World Politics – Page 15 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Tried and found wanting.

June 16, 2016 by Peter Lowry

If there was a God, would He not be looking down on us today in dismay. Would He be pleased with the state we are in? Would He be pleased with the way we are destroying this beautiful world? Can He be pleased with how casually we kill ourselves and each other?

Is it a contest to see if we can kill more with cars than with guns? Can we allow stupid bigotry to fuel the rise of fascist bullies? Why do we promote racist and religious and tribal hatreds?

And at the same time, we promote base stupidity. Take the Brits. These people who live in those beautiful little isles are so misled that they want to hang themselves economically. They are misdirecting their anger and fears. They are willing to destroy their own economy in their bitterness. If they leave the European Union, they might as well throw their British Pounds into the English Channel. They will be worthless. No other country can subscribe to such ignorance.

And if we send one more foolish Children’s Crusade to the Middle East, we deserve the horrendous costs. If you think you should visit Allah’s House or back yard, you have to wait until you are invited. To visit uninvited is to earn retribution. You cannot practice Jingoism and make peace. You cannot follow false leaders.

Nor should we peace-loving(?) Canadians sell weapons of war against their own people to the Saudi despots. Why do Canadians promote pipelines to export carbon pollution to the rest of the world? Is this not hypocrisy?

We ridicule Americans for their corrupt politics but does that make us any better? Like Americans, we kill ourselves with the sludge in our blood from Big Macs and fries. You can never look down on those you emulate.

And we should stop worrying about the One Per Cent. It is the 99 per cent who need the attention, the nurturing, the worry, as they are the ones who inherit what is left of this poor planet.

We must treat this world as the jewel that it is. It belongs to us and to future generations—our progeny. We must look after this planet and those whose lives intertwine with ours. For ours is but a brief span of a lifetime and we should treat this earth and fellow travellers with the respect they deserve.

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Vote Reform Primer: Proportional.

June 7, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The following is an up-dated version of the discussion on proportional voting in the Democracy Papers of 2007. This is the second of the series.

There is no denying that proportional voting in its many variations is the most common voting system in the world. This works very well in countries with many languages or with a high rate of illiteracy. All the voter needs to do is indicate which political party they prefer by making a mark or selecting the symbol of the party they prefer. After the election, members of each of the parties are appointed from party lists to the legislature according to the number of votes. There is usually a cut-off point of maybe three or five per cent below which no appointment is made.

In their enthusiasm for this form of voting, you will hear some supporters claiming that it will increase voter turnout and female legislative representation. Would it not be wonderful if such simplistic solutions to fixing our voting systems would work?

But the truth is that it is not so simple. Proportional representation (PR) has evolved in many variations. Mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting is just one variation that tries to accommodate both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR. MMP is the system that was presented as an option for Ontario voters in the October 2007 referendum.

But can it improve voter turnout? No. The voting method is not what influences voter enthusiasm or voter apathy. MMP voting in Mexico could hardly overcome voter apathy during 71 years of that country’s politics being dominated by one party. It was only the winds of change that took the usual 40 per cent turnout to over 60 per cent in the year 2000 to elect a president from an opposition party.

It has been constantly proved in Canadian elections that the closeness of the contest, the attractiveness of leaders and candidates, the efforts of campaign workers, the reporting of the news media and the major issues being argued as well as regional events are all factors in influencing voter turnout.

“Increasing female legislative representation” is an ongoing myth of those who support proportional voting. This idea might have something to do with the high percentage of women in public office in the Nordic countries of Europe that use PR voting but there are also sociological factors to consider. An unusual factor in Norway is a 40 per cent rule in the Storting (parliament). Despite the successes women have had, they still feel they need a law to ensure 40 per cent of the legislators are women. Some sociologists suggest that this rule limits women more than ensuring their role. Since Norway uses pure PR voting, the party lists for each of their electoral districts have the obligatory female representation. According to the International Parliamentary Union, currently 39.6 per cent of the legislators in Norway’s Storting are women.

Some people would consider it unfair to suggest Mexico’s MMP voting helps increase the number of female legislators. They would point out the supposed Mexican male machismo and that male dominance in a devoutly Catholic country would hold women back. And they would be wrong. Despite women only winning the right to vote in Mexico in 1947 and the right to run for election in 1953, they have progressed to a greater share of seats than women legislators in Canada. Mexican women hold over 42 per cent of their federal congress seats and Canadian women currently hold just 26 per cent of the seats in our House of Commons.

