Category: Provincial Politics

Finance Minister Charles Sousa must have the easiest job in Ontario. He has Premier Kathleen Wynne making all the big decisions for him and TD Bank’s Ed Clark telling him how to handle the details. Which all goes to prove that in politics three wrongs do not make anything right. Which begs the question: why is Charles taking the blame?

The triumvirate seem to want to tell everybody about this budget before Charles reads it aloud in the Legislature some time in April or May. You would not expect there to be a budget lock-up if everyone already knows what is in the budget.

The only thing that is not really clear is the status of Hydro One. There has been a great deal of talk of selling off some of the hydro distribution systems in Ontario. All it will do is guarantee that consumers on those systems will pay more for electricity. That is just as silly as the Highway 407 fiasco. Selling off a public monopoly to make it a privately owned monopoly is just a license to rip off the public.

Now if we sold off the Liquor Control Board of Ontario that would be different. We would then allow people to open wine stores. Ontario citizens could buy beer where it is convenient in the neighbourhood, even at convenience stores. We could even have interesting and innovative liquor stores. This plan can make money for the province. There can be licenses, sales taxes, income taxes, business taxes and maybe even some lower sales prices for the consumers.

The point is that a monopoly that remains a monopoly should not be sold. A monopoly that can be sold to create new businesses, lots of jobs and more taxes is a very good idea.

But we already know that an up-tight, closed minded Premier has said she will not do that. Liberals used to be reformers. There is no possibility that the Premier is a reformer. She does not want to be a reformer. Nor is she a Liberal, very smart or very competent.

And that, in turn, reflects very badly on Finance Minister Charles Sousa. Charles told us that he used to be a banker. You have to wonder how he felt when the Premier told him that Ed Clark from TD Bank was going to help him do his job.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

You really have to wonder at people in Quebec thinking of Pierre-Karl Pèladeau as being the person to lead the Parti Quèbècois. That is like the prospect of Barrie MP Patrick Brown becoming leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. It is a very bad choice but for entirely different reasons.

The main difference between the two men is that at least Pèladeau is smart enough to know—or at least find out—that he is a square peg in a round hole. Brown might not be that smart. And that is despite Brown’s more extensive knowledge of politics. In fact, you sometimes get the impression that compared to Brown, Pèladeau might have the political instincts of a gerbil.

The latest gaffe by Pèladeau was something of a replay of the famous quote by an angry Jacques Parizeau at the end of the 1995 Quebec Referendum when he said that money and ethnics had cost the separatists their victory. Pèladeau put it even simpler that because immigration is controlled by the federal government that the Quebec separatists are losing ground. He explained that it was the immigration demographics that were causing the separatists to lose ground at the rate of a riding every year. He gave that as his reason for rushing the next referendum.

Besides being a square peg politically, Pèladeau also faces the problem of his attitude towards unions. He does not like them. This is a bit of a problem for him if he wants to lead the left of centre Parti Quèbècois. The party needs that union support.

Luckily for Brown, his party is ambivalent towards unions. With his enthusiastic endorsement of Timmy Hudak’s suggestion of firing 100,000 Ontario civil servants last year, Brown has obviously never been on the side of people who work for a living. In fact, that might be the main difference between Brown and Pèladeau. Brown has a very limited amount of experience with working at anything. Pèladeau started at the top and he won some and lost some—it was his late daddy’s company.

The basic problem is that Pierre-Karl has far too much to learn about politics and Patrick has too much to learn about real life. Nobody is particularly concerned about their prospect of winning their respective party leaderships. Either will be a disaster. They would do irreparable harm.

It is not that we care very much about what happens to the separatist Parti Quèbècois but in Ontario, the Wynne Whigs need some intelligent opposition.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

It is hardly going to work. Artfully enhancing his photographs is not going to solve the problem. Patrick Brown looks like he looks. We have always considered his appearance to be a mixture of somewhere between adenoidal and nerdy. Adenoids can be fixed but we have to assume that being a nerd is a permanent condition.

But here we are seeing pictures of a very dapper young man in MP Patrick Brown’s favourite papers that make you do a double take. It will cause him trouble in the long run. He will try to introduce himself to somebody and the person will take a look at him and tell him: “Take off kid. I’m waiting for the real Patrick Brown.”

To clarify, we are using the term ‘nerd’ as defined as an irritating, ineffectual or unattractive person. That seems to fit, in our opinion. And while the person can be either intelligent or stupid, they can be obsessed with a non-social hobby or pursuit. That also seems to fit. It would never do for us to say anything inappropriate about the young gentleman that others have chosen to send to Ottawa.

