It’s been a tough year. Commenting on politics in such a fluid situation as we find in North America and Europe requires considerable dedication. It is also getting expensive and more time consuming to keep abreast of rapidly changing circumstances.
The idea was that I had a leg up because of my expertise in the political ground game and experience in Ottawa and Washington. The only problem is that our current crop of politicians is inventing brand new games. We can become just as confused by their antics as the talking heads who are paid to comment.
And those of us who labour over our blogs are getting some unfair competition from the news media in the form of free newsletters. So far, they have not been monetizing these efforts, but when they do, life for bloggers will return to normal. By ‘normal’ I mean the usual complaints and kudos about our opinions.
Babel-on-the-Bay also gets the occasional complaint about our policy of not providing space for people to complain about our opinions. Mostly, we get interesting e-mails both pro and con as well as when we make a boo-boo. A good example was the guy who must be from Ingersoll, Ontario who tells me they are still assembling some General Motors SUVs down there. I seem to also remember some government funding for that CAMI plant when it was built for GM and Suzuki.
But to me, General Motors’s last gasp was in Oshawa where it had made the deal with Colonel Sam McLaughlin. The company has broken its trust with Canadians. It will take much more that a few SUVs in Ingersoll, to restore our faith in General Motors.
And we are happy to say that kudos from Babel-on-the-Bay readers outweigh complaints by about three to one. Mind you, I obviously have a good number of new democrat readers as I get the most complaints from them.
If I am looking for some interesting arguments, I just have to run a comment about voting systems that are not as good as first-past-the-post. That brings out readers from all levels of politics. They tried out preferential voting in London, Ontario last year. They found the results were the same as though they had used first-past-the-post. I could have told them that.
But I find that, in politics, there are many things that people have to figure out for themselves.
-30-
Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]