PR voting is no panacea. It is a system that the Mexicans have fiddled with for the past 90 years. They are still not sure they have it right. While the Mexican President is chosen by direct FPTP election, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies (similar to the U.S. House of Representatives) use a mixed-member selection process. Of the 128 senators, 96 are elected and 32 are selected from closed party lists. In the Chamber of Deputies, 300 deputies are elected by FPTP voting and 200 selected from party lists.

In Ontario, the proposal was that there be 90 members elected by FPTP in larger ridings, averaging 135,000 people, and then another 39 members be selected from party lists according to the party vote. How this would solve the ills of a plurality (FPTP) system remains very much a mystery.

The suggestion often made by PR supporters is that the FPTP system means people who do not vote for the winner are wasting their vote. They also think people are wasting their vote when they add their vote to the winners’ pile when the winner already has more than enough votes. It is not a very logical argument.

Hundreds of years ago, before voters were given ballots to indicate their choice, they would gather in the market square and would shout out their choice of person to send to parliament. While that system was not perfect, it was the best that could be done at the time. Even today, FPTP is not a perfect system but at least it allows us to make a choice and not have to trust political parties to make our choices for us.

Today Canadians have a system of voting that allows them to vote for someone they have an opportunity to know. The candidates are very frequently from your community and we have the opportunity to decide if we want them to represent us. Proportional voting means that we can only vote for a political party and its leader.

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When controlling media, look like you’re not.

May 1, 2016 by Peter Lowry

The other day Lisa LaFlamme of CTV News was actually gushing when she said she was reporting from Northern Iraq. She was flattered and delighted to be reporting from just down the road from where the dreaded Daesh, or ISIL or ISIS, or pretenders at being an Islamic State are holed up in the Iraq city of Mosul. She had been selected for this honour by the Department of National Defence. CTV and the Toronto Star were following the chief of the defence staff on a tour of Canadian operations in Northern Iraq with Kurdish peshmerga army troops.

It was the best piece of self-serving media manipulation we have seen recently. You can only conjecture on what the military were selling to want to be baby-sitting reporters that close to a war zone.

And inviting experienced media people such as LaFlamme and Bruce Campion-Smith has other risks. These are not kids just off the rewrite desk. They know what questions to ask and they can be persistent.

And what has Defence got to sell? The only thing that seems to be in flux at this time is the question of rethinking the dumping of the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter. Some people are saying that National Defence wants the F-35 back in play. The over-priced, attack fighter hardly fits any of Canada’s defence needs and is the last aircraft that Canada should be considering.

But Defence’s top sales guy was there to carry the message. The reporters were treated to an extensive briefing by the chief of the defence staff. Lieutenant General Jonathan Vance said a few things that caught our attention. While he said we would be arming some of the elite Kurdish forces the Canadians have been training, there is to be no attempt to upgrade the equipment of the regular peshmerga soldiers–which means the Kurds will be on their own in confronting the confused leadership in Bagdad after the Daesh forces in Iraq have been destroyed.

And Vance bravely said Daesh would be destroyed. That is a strange promise for a general who is not going to allow his Canadians to enter Syria.

It seemed to be no secret that the peshmerga are to be used to mop up the Daesh fighters when they try to escape Mosul by heading north to the Syrian or Turkish borders. That seems to be on the assumption that the Iraqi forces (with their American ‘trainers’) are able to chase them out of Mosul.

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No honours for Elizabeth at 90.

April 19, 2016 by Peter Lowry

If the Brits really get lucky, Queen Elizabeth might outlive her son Charles. It seems that the British monarchy is holding up better than the country’s membership in the European Union. Mind you if that green little island gets cut adrift from Europe, there is no telling what will happen.

One of the worst-case scenarios for ‘Brexit’ (England’s shorthand for ending ties to the EU) would be the Brits trying to get Australia, Canada and New Zealand to help pay for the excessive cost of the Royals. This is well covered today by England’s tourism but by the time the French and Germans get even for deserting them, the British Pound would not be worth 16 ounces of anything. And the French would feel justified in turning their half of the Chunnel into a hostel for homeless Syrians.