The problem is that Patrick Brown has been our Member of Parliament for Barrie for the past eight years. This was the year that we were going to see the end of him. Who would have dreamed that he was going to try to sidestep into Ontario politics?

We have been wracking our brain over recent weeks trying to determine what a retail politician such as Brown can bring to Ontario’s Tories. He has done nothing in Ottawa other than curry favour with certain cabinet members. He has courted the anti-abortion organizations but his first love is still marathon running and playing pick-up hockey. He contributes nothing of substance. He inundates his constituents with badly produced, cheap mailings that are nothing but federal Conservative propaganda.

Have the Ontario Progressive Conservatives not had enough troubles in recent years? They had a guy like John Tory shoot himself in the foot and leave. Then they had a disaster named Timmy Hudak. And now they could end up with Brother Brown who has absolutely nothing to contribute. It certainly has been a long slippery slope for Bill Davis’ Grand Old Party.

If the vote in May actually does go his way, maybe the Photoshop experts could add a party behind that retouched picture of Brown. Not many people in the Barrie area would want to be in the picture. They know him.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

The only conclusion that seems to make sense is that Barrie’s own MP Patrick Brown is running a bluff. He is working far too hard at winning over long-time Ontario Progressive Conservative members to be ahead in the provincial leadership race as much as he claims. He might have acquired his new sign-ups on the wholesale market back in January and February but will they remember him in May?

Brother Brown must be enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. And where he got the money for that many sign-ups is the question of the year? He is claiming sign-ups costing over $400,000 in membership fees alone. (These do not seem like people who would want to pay for the right to vote for Brown.)

Brown’s biggest problem is that he is a nebbish. He has a record as an absolute nonentity in eight years in Canada’s Parliament. He spends more than any other MP in his party mailing disgustingly cheap mailers to his constituents that support local charities and Conservative propaganda. He has absolutely nothing to say for himself.

So where did the money suddenly come from for a speech writer? He is finally saying something and he does not use words like that in normal conversation. He is saying that provincial politics matter. It is though he has just discovered that the province is responsible for things that affect our day to day life. He talks about health care and education as though they are something of a wonder. Maybe his speech writer is boning up on provincial responsibilities but Brown is still playing the numbers game.

Why he continues to harp on the membership numbers makes no sense if he really has the votes of his claimed 41,000 sign-ups. Maybe he does not trust them. What can he do if half those people never vote? Can he sue the people who sold him those members? Is he really going to start telephoning 41,000 people to see if they exist? And, if they are real, are they going to be around in May to vote as they are told?

Liberal Party members might laugh at the prospect of Brother Brown as the next Timmy Hudak. The only problem is that it can just as easily happen in their party. People in the Liberal Party have been known to buy memberships on the wholesale market. They might even be dealing with the same wholesalers as Brother Brown.

It was like when voting a couple years ago for the Ontario Liberal Party delegates to that party’s last provincial leadership contest. There were a large number of ladies in line to vote at the time we got there. Judging by their dress and as some were speaking Hindi, they were assumed to be from the subcontinent. It was just surprising later to learn from the 2011 census that there were only 35 women with Hindi as their first language in the entire Barrie census area. There were even fewer who spoke any of India’s regional languages. And chatting with the ladies as we waited to vote, it was disappointing to learn that none of those who spoke English knew the name of Barrie’s recently elected Liberal mayor.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Ontario beer drinkers are foiled again. Now the Ontario government wants to sell beer and wine in large grocery stores. It should have been easy to predict an outcome such as that. After all, everyone knows how much the Liberal’s friends, the Weston family, owners of Loblaw Companies, need the money. Here we have been trying so hard to make it easy for someone to pick up a six-pack of beer and the Wynne government wants to do the opposite. They are just not very bright.

There would be no convenience at all to having about one in seven of the football-field size combined grocery and dry goods and pharmacy super stores selling beer. Even if the coolers were near the door, you would still have to contend with that one-to-eight item line-up for people who cannot count to pay for your little six-pack.

And how are you to know if that mega-store sells beer? It can never be as well signed as Ontario’s famous “In and Out” stores. The Beer Store might have been the destination but the “In and Out” was the identifier.

