votes.

We all feel terrible about it but we now know it was not the fault of our local provincial Liberals. We will have to be nicer to them.

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Life in a world without heroes.

December 5, 2015 by Peter Lowry

There are no longer heroes in North America. Small children used to look up to police in their uniforms and want to emulate them. Now they fear them. And it is the fault of the police themselves. The police have placed themselves beyond our reach. They have made a sham of the controls society should have over them. They protect each other and they defy the rest of society.

And they are unnecessarily killing people.

The killing goes on both in the north and south of the Unites States and in Canada too. The police are out of control. Just have a white police officer kill a black person in America and you can have race riots in that jurisdiction for the next year. The only persons who seem to survive the melee are the police officers who did the killing.

In Canada, we have police abusing their position in society to target the racially sensitive with ‘stop and question’ tactics that can inflame racial tensions. And when told to stop the practice, the police ignore the order.

But the answer by law makers in America is to provide military equipment to local police forces. American police today are dressed and equipped more like storm troops than your friendly neighbourhood cop.

Even in Canada, we had the experience of police gathering from across the country to practice the art of “Kettling.” When they did it at the G-20 in Toronto in 2010, the police destroyed a hundred years of good community relations. This was not policing but the unnecessary strong-arming of innocent civilians. And when it came to blaming someone for the tactic, they picked a mid-level supervisor who must have pissed off his fellow white-shirts. Mind you he was finally slapped on the wrist and lost a few days pay.

The guy really responsible for that example of bad policing might have had to finally retire from the force but he found a new sinecure. He is now the Member of Parliament for Scarborough-Southwest.

But nobody is doing anything about the problems behind this loss of innocence in policing. In Canada, we have failed to ensure that there is proper civilian review of police actions. We have police service boards who think they are some form of super police. They are allowing themselves to be co-opted by the people they are supposed to supervise. They have to stop working for the police and realize they are responsible to their fellow civilians.

It is one hell of a note when people are not protected from their own damn police.

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A tale of two finance ministers.

November 30, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It was the best of times–for the provincial government. It was the worst of times–for the federal government. A blogger ahead of his time from the 19^th Century, Charles Dickens understood that conundrum. Dickens wrote best sellers as pamphlets and fed his readers a chapter at a time. Today, anything more complex than 140 characters in a twit seems to strain the attention span.

But finance ministers have special problems. While our new federal finance minister is busy bemoaning the size of the deficit left to him by the previous Conservative government, his provincial counterpart has a different song to sing. It seems that the (drum roll please) surprisingly good management of the provincial Liberals is the good news in Ontario.

We are told that Ontario will be below its deficit target for the coming year. Finance Minister Charles Sousa has announced that Ontario will beat the expected deficit level by over a billion dollars. It seems, Charles tells us, the sale of Hydro One shares is already fattening festive calves at the Queen’s Park money rooms.

While Charles is not ready to create a balanced budget until just before the next election, he is now more confident. And do not forget that he has more of the Golden Goose, known as Hydro One, to sell.

Meanwhile federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau is the new boy on the financial scene. Since incoming new governments always disagree with the figures provided by the defeated government, nobody was surprised when he “discovered” that the fiscal surplus promised by his predecessor was really a deficit. At a promised $1.4 billion, the surplus-come-deficit was only about one per cent of the federal budget. Morneau’s bad news was that it will really be about a $3 billion deficit.

This federal $3 billion does not factor in the Liberal’s promised deficit financing on infrastructure spending to get more Canadians working. Again, the Federal Liberals intend to run these until before the next federal election when they will also produce a balanced(?) budget. Morneau has four years in which to figure out how to do that.

Most knowledgeable financial experts gave Morneau a pass on his claim that his predecessor might have exaggerated. They thought he was only feeding the media a bit of B.S. on his claimed deficit. They did not treat Charles Sousa at Queen’s Park as kindly. They thought he was counting the same money too many times.

You have to be really old to remember the times when we used to take a finance minister’s claims as gospel.

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Pay yourself first.

November 29, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It is a rule that the rich have to follow. They are taught that you always pay yourself first. It is how they stay rich. Take the situation of Chief Executive Officer Paul Godfrey at Postmedia. The company loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year and the stock is in the toilet. If the company was any more leveraged, the fulcrum would be left behind.

But CEO Godfrey and his inner circle still get their bonuses. Paul took home his one and a half million or so this year from a company that he acquired out of bankruptcy with a very large chunk of American hedge fund money. His promise was to slash costs and salaries to profitability. He is still a long way from that objective.

The recent and highly-leveraged acquisition of the English-language assets of Sun Media has not produced his promised reduction in the fiscal bleeding. The leveraged buyout from Karl Péladeau’s Quebecor for just $316 million was a good deal until you realize that it added another $650 million to Postmedia’s already massive debt.