We can hardly speak for the Aussies and New Zealanders but Canada would not be inclined to help fund England’s then impoverished Royals. Bill and Kate could bring the kids for a visit but if they wanted to stay Bill would have to get himself a proper job. Nobody can be pretender to the Throne of Westminster forever.

But what use are ties to England when the Brits have thoroughly pissed off the rest of Europe? Brexit would not be a friendly divorce. The country would be able to turn Heathrow Airport into an English Maquiladora to make cheap knock-offs of American products for the EU.

Canada would have no choice but to open up its constitution to changes. We could get rid of the Senate of Canada and the Monarchy at the same time. No more cartoon Governors General. It would open a new day for Canada with a constitution that serves us all.

But could Queen Elizabeth carry on regardless under this scenario? Could her and the old Duke face the torture of travelling tourist class on Air Canada for a royal visit to the Canadian colony? Even if the Monarchist League had a fundraiser, all they could probably be able to afford would be a first-class upgrade for her but the old Duke would be left to his own devices back with the hoi polio.

We will have to face the facts that at 90, Queen Elizabeth is very set in her ways. The Brits should leave her alone. That ignorant Mayor of London who is leading this Brexit fiasco needs to exit the Court of St. James by a window for a date with the guy who chops off heads. It might be the first decent haircut the jerk has ever had.

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The snob appeal of Brexit.

March 30, 2016 by Peter Lowry

Babel-on-the-Bay has decided not to do any Morning Line handicapping on the question of Great Briton voting to leave the European Union in the June 23 referendum (commonly referred to as Brexit). Unlike the Scottish referendum a couple years ago, we have no emotional ties to this argument. While there is no reason to think this vote will change anything, the foolish Brits seem to need the exercise as a way to clear the air, so to speak.

Quite frankly the entire exercise also seems to be a way for Brit Prime Minister David Cameron to play his usual games. What we are sure of is that no matter what side wins, it is the Brits who are going to pay the piper. This is a lose-lose proposition. It is already a stick in the eye to the French and Germans just for holding the referendum.

While Canadian expatriate Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, is doing his damnedest to stay out of it, there are so many economic questions that he is being dragged into the middle of the fray. What he obviously knows is that the Bank of England will be paying for this referendum either way. England has already annoyed the rest of Europe for its smug bigotry on the refugee file, the slurs against EU membership and their ongoing snobbish attitude towards fellow members of the European Union.

Any person who has gone through a divorce can tell you that it pays to keep some friends among your former family.

And it not as though there is any solace in thinking the Americans are your best friends for life. When you weight the economy of the European Union against that of Great Briton, who the hell would you choose?

And the Brits can hardly count on the Commonwealth. Canada is tied so tight to the Americans that Ottawa would have to call Washington to ask permission before offering anything to Great Briton. And the Aussies and New Zealanders are likely to have a jolly good laugh if the Brits ever asked them for anything. And have the Brits tried doing business with India lately?

The smart thing for the Brits to do is to cancel the damn referendum before they do any more damage.

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Did Le Pen expect rose petals?

March 22, 2016 by Peter Lowry

What did Marine Le Pen president of France’s Front National Party expect? Canadians are hardly about to strew rose petals in her path when she decides to come here and tell us what we are doing wrong. We are open-minded people but we are not particularly interested in people who spread bigotry and fear.

Who does Le Pen think she is, Donald Trump?

Mind you, that seems to be the hard-right wing politician’s thing. Marine Le Pen is a problem for France in that role she rails against immigrants and Syrian refugees alike. She wants to keep France pure. She embarrasses the conservative and the left-wing alike in her own country. And it is why she is being shunned during her holiday in Canada.

No Canadian politician of any stripe is eager to be seen with Le Pen. Even Pierre-Karl Péladeau has denounced her and her political views. He has little choice. While he might have been impressed with the Front National during his years of living high in Paris on the Péladeau family fortune, he is now the leader of a mainly left-wing Parti Québécois. It would never do for him to be seen hob-knobbing with the likes of right-wing Le Pen.

The best we can do for Le Pen as a tourist is to point out some of the excellent restaurants she will find while visiting Quebec City and Montreal. We would also point out to her that some of the most interesting nightlife in Quebec City is in the western suburbs such as the Sainte-Foy area.

