Provincial Politics – Page 96

Quebec’s edge of the wedge.

June 29, 2015 by Peter Lowry

You have got to watch those guys! There is nobody slipperier than a Quebec provincial politician. If they cannot get you coming, they get you going. They have the God complex. They are so sure of themselves. They even think they can control the Internet. They already know they can control free speech—all that is left is a minor jurisdictional dispute with Ottawa.

Since the Internet is provided by companies controlled by the federal government, Quebec might have a few problems with this fight. The province wants to block all web sites offering on-line gambling other than the web-site owned by Lotto-Quèbec. It is alright for them to rip off Quebec citizens but everyone else is verboten.

They actually think they can keep the interlopers out and enable Lotto-Quèbec to make another $10 million to $20 million per year of profits for the Quebec treasury. What some of the Quebec politicians might be thinking is that if it is easy to bar certain web sites why not start making lists of web sites that oppose Quebec’s separatists. Maybe it is easier to just ban any web site that is not in an acceptable language? There are so many possibilities.

But start with the easy targets. These first sites to be barred are just interlopers. No one cares about their rights.

But is that not where it always starts? And there had better be those who care. The very strength of the Internet is the borders it breaches. It is worrisome though when you realize that Quebec has never had a strong ethos of rights and freedoms. Last year’s Charter of Values was a good example of the problem. It was just one more example of how Quebec politicians were willing to take away freedoms from their own.

It suits the tribalism—the overriding emphasis on language and insularity. It encourages the petty would-be tyrants such as Pierre-Karl Pèladeau. Quebec is not an island. It is not an entity by itself. It has a vital role to play in the future of Canada. To isolate and build barriers is to attempt to deny destiny.

Nobody who understands the Internet will disagree that it lacks discipline. It is that very lack of discipline that enables it to work. It shouts of freedom. And it must remain free. It is for all who would want to use it.

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Toronto Star doesn’t know diddley.

June 27, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Got up a bit late the other morning and found the wife grumbling over her coffee and the Toronto Star. She had read an editorial that annoyed her. Her complaint—on which she was quite voluble—was about the Star’s new stand on a casino at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto. Since she has always been in favour of having a full blown casino resort operation at that location, her complaint needed explanation. It turned out her complaint was about how little the writer knew about the subject.

Her first complaint was that the Star editorial writer suggested that blackjack and roulette tables could be added to Woodbine’s slots operation and it would be a full fledged casino. She considered that an insult to her and her fellow craps players. She does not consider a casino to be legitimate without at least one full-size craps table and a crew of at least four to keep it running smoothly. She is a purist: after trying the one-sided craps tables with their single croupier at the Casino de Montrèal, she has never been interested in going back to that casino.

But there is a strong possibility that her real complaint was the foolish suggestion in the Star that the casino at Woodbine should only operate 18-hours per day. The writer had the audacity to suggest that the casino close between 4 am and 10 am. That proves it: the writer is not knowledgeable and has probably never been to a casino in his or her life.

This is the kind of thinking that has hamstrung Atlantic City and cost it big in becoming a gambling destination. The wife and yours truly were once simultaneously ejected from an Atlantic City casino at 4 am. We had never been told that the casinos in that town closed every night. We were outraged. We were both on a roll. The wife was leading the riot at the craps tables and we were racking up some major loot at blackjack. And you never, ever interrupt a gambler on a roll. Atlantic City is also off the list.

And we could be dealing with similar problems in Ontario. We have newspaper editorial writers and politicians in this province ignorant about gambling and thinking they should make the rules. Few people really understand gambling. Not everybody wants to go to casinos. Yet they want to say ‘no’ to casinos for others. They say they are worried about people becoming addicted to gambling. Our society has far more serious problems with alcohol, drugs and tobacco.

Ignorant politicians who think they are protecting people from gambling addiction by saying ‘No’ to casinos are helping criminal elements to take gamblers’ money. Society can deal more easily with addictions that are out in the open. It is those that hide in back alleys that threaten us.

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Election changes need all-party support.

June 7, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Announcing proposed changes in Ontario election statutes last week, Premier Kathleen Wynne gave the credit for instigating change to Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer. If she now moves the changes through the legislature with the support of all parties, we could have some worthwhile legislation.

The least contentious change being suggested is to move the fixed date of the next scheduled provincial election from the fall of 2018 to the spring of 2018. While the majority party might prefer to wait until the spring of 2019, common sense suggests that there is no need to annoy voters with a six month or so extension of the mandate.

There might be an argument over the proposal to leave the 11 northern Ontario provincial ridings as is while adding 15 new ridings in the south. We have to recognize that is quite a high disparity in population between those ridings and southern Ontario ridings. When you consider that the original concept of “riding’ was the distance a person on horseback could travel in a day you can understand the challenges of representing one of those northern districts.