And yet the stupid Wynne Whigs are going to shout about the new convenience. In discussions with the Retail Council of Canada, it was disclosed that the government wants to “enhance choice and enhance convenience.” How do you do that if your obvious aim is to add the beer and wine to the week’s grocery purchases? There is nothing wrong with selling beer, wine and liquors with food. That is certainly one way to do it. It is just not the only way. To restrict it in this way is just further unwanted and unwarranted paternalism by out-of-date, ignorant politicians.

And, at the same time, these politicians are going to force the foreign-owned Beer Store owners to kick in a new $100 million tax for the right to sell beer in Ontario. These owners are going to be quite unhappy with that and are going to raise their prices to pay the government’s new tax. The consumers always pay for the government’s greed.

We have got to free Ontario’s slaves folks. We have waited too many decades for the sale of beer, wine and booze to reflect our progress as a society. We are not making progress in this province. We are stalled somewhere in the early 20^th Century. And the really bad news is that these stupid politicians are charging us more than other people pay for booze. After all, they do not want the poor working man or woman to drink.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

It seems that the foreign-owned big breweries took a pass on purchasing tables at the Ontario Liberal Party’s major fund-raiser this year. Of course, they tell us that it is not corrupt nor payment for services rendered for those breweries to always step readily up to the bar for tickets to these events.

But now that they are displeased with the Liberal government for threatening their sales monopoly, why are they no longer such good corporate citizens? Should this not be taken as withholding payment for services not rendered? Is this a new definition of corruption?

And why are we in Ontario tolerating such corruption?

And why is Ontario’s chief elections officer trying to do something about third-party political advertising during elections? The man’s job is to get us to clean up our act and we have got to listen to him. He blew the whistle last month about the Liberal fiasco in Sudbury and we are still waiting for someone to do something about it. You can use weasel words if you like but a bribe is still a bribe.

And please do not think it is just Wynne’s Whigs who are corrupt. In our opinion, Ontario politics are corrupt. You have the example of an Ontario federal Conservative politician buying his way towards the provincial party leadership with over $400,000 worth of memberships. And if you really believe each one of those people paid their own membership, we have some muskeg near Bancroft in which you can invest.

And there is no reason to let Ontario’s New Democrats off the hook. They take their cut from the brewers’ unions to protect those unionized jobs. That makes them hypocrites in protecting the Beer Store monopoly. They should answer to their own membership for the way they are helping artificially force up the price of beer in this province.

What is even more embarrassing is that Ontario lags behind all other provinces in Canada in controlling all aspects of election expenditures. Special interest groups spent almost $9 million in the last Ontario election and most Ontario residents have no idea who the “Working Families” were who spent $2.5 million hammering Conservative Leader Timmy Hudak. The point was not whether Hudak deserved such treatment or not but the fact that it was in support of Premier Wynne in her bid for re-election.

When the Liberal Party holds a fund-raiser at a price of $15,500 per table, it has taken the event well beyond the ability of most voters to participate. That alone lays the event open to charges of corruption.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

This blog rarely apologizes. And nobody has prompted this apology other than our feeling of guilt the other day. We just feel that fair is fair. It came like a rising tide while sitting at a blackjack table at the Niagara Fallsview Casino. We had taken a few days off for a short trip and, in the face of freezing rain and deplorable driving conditions, we overnighted in Niagara Falls, Ontario. After dinner, the wife wanted nothing more than a nice warm bed and suggested that your writer might go explore the Fallsview Casino.

And that is why we want to take back anything nasty we have ever said about Casino Rama. The problem is that we have always loved Niagara Falls, Ontario. Sure, its tacky town but it is our tacky town. Las Vegas is Tacky Town with capital “T’s.” And when they opened the original Casino Niagara on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, Ontario, we expected it to be tacky. And it sure was.

Casino Niagara was fun—most of the time. It had no pretensions. You could imagine a place like it in downtown Las Vegas and it would fit right in with the Four Queen’s and Binion’s Horseshoe.

But we expected the Niagara Fallsview Casino to have pretensions. It is not Caesars Palace or the Bellagio but as a showcase for Ontario, you had a right to expect more. You sure do not get more.

Once you are in the gambling area, you find the Fallsview Casino is poorly planned, poorly lit, and badly managed. What really put this gambler off was that it was very evident that the comfort and well-being of the customer was the farthest thing from the concerns of casino management. This place does not even rate against the Seneca Casino just across the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, New York.

The pit employees at the Fallsview act as though the gamblers are not even there. You are reluctant to bother them. They are not friendly. Even the one craps table in operation was subdued and cranky.