Maybe that is all you need in business today. Nobody denies that Paul Godfrey has chutzpah but with his added hubris, you would think he would look for better challenges. He might have lost his friend Stephen Harper in Ottawa despite his forcing all of his newspapers to endorse the Conservatives but he has embraced Barrie Ontario’s own Patrick Brown as though he were a long lost son. His next ambition could be to make that boy Premier of Ontario.

Mind you the question of making Patrick Brown palatable to Ontario voters might be far more of a challenge than even Paul Godfrey can handle. As you have noticed lately, the lad only speaks occasionally but he does have a decent hair cut, an expensive suit and the proper accessories. At least Patrick no longer looks like a sow’s ear.

But the concern is that Paul Godfrey’s house of cards at Postmedia is working on constantly diminishing returns. If Paul keeps paying himself and his henchmen while still paying the vigorish to the American hedge funds, he will ride that gravy train right into what Lord Connie Black recently referred to as his own end zone. And as other writers have noted, Paul is no wunderkind in the newspaper business. He is barely in the mainstream of Canadian politics. Maybe at 76 it is time for him to take his millions and retire to some warm place in the sun.

The newspaper business is no longer for people who love the smell of newsprint. Paul was always a manipulator and never an innovator. As a retiree, he could just carp about things like the rest of us.

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Two thumbs up for the Charbonneau show.

November 26, 2015 by Peter Lowry

As Cole Porter put it in “Another Op’nin’, Another Show” to open his hit musical Kiss me Kate, there really is no business like show business. And there is nothing more insidious than the omertá of the Mafia and the corruption of politicians. Madame Justice France Charbonneau’s enquiry into construction in Quebec ran an extra two years and produced a libretto of more than 1600 pages. There will be the appropriate clucking of tongues, promises of definitive action and the report will be filed and forgotten.

What surprised the enquiry more than anything else was that the politicians were skimming more money from construction in Quebec than the Mafia. That poses a challenge to the Mafia bosses and their henchmen in the biker gangs. There could be more “examples to others” swimming with the fishes and the fecal matter in the St. Lawrence River.

The Superior Court Justice actually said that “This report tries to address the problems with concrete solutions.” That might mean there could be more recalcitrant contractors wearing concrete boots looking up from the bottom of the river.

What the report misses is the ingrained lassitude of Quebecers towards this stealing. There is something of a measure of pride in how efficiently the skimming is done. The analysis shows that the Mafia and bikers are getting about 2.5 per cent of contracts while the politicians are easily taking at least 3 per cent. Along with the middlemen engineers and civil servants, Quebec is being tithed more than 6 per cent of its construction expense. And that adds up to billions of dollars every year. It is paid through taxes.

But that is considered chicken feed to the better organized and better connected Calabrian Mafia in Ontario. Also known as the ‘Ndrangheta, these mobsters have become wealthy patrons of the arts and politics in Ontario and few in the know would dare make even casual allegations in light of their power and position of privilege.

In a life in politics, you keep tripping over these people. They are well-educated professionals, they have successful businesses, their memberships are impeccable and they marry well. Their golf handicaps are low and they winter only in the best parts of the Caribbean. They leave the pimping, strippers and strong-arm stuff to the biker gangs. They are a tight-knit family and they have come a long way from Calabria.

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Can the provinces keep the money?

November 24, 2015 by Peter Lowry

It seems that the point has been made about climate change: Industry can destroy the environment if they pay a tax on it. And that is why the provinces are so eager to cooperate with the Trudeau government. It is all determined by who gets the money. It makes you wonder how the federal government will get anything out of the provincial carbon tax bonanza?

It all started with British Columbia. Premier Christie Clark has acted something like a mother hen with her chicks. She insists the B.C. carbon tax is revenue neutral but the province operates the toll booths and sets the prices. We expect her province intends to keep the profits from the sin of pollution.

Premier Rachel Notley announced her Alberta solution to climate change with the enthusiasm of a second coming. It seems you can ship all the bitumen where you want as long as you pay the province when you go over the to-be-determined cap. The beauty of the plan is that both individual citizens and polluters get to pay for this and the individual taxpayer might get some money back when the province feels generous.

Premier Brad Wall of Saskatchewan is still stonewalling the federal government over Syrian refugees coming to Canada. We all assume this must be part of his strategy to win the federal Conservative leadership and so everyone is trying to ignore him. Anyway, we expect Saskatchewan to follow the Alberta lead.

All Manitoba does is a lot of talking about climate change but has not figured out how to tax it yet. Premier Greg Selinger of Manitoba will be at the conference to learn how.

Being supposed Liberals, Ontario and Quebec’s premiers are flexing their muscles and are ready to defend their highly profitable cap and trade tax plan. They have even got California tied into the loop to give them even more heft. Both provinces will make a killing on the taxes if the feds agree to them keeping the money.

And then there are the Atlantic provinces that are not causing very much climate change. Mind you they are always open to good tax plans.

You can just imagine this crowd of premiers standing behind Prime Minister Trudeau at the Paris climate conference. His RCM Police detail will be more concerned about the premiers picking the prime minister’s pockets than any serious security concerns.

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