Month: September 2022

Leave ‘Em Laughing.

by Peter Lowry

If you live in Ontario, you need to pay attention to premier Doug Ford. If you don’t, he and his conservatives could bankrupt us. He has totally screwed our healthcare system. He is stealing from us with his planned Highway 413 for his developer friends. He is heading for a collision with our teachers. Remember, he is just a salesman. He hopes to leave the suckers laughing.

I don’t think we have ever seen a man so delighted with his job. He got his money the old-fashioned way, he inherited it. He was taught about politics by his younger brother when Rob Ford was mayor of Toronto with a habit of crack cocaine for fun. When Doug ran for Toronto mayor, he lost to the more conservative John Tory.

But that did not keep Doug Ford from getting even. One of the first things he did when he got to Queen’s Park was to block the increase in the number of councillors for a city of 2.8 million. He left the limited number of councillors with an impossible job. More recently, he decided to have a super-mayor for our two largest cities. He and John Tory must have kissed and made up. The super mayor idea is American and works for them because they have party politics at the municipal level in most of the cities. Toronto has disguised party politics without party discipline.

But Ford’s nemesis will be healthcare. He is attempting to ‘innovate’ with privatization. And it can’t be done. Privatization would cause a further, serious, drain of medical staff from our hospitals. These facilities are already understaffed. Beds are unoccupied in wards with no nurses. There are surgical facilities in hospitals that are not being used. Building new private facilities would be charged to public dollars. Staffing the private facilities would be a further drain on our hospitals. And then public money would be used to pay millionaire doctors.

And the very idea of dumping the feeble from hospitals on for profit nursing homes is the most egregious plan of all. These facilities have neither the staff to handle this influx nor the physio-therapy facilities to help them. To increase private facilities profits in this manner can only be described as abuse of the sick and hurrying them off to what can be a lonely and dreary death.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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In Sheep’s Clothing.

by Peter Lowry

Nor does the leopard change his spots. The news media seem to think that the new leader of the conservatives in parliament has discovered his nicer self. We can expect that he would want to appear more likeable to the Canadian voter. Nobody said he was stupid. His objective is be prime minister and nobody wins that job overnight.

But what will not change are his narrow libertarian leanings. He will use his wife, his children, hollow concerns, anything to be considered more likeable. His worry for the Eastern Canadians recovering from the ravages of Mother Nature’s hurricane is facile. He is still a mean little man who fails to understand the need for government to aid and protect those less fortunate in the vagaries of life.

Pierre Poilievre preaches that it is every person for themselves. His plan is for a country where only those who strive will survive. It would be a land where the rich will only get richer and the poor and those of advanced age will be forgotten. There will be no sympathy for the sick and cold prisons for the violent.

This is a man who has never held a job outside of politics. He probably has no understanding of the every-day workplace. He would not know the good employer from the bad. He has never experienced the discipline of military service. He fights against gun control and has probably never been on the wrong side of a person who was out of control with a weapon.

Mr. Poilievre seems to have never experienced trauma. He appears to have no grasp of the economics he pretends to critique. He must have been advised to button up on his support for cryptocurrencies. Maybe, some day, he will be able to take a tour of the Bank of Canada and learn how it functions, outside of direct government control.

A reader suggested the other day that Mr. Poilievre is a parasite on the body politic. I think such comments are counter productive. He is a person of limited experience. He does not seem to want to help protect our world’s environment and its safety for human habitation. He seems a bookish type. I wonder if he has ever read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Sweet Spot.

by Peter Lowry

When the new leader of Canada’s conservatives made his debut confrontation across the aisle from the prime minister, it was more of a touchy-feely session than a gun fight in some corral. It was a soft approach, testing old punch lines and old arguments. It was if they were each looking for the sweet spot before drawing the knives for real.

If that opening was “playing nice” as columnist Chantal Hébert described the occasion, the two will need better script writers over the coming three years. Pierre Poilievre’s problem is that he is going to have to hone closer to the truth. He wisely stuck to the tired but ever-present conservative shibboleths such as the federal carbon tax. His plaint over possible tax increases was just standard conservative cant and was hardly even worthy of an answer.

Hébert’s opinion that the liberals will stand firm on the carbon tax to emphasize the parties’ different stands on the environment, makes sense. Poilievre might be representing an Ottawa area constituency but his home is Alberta. He is pro-pipelines, pro-tar sands and a climate change denier.