And playing blackjack with a bored dealer became quickly boring for everybody. It was only the fact of winning that kept this gambler there for a while. It was strange playing with cheaply made chips that needed cleaning—they often stuck together.

While we appreciated the Casino winnings paying for our room and dinner for the evening, we will henceforth be more positive about Rama. Since it is 25 minutes from where we live, we tend to take it for granted. It just also happens to have very pleasant employees (other than in Players Services) and a much brighter and well lit gaming floor. We will henceforth be more appreciative.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Ottawa is so bereft of excitement and speculation now that former Foreign Minister John Baird has flounced out of cabinet and gone home to Nepean. It leaves Minister of National Defence and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney as the last Bobbsey Twin standing. It leaves the obvious succession line for the Conservative Party of Canada an open door for the Conservative Cardinal of Calgary.

But wait. Did not Brother Brown from Barrie not just give away the secret of how the Minister of Multiculturalism intended to use the keys held by his department to win the party? Was it not Kenney who set up the do-nothing MP from Barrie with the key to a half million Ontario residents with roots in India? Why else would Kenney insist on keeping two time-consuming portfolios? National Defence makes serious demands on its minister in peace-time let alone when we have military deployed in harm’s way in various parts of the world.

It was Kenney who, as multicultural minister ingratiated himself with the Prime Minister by coming up with the multi-cultural people walls that the Prime Minister uses for his major announcements. God forbid that PM Harper would have to announce anything important in the sterile confines of Canada’s Parliament. Mind you some of those people on the walls are starting to make facial expressions about what the PM is saying. It is time to hire a Village People group who know to keep their emotions in check.

But how is any contender to replace Stephen Harper going to compete with Kenney’s easy ability to bring in new Conservative Party memberships in the hundreds of thousands. He could make the effort by Justin Trudeau before the last Liberal leadership contest look pitiful by comparison. What will cause him to stop will be all the $10 memberships he will have to pay for. No likely Conservative Party contender could compete with a half-million sign-ups.

Mind you there is a great deal of thinking in the political parties today about how to contend with those numbers of ethnic sign-ups. As Brother Brown is about to prove in Ontario, wholesale sign-ups are not guaranteed to be highly reliable. Nor are they particularly useful as they have been signed on a one-time basis. These are not people interested in long-term political participation. The best solution might be to cut off the memberships at the same time a leadership convention is called.

Political people just have to think more long-term in their planning. Good grief, we are becoming more like the Americans every day.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]

Martin Regg Cohn, provincial affairs writer at the Toronto Star seems to be on a similar track as this writer on many aspects of politics in Ontario. He just works for a family friendly newspaper and has to be more polite. He really caught us off guard the other day with his article about the Wine Rack and the Wine Shop that are usually part of large grocery stores. We have always tried to ignore those pathetic places.

But when Martin started quoting sales figures in the billions, the jaw dropped. Are that many people in Ontario so desperate for a little wine with dinner? Have you read the labels on that stuff? Have you tasted it in the clear light of day? This was always assumed to be for people who are desperate after the local LCBO has closed for the evening. Or it is for people with absolutely no knowledge of wines whatsoever? The gag reflex kicks in just imagining trying to drink it.

This is not being a wine snob. When Quebec first allowed companies to import blended wines in bulk and then tried to cover the flavour with Canadian wines, we tried it and found that the experiment was an abysmal failure. And this was a taste test by a guy who uses Armand Roux’ l’Épayrié as his house wine!

Ontario followed Quebec into the foolishness and have been corrupting Ontario wine palates ever since. You would think that with the popularity of Downton Abbey on television, people might be picking up some tips on decent wines.

What we can tell you for sure is that nobody in central Ontario is allowed to have a proper wine with their dinner in the expensive restaurants. If anyone can explain why you can never find even a mediocre French wine on wine lists in this area, this ‘inquiring` mind would like to know.

But getting back to Martin Regg Cohn, we are unlikely to disagree with him in his analysis of the stupidity of Ontario politicians. These ignorant people have trapped Ontario in the early 1900s. They fail to realize that we won the First World War and the flappers took over in the twenties. We would have been happier through the dirty thirties if the booze had flowed better but then we had another war to win in the forties. By then the politicians thought they should be more paternal and they have screwed up the distribution of beer, wine and spirits ever since.

What Martin misses in his stories of sales of beer, wine and liquor is the absolutely disgusting customer experience across Ontario with the Beer Store. It would not surprise us to learn that the Star writer has never been in a Beer Store.

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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]