October 2020 – Page 3 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Democracy Denied.

October 10, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Canadians should stop worrying about the fascist leanings of that guy in the American White House and worry more about the death of democracy in Canada. Every day, we see the continued erosion of democracy in Canada’s political parties as another brick in the wall closing down our democracy.

I make no secret that I am a liberal. It is why I received an e-mail from Suzanne Cowan, president of the liberal party the other day telling me how it is going to be for people to become candidates for the party in the next federal election. I should send her an answer asking when the party agreed to this arrangement? There is nothing democratic about this selection of candidates.

The problem started back in the 1980s when the liberals ended up with some very bad choices for candidates when they were selected by a gang-up of their ethnic or religious group. It was during the 90s that Jean Chrétien’s liberals got parliamentary approval to having party leaders sign off on all candidates for their party.

Instead of the measure being used as a last resort, to block gang-ups in the electoral district associations, it became a way for the leader of each party to decide who would be their candidate. Leaders such as conservative Stephen Harper and liberal Justin Trudeau used this to further their discipline over their parties. It did little to further democracy in Canada.

We have effectively neutered Canada’s political parties. Instead of democracy, Justin Trudeau is ushering in his personal autocracy. He is an elitist, supported by his own cabal in parliament.

The only problem Trudeau has not addressed is what to do about the liberals who might object to being used as his personal piggy bank. There are too many times that more than one e-mail from the party in a day will ask for more money.

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O’Toole’s new hue of blue.

October 9, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Erin O’Toole, the new conservative party leader brought a new hue of blue to parliament on his late arrival. Delayed by covid-19, the conservative leader brought a new approach to the minority parliament. Where catcalls and rudeness have prevailed for so long, the new leader brought reason, conciliation and understanding. It was an approach to politics readily understood by most Ontario politicos over 50. It was the politics of former Ontario premier William Davis.

Bill Davis turned 91 this year and while his health might not be the best, his legacy in Ontario continues to be honoured. It all boiled down to one word: decency. He was conservative premier of Ontario from 1971 to 1985 and he made sure Queen’s Park during that time was a friendly place. In those years, I worked closely with the liberal caucus under Bob Nixon and, when at Queen’s Park, I often had a friendly word with people on Bill Davis’ or NDP leader Stephen Lewis’ staff.

But I think for Erin O’Toole, sincere or not, this approach will be a hard sell to his caucus, his supporters and his provincial conservative backers. Today’s political divide is too broad, the acrimony too deep and the distrust ingrained.

Too many of the conservative caucus are former Steven Harper MPs who went through the hard-fought years of his partisan governments which dealt more with conservative ideology than the needs of Canadians. O’Toole was there for the last and in cabinet in that final four years.

It is hard to imagine that he would not realize the difference in style he is trying to utilize from that of the provincial conservatives where they are in power. This is with some of the provincial conservative governments routinely condemning the federal liberals for their efforts on climate change, bringing lawsuits to the supreme court and even putting advertising stickers on all provincial gas pumps condemning the carbon tax—until the practice was stopped by the courts.

Mind you, this kinder, gentler conservatism might be just to impress the voters. Time will tell.

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It’s not about who won or lost.

October 8, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Your choice of who won the American vice-presidential debate in Utah last night tells more about you than the antagonists. Supporters of either were not disappointed. We knew that vice-president Mike Pence is not a dynamic speaker. He knows his party’s line and right or wrong, he will defend it.

We came to see how Pence would make out against an experienced prosecutor. Those of us who watched Kamala Harris in the run-up to this election knew that this lady can handle herself. No errors for her such as calling her opponent a clown.

Yet she was alternately frustrated and amused by Pence’s deafness to a frustrated moderator. She also wanted to get her licks in. She wanted equal time but it was not there for her. Maybe it will be in the newspaper reports tomorrow about where she stands on packing the supreme court.

Oddly enough, it will be Americans who least understand the concept of packing. Most politically knowledgeable Canadians understand that the prime minister can appoint as many additional senators as are needed to give his (or her) party the majority needed to clear a legislative log jam in the Senate of Canada. In theory, the same solution can be applied to the supreme courts of the two countries.

There was no question for the hour and a half that the debate took, that Kamala Harris is by far the better debater. At the same time, Pence gets marks for being deaf to the pleas of the moderator. He also got marks for getting more hard hits (though maybe inaccurate) on his opponent.