Poilievre’s problem is that he has to grow the sweep of the conservative party with his 300,000 malcontent supporters among 37 million Canadians. And he is hardly going to do that with arguments for government meanness and frugality. If he thinks that, he just does not understand the anger that surges across this troubled and fragile world. He can use that anger only if he can identify the causes. Just 300,000 malcontents might be too small a sample.

We could all feel more confident if the standard bearer on the other side of the aisle was not Justin Trudeau. No doubt there were many groans across Canada recently when Trudeau told us that he wants to lead his liberals into the next election. He should check to find how many of these so-called liberals are enthusiastic about that prospect. He should also check to see why Donald Trump and his “deplorables” won the American presidency in the 2016 election in that country.

The facts are that real liberals need a real liberal leader.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Poilievre’s ‘Woke.’

by Peter Lowry

The word ‘woke’ is not all that new. Its use is taking a roller-coaster ride. Young people tend to use it in the sense of becoming aware of societal errors of the past. Right-wing religious writers have usurped the word ‘wokeness’ to be a label for a supposably baseless new religion attempting to supplant the traditional Christian religions. It must have cost many of us some puzzlement when conservative leader Pierre Poilievre accused the Trudeau government of entering a radical woke coalition with the new democrats.

It was this suggestion that there could be a radical wokeness that left me confused. There was nothing new in the arrangement between the two parties. Our present prime minister’s father and the NDP’s David Lewis had entered into a similar arrangement in the 1970s.

I suppose, if I had cared, I could have contacted the conservative leader’s office to find out what he meant. I wrote it off as just a weak attempt to impress a younger audience. I expect it is just another example of Mr. Poilievre’s uncaring glibness when attacking others.

When political observers write about the relative strengths of the party leaders, they tend to denigrate Trudeau’s grasp of finance while giving Poilievre a pass. They even hope that finance minister Christa Freeland can fill the void. They tend to forget the wild swings Poilievre makes at subjects such as cryptocurrencies and the governance of the Bank of Canada.

Whether Freeland is capable of complimenting Trudeau’s strong advocacy in controlling climate change and providing for the social needs of Canadians has yet to be determined. Whether there is a need for her to backstop Trudeau in the way Paul Martin supported Jean Chrétien, I doubt it. How soon we forget that Paul Martin’s far right actions as finance minister in the 1990s cost the liberal party dearly. Many of us progressive liberals never forgave Paul for his right-wing attack on social spending. It cost the liberal party the loss to Stephen Harper. Canadians seemed to say: Why vote for a right-wing liberal when you can get the real thing with Harper?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Battles of Brampton’s Brown.

by Peter Lowry

There is not much excitement forecast for the upcoming municipal elections in Ontario on October 24. The exception is likely to be the mayoralty in Brampton. The current mayor, Patrick Brown, has decided to run for re-election and a fierce fight is brewing. He is hardly your usual conservative mayor.

Brampton is a city passing 700,000 in population with more than 40 per cent of the population having ties to the Indian Sub-continent. Brown, who is from Barrie, Ontario and a former member of parliament for Simcoe County electoral districts has ties to this south Asian contingent of voters. One of his promises to the Sikh community, to first get elected mayor of Brampton, was to convert more of Brampton’s beautiful parks into cricket pitches.

It was his ties to this south Asian diaspora that led Brown from federal politics to Ontario politics. He swamped the membership of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party with south Asian sign-ups and, for a while, was leader of the Ontario conservatives. There was considerable agreement when he stepped down from the provincial leadership and sought solace in municipal politics—first in Peel County and then, selectively, in Brampton.

Brown really knows very little about anything other than politics. He had no trouble defeating the incumbent mayor in Brampton. It provided him with a comfortable catbird seat from which to keep his name alive through the media. He bode his time and jumped into the federal conservative leadership. That adventure was a story on its own. He only signed up 100,000 new (and probably temporary) conservatives. He also got himself ejected from the race.

But Brown is back in Brampton running again for mayor. This time, Brown is facing five other challengers for the mayoralty. Three of the opponents have Sikh names.

The most interesting of Brown’s opponents is Nikki Kaur (Kaur means princess in Punjabi). Ms. Kaur is a lawyer and an employee of the municipality who was fired and then re-instated. She is supported by people such as Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, former liberal premier Dalton, McGinty and conservative apparatchik Nick Kouvalis, who is also helping run John Tory’s mayoralty campaign in Toronto.