One of the Canada’s federal politicians who might have found a conversation with Marine Le Pen interesting is Canada’s Minister of Democratic Institutions. In the recent round of regional elections in France Le Pen’s Front National candidates did very well in the first round of voting. They reached as much as 42 per cent of the vote in some areas.

But France, with its two-round voting system, requires a majority to be elected. In the second round of voting, Le Pen’s candidates fell by the wayside as more mainstream candidates won the majority of votes. In some cases more left of centre candidates had stepped aside to ensure that the Le Pen candidates were defeated. And they were.

Minister Maryam Monsef in Ottawa should pay heed.

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The Saudis are not Canada’s friends.

January 9, 2016 by Peter Lowry

If you wanted to find opposites in the world of international relations, you could not find countries as contrary to each other as Canada and Saudi Arabia. When people refer to the Saudis as the Kingdom, it is not a friendly term. It is reality. And a country such as Canada is anathema to everything the Saudi Royal family stand for.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is a country deeply imbued in the extremism of Wahhabism. While Sunni Mohammedan in origin Wahhabism is the Tea Party sector of Islamic fundamentalism. And the Kingdom runs on it. It was Saudi’s who supported Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. It is also widely believed that it was funds from the sale of Saudi oil that funded the fledgling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). For where the state teaches extremism, extremists are created.

While Canada’s foreign affairs has to deal with the Saudis, there is no reason to ever consider the Kingdom as friends. For Canada to sell the Saudis the heavy weapons of war is hypocrisy. These armoured vehicles Canada is sending to the Saudis are to suppress the Saudi’s people. They are the product of an American company made in Canada. They are licensed to kill people.

But there is one thing for sure, the Saudis will not let their women drive them. Women are not even allowed to have a driver’s license in that country.

Canada, a pluralistic, democratic and open society, does not have to pander to the Saudis. We do not even need their oil. And do not forget that it was the Saudis who drove down the price of oil to force tar sands synthetic oil producers in Canada and Venezuela out of business. So far they have done a good job of it.

What Canada and the world cannot countenance is the wholesale slaughter of people who dissent in their society. When a society can so casually kill people, what is our moral position in doing business with them? You cannot sell people the bullets one day and then remonstrate them for using the bullets for their purpose.

Canada does not have to like countries with which it maintains relations. It should stand ready at any time to offer the hand of friendship to a country that recognizes the value of human life. Until then, the Kingdom should be quarantined.

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“Justin, Justin, Where have you been?”

November 28, 2015 by Peter Lowry

“I’ve been to London to see the Queen.”

And that was it. Our fealty assured, Prime Minister Trudeau went on to Downing Street to meet the guy who really runs things in England. These meetings were scheduled ahead of the Malta meeting of the heads of the British Commonwealth of Nations. There is little time there for anything more than a pro forma ‘Hello’ in Malta. There are more important fish to fry in that venue.

The objective is to restore Canada as a leader in not only the Commonwealth but in world politics. Hobnobbing with the Queen in that meeting would be a waste of valuable face time with key United Nations contacts who are also members of the Commonwealth. It is also a good bounce pad to arrive fresh and relaxed at the Paris climate change conference.

And Trudeau is no royalist in any event. As a Quebecer, he is ambivalent to the Queen. On meeting her (he was a lot younger last time they met) he was probably thinking “Nice old lady—so this is today’s British Empire!”

Mind you, she complained mildly when answering the toast he was asked to make to her at a Commonwealth dinner that he was making her seem old. The time has long gone when the monarch could say “Off with his head.”

The facts are that there really has not been a British Empire since Prime Minister David Lloyd George left Whitehall after the First World War. What Winston Churchill had left for the Second World War was mainly bluster. It was the Americans, Canadians and allies who supplied and fed the Brits during that war and joined them in sacrificing their young on the battlefields.

What Prime Minister David Cameron knew when he met with Trudeau in London was that the Canadian had no interest in supporting more bombing of Iraq and Syria. He knew better than to ask Trudeau to keep Canadian planes there to support Old Blighty.