The only problem with picking a winner, is that this debate was not about the job of vice president. What Americans and others were assessing was the kind of president each would be if anything happened to the geriatric winner of the presidency.

Both vice-presidential candidates stuck with the partner who brought them to the ball. Nobody won or lost.

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Ford cures covid-19 numbers.

October 7, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Premier Ford of Ontario has a salesman’s way with numbers. You want fewer people with covid-19 from the coronavirus, he gives you lower figures. He can even flatten the curve.

The secret is in the number of tests. He has it all figured out. He has found that he who controls the number of tests can make the numbers of covid-19 casualties go up or down. He can even tell you if the curve is flattening or not.

It is simple statistics. If you do 100,000 tests of people who have an incidence of one case in every 1000, you will have close to 100 cases. When you complete only half the number of tests, you are more likely to have half the number of cases of covid-19.

And if you want everyone to have a happy Thanksgiving in Ontario, just close those testing centres in high incidence areas of the province. That could be as simple as telling people to book an appointment for a test and when they call, leave them on hold until they give up.

But please do not ask Premier Dougie how many people are celebrating Thanksgiving at the Ford Household this coming weekend. Until the premier has checked with his wife, he has no idea how many Fords will gather at the premier’s household.

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The wondrous recovery of Donald Trump.

October 6, 2020 by Peter Lowry

You have got to hand it to the boys and girls over at Walter Reed military hospital. They had a cure ready for their leader when he needed it. How many do you know who have suffered from the coronavirus and told you that there is no need to fear a disease that has already killed more than 200,000 Americans?

It just goes to show you that Donald Trump is invulnerable. No silly masks for the Trumpster. He can laugh in the face of a deadly illness. Did you see the number of medical personnel getting the credit for this miraculous cure and taking their bows outside the army hospital?

Fie on me for suggesting that the president’s little bout with a fever might be a faux covid-19. All along, these intrepid military medicos had the secret to a cure in their back pocket. It is a shame they are not prepared to share the secret of that cure with those countrymen and women suffering more seriously.

But Trump is back in the White House and the stock markets are rising. Just wait until the next presidential debate, He will teach that upstart Joe Biden not to call him a clown! He will teach him not to try to talk over him when he has so much to say.

But there are other questions to be answered. How is Melania? Is the first lady feeling better? Or looking better?

And what about all those White House insiders who might have got inside the coronavirus? Are they going to get the same miracle cure as the president?

Did you see the clips of the president taking a victory lap around Walter Reed hospital in an armoured SUV? It was hard to tell how he looked as he waved at the admiring crowds.

And here you were thinking the real miracle would be in getting Trump re-elected?

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Trump’s Progress.

October 5, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Has it occurred to you that president Donald Trump might be faking his bout with Covid-19? It would certainly have to be an elaborate ruse. There would just be too many weak links. He could probably never pull it off.

But just think. What if someone had come up with a mild strain of the coronavirus and salted the White House? Or something that presented like the coronavirus and had everyone fooled?

The very worst thing that could happen is to have Donald Trump back in the White House in two weeks, healthy as a horse and in his usual form. Just think of him being ready to double down on his first debate.

It would take him no time at all to convince his clique that it was all a scheme by those antifa and hard left radicals who are out to get him.

But the more interesting situation will be if he loses the election anyway. This guy could never win a sympathy vote. His followers have little sympathy to share.

It is also hard to contemplate him having white-supremist supporters taking up his call for election watchers. That could open up to violence at polling places and an incomplete election process.

We can only imagine how Mr. Trump might be enjoying his respite at Walter Reed military hospital. The presidential suite there would make an excellent contained site to plan the take-over of America and turning it into a fascist regime.

Mind you, we are only exercising our imagination here.

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Dredging Down in Green.

October 4, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Congratulations to the new leader of the Green Party of Canada. The party has selected a Torontonian named Annamie Paul to be its new leader. The party leader is a 47-year old lawyer.

As in the recent conservative party election, it took considerable counting to arrive at a majority choice. Ms. Paul was selected after eight counts of the ballots to arrive at a choice by over 50 per cent of the voters.

As the mathematics works in a preferential ballot, it is not necessarily the primary choice of candidate who wins when there is a large number of candidates in the running. In each subsequent count, the last candidate in the count is dropped off the ballot and that candidate’s second votes go to the indicated candidates. One of the possibilities in that form of balloting is the election of the candidate known as ‘None of the Above.’ It is when none of the multiple candidates achieves a count in excess of 50 per cent.