It could spell continued bad times for Brown.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Carbon-Capture Conservatives.

by Peter Lowry

It is becoming obvious now that carbon-based fuels exploiters in Canada are going to hang their hats on carbon-capture technologies—if they can just get governments to pay for it. For an expensive solution that really cannot do the job, it appears to be the only answer they can find. And their political lackies are expected to get on the carbon-capture band wagon. Just watch politicos like federal conservative leader Pierre Poilievre jump aboard.

You need to remember that there are multiple carbon expelling events in the life of the high-carbon bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands. There are the high amounts of carbon created by the digging or drilling for the access to the bitumen. Then there is the transport of the bitumen to the upgrader processes that brings it to a bitumen sludge that can be transported by rail or forced at high temperatures through pipelines. Eventually, the bitumen gets to a refinery that can produce ersatz crude oil from the bitumen, leaving behind tons of bitumen slag. From that stage, the crude can be refined into carbon-based fuels for heating and transport requirements. It is because of all these process stages that the actual amount of pollution caused by the bitumen is hard to compute.

But what we also know is that while oil and water really do not mix, at least oil is difficult to cleanup when it spills into water. Bitumen, because of its tar-like nature floats for a while and then sinks to become an obnoxious part of the eco-system that is impossible to cleanup.

This is also the reason for the ongoing and bitter legal battle between the State of Michigan and the Enbridge pipeline people over the Line 5 pipeline crossing the Straits of Mackinac. The State of Michigan has had the experience of a critical spill of bitumen into tributaries to the Kalamazoo River in South Michigan. In 12 years and more than a billion dollars on cleanup, there is still bitumen in the Kalamazoo.

When you get politicians on both sides of the border arguing over the issue, there is also a lot of confusion. The only comment that I will add is that if any large lake-ship accidently drags an anchor through the Straits of Mackinac when Line 5 is carrying bitumen, millions of Americans and Canadians living around the Great Lakes are going to be outraged at the economic destruction it could cause.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Trudeau Sings?

by Peter Lowry

We obviously have a multi-talented prime minister. It turns out he can sing as well as do blackface. Or was this a complaint about his singing? I know how it is. You get together with some other Canucks in some foreign port and after a few cups of the local joy juice, you are all singing Alouette.

But karaoke is something else. It is very rude for someone to record another person’s attempt at a more difficult number. And besides, Trudeau needed to save his sense of humour for when he got back to parliament. Poilievre was lying in wait for him. 

The entire parliament was waiting for the first attack on the prime minister by the new leader of the opposition. This is Justin’s third new leader of the opposition. I figured that the confrontation would be good for a few laughs. Yet, I missed the whole thing as my Internet and television were down when Justin Trudeau returned to the house of commons the other day.

Did Poilievre ask if he sang in New York as he did in London? Or did he just go for the laughs over Justin-flation?

My advice to Justin would have been to leave them laughing. Unless, of course, Mr. Poilievre made the continued mistake of exhibiting his total lack of knowledge of economics. In that case, a gentle and patient lecture on basic economics might be in order. Trudeau might even suggest a few helpful texts on the subject

But in this vein, I would like to publicly thank Linda McQuaig for writing in the Toronto Star the other day that Poilievre is the farthest thing from a populist. Linda is a very perceptive writer on politics. She obviously knows a populist when she sees one. And Poilievre is not included. She commented on that weasel’s time with Stephen Harper and suggested that he might just be Harper-Lite.

Actually, Pierre Poilievre keeps trying to be like Stephen Harper, except he lacks Harper’s sparkling personality. If anything, Mr. Poilievre reminds me of the shark in Bobby Darin’s 1959 swing version of Mack the Knife.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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An Experiment in Democracy.

by Peter Lowry

OK, I am going to recant, briefly, here. I think they should have proportional voting in Quebec. I admit to the heresy that I am spouting but I think the outcome would be worth it for the laughter.

Quebec politics is good for a laugh at any time. I just feel the amusement could run longer under proportional representation in the Quebec assembly. Under first-past-the-post voting we, too often, end up with one of the minority parties winning enough seats to form a government.

But with five major parties in the running, it would be more fun to have all five in the assembly fighting it out on an on-going basis. Just how long it would be between elections would be a toss-op.