And Trudeau had a plan ready to impress the gathering of Commonwealth members by offering more money towards the fight against global warming. He could then go on to the Paris climate conference with a broad array of Commonwealth countries already in his corner. Justin Trudeau has done more for Canada’s foreign relations in the past month than Stephen Harper could do in nine years.

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“Fear us,” said ISIL. But should we?

November 18, 2015 by Peter Lowry

“Fear us,” said bin Laden’s al-Queda. And the Americans feared them. They involved the West in foreign wars that nobody has won.

The people who call themselves an Islamic State say “Fear us.” And they have involved the West in foreign wars that nobody can win.

Did we learn nothing back in the time of Saladin and the Crusaders? Did we not understand the fate of Gordon in Khartoum at the hands of the Mahdi? Did we really believe the silly propaganda about a poor War I soldier they called Lawrence of Arabia?

First the French and then the Americans were defeated by the jungles of South East Asia. The Americans and their allies faired as poorly against the opium poppy growers of Afghanistan as the Russians and the British before them.

And for all the lives lost and damaged in the search for Osama bin Laden, it was technology, the CIA and a small U.S. Navy Seal team that finally spelled his end.

Now the French have every right to feel enraged and vulnerable. After the Paris attacks, they want revenge. It is the World Trade Center redux. And the noose on our freedoms is tightening. All countries of the West share the concern.

But will we let these hoodlums, these brigands, with their false piety, corruption and child-like use of the Internet, call the tune? We have the technology to end the money trails to these false prophets of Allah. And without the money from the Arabian Peninsula and stolen oil, the criminals of the faux Caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant will soon wither and fade in the desert sands.

Why can we not realize that bombs are worthless without boots on the ground? You have to send armies after armies, planes against planes, ships to sink ships, bandits know bandits, spies counter spies, and terrorists terrorize terrorists. The French know the truth of that. We have to stop playing the game and simply win. We have the might and the technology, the intelligence and we have the right to seek justice.

But Canada has no place in making useless war. Despite the agony of our friends in France, we have to remove Canadian planes from the wasted bombing of the desert sands. We have to determine who should be helped in the quest for peace in the Middle East. We have to encourage others to join in supporting peace.

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Leave it in the ground says Obama.

November 7, 2015 by Peter Lowry

President Barack Obama has finally let the shoe drop on the Keystone XL pipeline. His rejection of the partially built pipeline was expected. It is now the answer to many other pipeline proposals emanating from the tar sands of Alberta. Keystone XL was just the stalking horse.

What the American President said was that if we are intent on preserving this planet “We are going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” He was saying that the bitumen derived from the tar sands is too polluting to be used to make synthetic oil.

And the people who want to exploit the tar sands for profit should be the losers. They have lied and denied and defied for too long. By no stretch of the imagination can Alberta bitumen be described as “heavy oil.” It is not oil. It is nature’s mistake in the creation of petroleum. It is the same pitch as the Phoenicians used to waterproof their galleys that plied the Mediterranean. It is the mortar that built ancient Babylon. It was only when crude oil is priced over US$60 a barrel that money can be made in tar sands exploitation.

One of the mistakes we make is to treat Venezuelan bitumen the same as Canada’s. The tar sands in Venezuela have a lower viscosity than Canadian bitumen. It actually is a heavy form of oil. This is mainly shipped to the Unites States where there are specialized refineries at the Texas Gulf ports that can work with it.

Diluting and heating bitumen slurry and pumping it under high pressure is the theory behind proposed pipelines such as Enbridge’s Gateway pipeline over the Rockies to Kitimat, the twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline over the Rockies to Burnaby or TransCanada’s Energy East or Enbridge’s converted gas pipeline to Saint John. All of these pipelines are guaranteed time bombs of disastrous spills that are almost impossible to clean up. On land a bitumen spill is a toxic fire hazard that leaches into the water table. On water, the spill gradually sinks to the bottom as the lighter diluting material washes away.

On the west coast the intent is clearly understood to have ocean-going tankers load the bitumen for shipment to countries that do not care about the pollution caused. The eastern destinations have refineries there but the intent is obvious to ship it and do the conversion to synthetic oil elsewhere in the world.

It is this hypocrisy of Canada’s tar sands exploiters that has earned Canada the enmity of people concerned about global warming. U.S. President Barack Obama just did Canada a big favour by stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.

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