Without a rule to cover this situation, a secondary balloting process becomes necessary—less the candidate who came last in the first ballot, of course.

While there is, at least one candidate challenging the correctness of the Green Party vote, there is little likelihood of the count being declared invalid. Paul led in many of the ballots and ended up with just over 12,000 of the 24,000 votes cast.

Ms. Paul succeeds Elizabeth May who led the Greens for the past 13 years and was the first Green Party candidate elected to the House of Commons. The Toronto native has already been nominated to contest the upcoming bye-election for the Toronto Centre electoral district.

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Please Note: If you intend to castigate me for criticizing the preferential voting, please come up with some better arguments.

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Condemning the Ford government.

October 3, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Only the other day, I was saying: The objective is to run the government in accord with their dogma. They are not running it for you. The front page Toronto Star exclusive by reporter Bruce Arthur this morning tells the story. Despite all of Doug Ford’s bluster about ramping up the covid-19 testing in the province, insiders are telling us that the government has been giving us smoke and mirrors.

They lie to us. Since early April there has no political support for ramping up testing. It was a trick, some in the Ford government learned in the dying days of the Harper government in Ottawa. It was open knowledge that at the time when Tony Clement was president of the treasurer board and no matter what was announced from which minister’s office, the funds were controlled, and, in many cases, held back by treasury.

The promise by Premier Ford was that the number of covid-19 tests per day targeted over the summer was 100,000. When you think of all those parents who lined up with their children to be tested in August—it was to no avail.

If you can read all the copy Arthur produced this morning, you will come to the conclusion in the final sentence. The province will be able to process 100,000 tests per day this coming January.

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This business of news.

October 2, 2020 by Peter Lowry

From an early age, I was always fascinated by this business of news. Understanding news as a commodity is an essential background for people in the business. It helps if you are a fisherman. It is best you get the value for your product before it ripens.

One of my first jobs was with the Toronto Globe and Mail. It was experience in every department. While a titular national advertising sales person, I found myself in meetings with the publisher, getting banned again from the strictly union composing room, chatting with reporters, writing editorial for travel and trouble-shooting with annoyed advertising agencies.

This was all on top of some very good early training in broadcast reporting and production. I never liked my performance on radio or television but the experience was helpful to others. It provided an easy segue into a later role in the computer industry. I was an early adopter.

One of the most annoying aspects of news has been how computer services such as Google and Facebook think they know about news—and use it at their will, without payment or understanding of the product.

One of the best examples of the bad use of news has been by Microsoft. The computer company takes a mishmash of news, Hollywood pandering and hard advertising, mixes it for the opening pages of Internet services and might forget to pay the news companies that paid reporters to produce the news content.

What I have failed to understand was the unwillingness of politicians and regulators to recognize copyright on that news content. Even in the freely distributed product of the Hollywood gossip mills, there is an inherent copyright to the name of the personality being plugged. After all, how do the Kardashians make any money if their name is left out?

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Mr. Ford is enjoying the game.

October 1, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Doug Ford has come a long way for a guy who made his mark selling labels for his father’s printing company. Today, in the midst of a pandemic, he is immersed in the multi-billion dollar health and education business of the Ontario government. And with no effective direction or even opposition to the Government in Ontario, our hospitals and schools are teetering on the edge.

If the second wave of the pandemic in Ontario reaches anywhere near the depths of what the experts are forecasting, we are in serious trouble. In the rush to get the province out of its multi-tiered lock downs, Doug Ford’s conservatives have trapped the province in an under-funded, under-manned health care system and a rapidly changing education system.

What we are seeing today is desperation. While trying to rely on the medical profession for its expertise in medicine, we find that this party, has little, if no, expertise in running the government.

The government is faced with the same problems in both education and health. They could be in need hundreds of teachers and medical personnel and are reaching into the pool of retirees. The only problem is you can only reach so far back. People who have been away from the system for five to ten years are likely to be well past their ‘use before date.’ They have not kept up. There should have been up-dating sessions for the past five months.

The situation faced by teachers is its own circumstances. Faced with new computer-learning and often larger classes, teachers are digging in their heels. While the government is assuming that the youth of the students will limit the number of casualties, they had not realized that the average teacher is more vulnerable.

The Ford government is a reactionary government. The only plan is to try to balance the budget while only spending what has to be spent. The objective is to run the government in accord with their dogma. They are not running it for you.

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