Why the Liberals want to “pre-register” 16 and 17 year-old non-voters is not so clear? It would be like registering them with a political party at birth. It might not offer the get-out-the-vote benefits that are hoped for.

But the most contention over the Chief Electoral Officer’s recommendations will be the question of third party advertising. This has been a serious blot on Ontario elections for quite a few years and the situation was blatant in the most recent election. Since the falling out between Ontario’s teacher unions and the provincial Liberals, all parties will have very political positions on the subject.

While maybe the teachers only helped win a minority for the Liberals in 2010, their gross expenditures on behalf of the Liberals in 2014 helped produce a sizeable majority for them. Why the Liberals are now in the midst of a knock-down, drag-out fight with the teachers has everybody wondering. Maybe it is just an attempt by Wynne’s Liberals to show that they are not in the unions’ pockets.

Since the new Conservative Party leader would not have a clue about teachers and Liberal Party relations, he will just be obtuse on the subject. The New Democrats on the other hand want to shaft the Liberals and win back their old allies, the teachers. Speculation on this subject should keep us amused for part of the summer.

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“Will no one rid us of that bother Brown?”

June 1, 2015 by Peter Lowry

In an erudite e-mail the other day a reader equated Ontario Conservative Party Leader Patrick Brown’s intelligence to that of a barrel of axe handles. He felt that it was a measure of our democracy where “someone as disadvantaged as Patrick can aspire to the leadership of a political party.”

But dammit, he should go away to Toronto and do the job that he appears to have bought and paid for. We are quite tired of him hanging around Barrie, spending our federal taxes to continue to promote him self. We excused the terribly self-serving, four-colour, full page ads in the local papers after he had resigned from the Parliament of Canada. We figured it was his last hurrah and good riddance.

But no such luck. We got another ugly grey mailing from him just this week promoting his half marathon promotion in June. It clearly said that it was from MP Patrick Brown and you could get more information on this event by e-mailing him at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.

Is he or is he not a Member of Parliament? Is he or is he not the Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario? Is he fish or fowl?

And now he is getting the New Democrat opposition in Ottawa in on the act. It appears that they have officially complained to the federal Board of Internal Economy about Brown’s attendance in Ottawa while running for the Ontario party leadership. They point out that if you show up for just 31 out of 131 votes in the House over the past seven months you are hardly doing your job as an MP. And they believe that using federal government communications to run for the Ontario party leadership is also a no-no.

But it is hardly a surprise to Barrie residents that Mr. Brown is using every loophole available to him to use our tax dollars for his benefit. Having attempted to analyze the figures reported from his last federal election campaign, we can only comment that the boy might have a future as a fiction writer.

And we still do not know who paid the more than $400,000 for the memberships in the provincial Conservative party that got the leadership for Mr. Brown.

It is wonderful to live in a democracy. It does not mean that persons such as Mr. Brown can abuse that democracy for their personal gain.

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An e-mail on preferential voting.

May 31, 2015 by Peter Lowry

To: [email protected]

Dear Minister McMeekin:

You must have missed reading Babel-on-the-Bay on March 26 this year. That was when one of the postings was devoted to Toronto council’s request to your Ontario ministry for preferential voting in that city’s municipal elections. The posting was about why this might not be a good idea.

It is obvious that under the pressures of your ministry’s work load, neither you nor your staff have had time to analyze the city’s request. Should you require further discussion of the subject, this writer would be pleased to help.

First of all, having been involved in municipal, provincial and federal elections for the past 53 years, we have some hands-on experience. And having held every position on a riding executive other than chair of the women’s committee, we have considerable political awareness. And having once run as a Liberal candidate, we have also spilled blood for the party.

But even then, it takes extensive study of voting systems and government structures around the world to truly understand their strengths and weaknesses. In response to the 2007 Ontario referendum on mixed member voting, we authored the Democracy Papers, a series of documents supporting our first-past-the-post voting system. The Democracy Papers are archived in Babel-on-the-Bay.com and even eight years later are accessed daily by researchers from around the world.

The very simple answer to people supporting preferential voting is that it is a system that makes the losers the choosers. It is not the complication of the ballot that is confusing. It is the suggestion that the voter has to make more than one choice. It is like back when Toronto had two aldermen per ward. A lot of mediocre candidates got elected because of that second vote.

Toronto has to be saved from its ignorance. And we certainly do not want to spread the disease across the province.

Thank you,

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Premier Wynne and the teachers’ Greek chorus.