Proportional representation would give each of the parties a number of seats according to their popular vote. As it would be unlikely that any one party would win enough seats to form a majority, there would have to be some deal making to form a government. For example, the CAQ of François Legault might need the four or five of Éric Duhaime’s conservatives to give the CAQ a majority. It would be a marriage made in some place below Heaven.

Conversely, Québec Solidaire might have enough members, along with the liberals, to form a government. There would be heavy action with Quebec’s bookies on how long that coalition would last.

Though nobody would be very interested in a deal with the losers in the Parti Québécois. They might be lucky to elect two or three MLAs.

And that is the problem with Quebec politics. Parties tend to come and go. Here today, gone tomorrow, is their slogan.

As it stands today, the Quebec liberals are the oldest party in the assembly. They have had some interesting conservatives running that party in my lifetime.

But then what is in a name. And who knows what the next two or three Quebec parties will be called? Just keep it interesting ‘mes amies.’

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The New Politics?

by Peter Lowry

In writing recently about the similarities of Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump, I kept walking around the obvious. Putting a political label on either of them is difficult. The truth is that their politics needs a new name. It isn’t as authoritarian as European fascism. It lacks the corporatism. And only Trump shows signs of racism. And neither is a real libertarian.

Both Poilievre and Trump have this inability to stick to the truth. That might just be the belief of politicians that if you say something frequently and loudly, it can become a truth, of sorts. Mr. Trump is under the impression that he was the winner between he and Joe Biden. And poor Pierre Poilievre thought (until recently) that Bitcoin was a good investment. No doubt both the gentlemen can be easily deluded.

But I mentioned the other day that they both need their hard-core supporters. The ‘brown shirts’ (and shirtless) who carried out Trump’s insurrection in the American Capitol could have used some better leadership. Poilievre’s trucker convoy had lost most of its leaders to jail cells or restraining orders before the police got them properly kettled and ran them out of the nation’s capital.

I tend to think of the two as buskers, playing for nickels and dimes on the periphery of politics. Trump caught everyone by surprise by winning in 2016 and the American public made sure he lost in 2020. He was a sorry spectacle in the White House.

The striking difference between Trump and Poilievre is that Trump started out in 2015 with no clue about how politics really works and Poilievre has no clue about anything outside of politics. I would say that Poilievre is the loser in the sense that his entire working life has been nothing but politics.  

They both seem to think they can be dictatorial. It was probably Trump’s greatest disappointment in office. People kept telling him what he could not do. His only solution was to hire people who would lie to him. At least he felt better.

Other than ridiculous promises to end inflation, end government handouts and to prevent increases in taxes in the future, we have no clear idea of what Poilievre would do as prime minister. Like Trump, he obviously has no idea what to do about climate change or pandemics or inflation.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Ford Forges On.

by Peter Lowry

It really is amazing. How come so many smart people in Ontario can elect such a dumb-ass premier? He really is, you know. Doug Ford would have difficulty finding a one-point score on a Scrabble board. He is a failed salesman. He learned politics from his brother when the younger Ford was mayor of Toronto and high on crack cocaine.

I’ve got to stop laughing every time I see the premier trying to use a teleprompter. They provide it for him to keep him on script and not embarrass everybody. He seems to think that because there is a screen on either side of the podium, he should read a sentence from one and then turn his head and read a sentence from the other.

But he still seems to think of himself as a city councillor. His besties are the lawyers who represent their developer clients at city hall in Toronto. They look after Ford and Ford looks after their clients. The planned Highway 413 might be bad luck for the climate but it’s a sweetheart deal for the developers who have bought up the good farmland around the planned cloverleafs.

Did you understand how Doug has solved the problems for Ontario hospitals? He thinks the hospitals are just going to evict the old and sick and send them to whatever long-term care place might have a bed available. It is that or the hospital will charge the patient $400 per day as long as they stay. Just where the competent staff is to be found for the long-term care places might be a mystery. The conservatives seem to have forgotten we used to have convalescent hospitals. They seem to have been replaced by for-profit long-term care facilities. Some people are wondering how many lawsuits are waiting in the wings for that law.

And you cannot shame Doug or his henchmen. He recently added a few dollars to the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Some opposition MPPs decided to see if they could live on the money for food in the program. It is about $95 for food for two weeks. They couldn’t do it. And we would all like to see the premier try it. He would probably make it through breakfast and lunch the first day and then he would starve for the next 13 days. Mind you he could stand to lose about 15 kilograms—do him good.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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