May 29, 2015 by Peter Lowry

If you have this Greek tragedy at Queen’s Park figured out, you might be smarter than the rest of us. It seems to be a battle of choruses. And you can only tell the players apart by the masks they present to the audience.

We know that this current conundrum has something vaguely to do with educating Ontario’s children. Now if we could also educate the educators, the politicians and the public, all would be clear.

What we do know is that our children are being held for ransom by the teachers and if the teachers do not get what they want, our children will suffer. Parents will be angered. Politicians will be blamed. The only problem with this is that these teacher choruses wear many different masks and we have no way to know what it is they want.

Politicians also wear different masks and the three major choruses at Queen’s Park snipe at each other, pointing fingers at each other. There is no lack of blame being distributed.

Some of us remember those halcyon days when the teachers and the ruling party were close and loyal friends. Teachers paid much money to vilify the Conservative leader. They did such a good job for their Liberal friends that the Liberals were returned to a majority government. That meant that the Liberals no longer needed the teachers.

And now they are not friends. They have turned their backs on each other. They do not communicate—except through the news media. The news media do not understand anything either and are not helpful.

Those of us watching this fiasco unfold know quite well that none of this mealy mouthed concern for the children matters to the protagonists. It will be the first to recognize that this is not the way to win friends or influence voters, that starts to make sense of the situation. It might take a superhuman effort but someone has to put their brain in gear and come down to a 12-word condensation of what this fighting is about.

And if they are smart enough to do that they might also propose a 12-word solution to the problem.

The alternative is to having the situation fester for the next three years and we can end up with a new government that nobody thought possible. And then we will only have ourselves to blame.

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Bashing Barrie is a provincial sport.

May 27, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Queen’s Park dashed Barrie’s hopes for a university campus recently and nobody in the city is happy about it. You would swear that bashing Barrie could be made a sport as part of the upcoming Pan-Am Games. Barrie was again among the forgotten as the province announced that only York University is currently allowed to expand. And that expansion is only as far as Markham on the northern boundary of Toronto.

To Barrie’s credit, it made a very strong case for building a campus for Sudbury-based Laurentian University in the city. Georgian College already partners with a number of universities in offering degree granting courses for students in Barrie and Orillia. As it stands today, it is reported by the media that more than 80 per cent of Barrie’s young people seeking post-secondary education are forced to leave Barrie for that education.

As the major centre of population growth at the north end of the Greater Toronto Trading Area, Barrie serves a large trading area of its own covering much of Simcoe County. While most people assume that the city is just a bedroom community for Toronto, it actually is claimed to have more people coming to work there from the neighbouring areas than leave it to go to Toronto each day.

It is only Torontonians, such as Premier Wynne who assume that Barrie is just the gateway to the Parry Sound-Muskoka-Haliburton lake country. Mind you, Barrie residents are used to directing lost tourists on summer weekends that make the mistake of trying to find routes through town other than a jammed Highway 400.

But Barrie is something of a political nonentity at the moment. Having the leader of the opposition at Queen’s Park from Barrie and without a seat in the Legislature leaves the area in limbo even though represented at Queen’s Park by a Liberal backbencher. The MLA is new and has little experience, knowledge or background on what the city needs from the province.

Federally the situation has been much worse for some time as the Conservative Member of Parliament that just resigned had no real influence in Ottawa and is not expected to ever have any influence at Queen’s Park.

It will be interesting to see how much influence Bryan Tamblyn, the former president of Georgian College and candidate for the federal Liberals in Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte, can bring to bear on the matter. It depends entirely on whether or not he is under the thumb of the old guard Whigs who think they run the Liberal Party in Barrie.

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It’s hardly like winning the daily double.

May 17, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Back in March Babel-on-the-Bay commented on how sad it would be if Pierre-Karl Pèladeau won the Parti Quèbècois leadership in Quebec and Patrick Brown won the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership in Ontario. We need be more careful in what we do not wish for.

Both these men are giants only in their own minds. They won their respective prizes by an average of about 60 per cent of the votes. Both are in their party’s driver seat on sufferance. Neither has ever shown any skills in leadership or in political policy direction. And neither of them has ever shown any political personality. That is not charisma that they have shown Canadians.

Both are the antithesis of what their parties really need. At a time when the separatists in Quebec need a patient, methodical person who can rebuild the Parti Quèbècois in its once left-wing strength, they have a right-wing, self-important individual hell-bent to get to another referendum. In Ontario where the Conservatives needed a compromise candidate who could pull the party’s factions together, they had their membership swamped by people new to the province who had no idea who or what they were supporting. They got a right-wing, right to life candidate who has never accomplished anything.

Parti Quèbècois’ Pierre-Karl Pèladeau is also right wing politically and thinks he can pull together Quebec’s disparate separatists from the political left and the right. And besides that on Tuesday he has to face the Quebec National Assembly in Quebec City in the role of Leader of the Opposition.

Patrick Brown has time to think about that as he will also become Leader of the Opposition at Queen’s Park. All he has to do is find a Conservative member who will resign his or her seat for him to run for election. He already resigned as Member of Parliament for Barrie on Wednesday.

(That did not save Barrie residents from full page, four-colour advertisements in the two local papers wherein Brown congratulated himself for his nine years in Ottawa accomplishing nothing. Mind you, who paid for Brown’s $400,000 worth of PC Ontario memberships is still a far more important question than who paid for his self-aggrandizing advertising?)

It is a simpler question in Quebec because Pierre-Karl can pay his own bills while he still has control of the major news media in the province.

At least Pèladeau will have his “grand coalition” to create an independent Quebec to keep him busy. All the Ontario PC leader has is probably some marathons to run.

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Are your 15 minutes of fame finished Mr. Brown?

May 13, 2015 by Peter Lowry

The new leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives must have been saving money on speech writing when he talked to the Ontario Legislature on Monday. If there was ever a time for Patrick Brown to be gracious that was it. It was a courtesy that he was asked to address the members of the legislative assembly. They had Quebec Premier Phillippe Couillard giving a statesman-like address to the legislature and, in a non-partisan gesture, the Liberal government invited Patrick Brown, as a new party leader, to say something.

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s people must have known he would blow it. His party members in the legislature had to be embarrassed. Brown came out with a partisan attack on the Liberal government. It was the same attack as was added on to his speech to the convention on Saturday. It made some sense to the Conservative crowd on Saturday but made no sense under the circumstances on Monday. You could almost feel Couillard looking at him during the speech and thinking the French equivalent of “What a jerk!”

But the problem for voters in Ontario is that what you see with Patrick Brown is what you get. In a lengthy editorial on Tuesday, the Toronto Star told Brown to “Get to it.” Sorry, dear editor, but there is nothing more to get to.

Patrick’s record in Ottawa of doing nothing is not about change. After nine years of watching this young man in political (in)action, questioning those who know him well and others after meeting him, we can tell you he is unlikely to change, grow or mature in his new job.

People think they saw his strength in winning the Tory leadership. What they saw was his weakness. Those ethnic votes from the Indian sub-continent were a one-of event. Those are not votes that will matter in a general election—mainly because many of them are not yet citizens. There is nothing remarkable about his outreach to ethnic groups. That has been going on just as cynically in politics since before he was born. Nor does his false concern for the supposed disadvantaged in the north or rural Ontario come across as anything more than the usual political pandering.

The Toronto Star editorial writers think that Patrick Brown should open up about himself. The editors should be more careful about what they ask for.

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“Author, Author”

May 10, 2015 by Peter Lowry

Having written many political speeches over the years, it would have been a pleasant surprise to hear the shout for the author to take a bow among the applause at the end of many a speech. Having listened to MP Patrick Brown on Saturday when he accepted the leadership of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, that call would have been deserved. The speech was a good balance for the occasion.

Brown was gracious to his opponents and a bit obsequious to his friend MPP Monte McNaughton. McNaughton was the only candidate to quit the race and bring his socially conservative supporters to the Barrie MP. Not that Brown needed them. His mass memberships for people in the Tamil, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim and Chinese communities were more than enough to win and he recognized them by a few words in each language.

Despite the crafting of the speech, there is still a lot to do to improve the speaker. Mr. Brown has to be considered a work in progress. He can probably blame his mother for not doing something about his adenoids when he was young. That high, squeaky voice and the mouth-breathing appearance appears to be adenoidal. And while he is used to reading speeches, he does not seem to have the memory required to scoop ideas and then talk to his audience. You get a lot of his greasy hair while he reads to you.

When he goes off script such as he did near the end of the speech, he comes full face but seems to stutter a bit. He can probably be taught how to use a teleprompter. He might even learn how to handle seeming adlibs that are programmed into the script.

But speeches are not the main problem with Patrick Brown. This leadership contest was a “one-of.” No other political party in Canada is going to be so stupid as to allow someone to buy wholesale votes so as to swamp the party membership and win the leadership. Brown taught the Ontario PCs a lesson and they are not pleased about it. He will have to watch his back.

But it is his lack of any leadership qualities, his lack of direction and his lack of vision that should be worrying the Conservatives. Mind you, he found a speech writer or someone found the speechwriter for him. He will soon be assembling staff and starting to take advice from some of his backers. It is those backers who need to come out of the closet. We need to have an idea of where Patrick thinks he is going. Platitudes are not enough to take his party anywhere.

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