Babel-on-the-Bay – Page 10 – Babel-on-the-Bay is the personal website of Peter Lowry. It is a vehicle for political commentaries.

Alberta Waste Management.

October 11, 2023October 10, 2023 by Peter Lowry

One of the tasks, the federal government leaves to the provinces is waste management. It is a task that nobody worried about very much back at the time of confederation. One thing you can say about waste management, it gets to be a bigger problem every day.

In Alberta, the province not only has problems with waste management, they also have a problem with management waste. How much, for example did Jason Kenney waste on pipelines that never happened. And how much has the current premier wasted bitching about the federal government’s “disastrous energy regulations” that might—or might not—bring us to net zero a dozen years from now.

And just why does this remind us poor benighted easterners of a slogan saying something like “Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark.”

But when we see an advertisement paid for by Alberta taxpayers that says “No one wants blackouts in -30˚.” Who would suggest such a thing?

What really drives me crazy is the federal government has blown over $20 billion on the Trans Mountain Pipeline to ship Alberta bitumen through the Straits of Georgia. Do the poor easterners get to hear any thank-you for that ridiculous expense?

All we get are advertisements promoting that sham of carbon capture from the tar sands exploiters. I was delighted when I saw that the Competition Bureau was going to study the advertising campaign that has been trying to mislead the Canadian public. The joke is that you create more carbon to ship and store the original carbon. It is a constant cycle.

One of the advertisements paid for by Albertans was the one about the hard choices families will face between paying for winter boots for the kids or their mortgage. Does this sound like sensible discussion of the subject? It could better be described as scaremongering.

And this is the province that currently has declared a moratorium on low-cost wind and solar energy projects. Go figure?

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Ford’s Frailty.

October 10, 2023October 9, 2023 by Peter Lowry

In seniors, frailty is a set of symptoms pertaining to the approaching end of life. In politics, it is the weaknesses other politicians will recognize as the key to defeating a politician at the polls. Premier Doug Ford in Ontario has all the symptoms. It does not guarantee that he will be defeated. It still needs the agent of his demise.

The agent who can best defeat Doug Ford is currently running for the leadership of the Ontario liberals. Her name is Bonnie Crombie. This is not to downgrade her opponents for the job of Ontario leader. They can each bring a special skill set to the task. What they are less competent to do is to understand what makes incumbent Doug Ford run. That is Ms. Crombie’s home turf.

In a recent opinion article in the Toronto Star, a writer posited that the “Greenbelt scandal won’t bring down Ford.” The writer’s opinion appeared to be based on a collection of opinion polls that claimed that people distrust politicians anyway. It seemed that the writer was telling us that since all politicians are crooks, they were expected to try to get away with stunts such as Ford tried with the Ontario Greenbelt. What the writer ignored, first of all, was his own recognition that municipal politicians had a somewhat better reputation with the poll respondents.

And that is Ms. Crombie’s lucky charm. She is a successful municipal politician in addition to her term as an MP in Ottawa. She understands the special place that developers hold in our city halls across Canada. She knows that Doug Ford’s only previous political experience was under his late brother Rob’s tutelage at Toronto City Hall. His best friends in politics are developers and their lawyers. There is little he can put over with Ms. Crombie.

It is also why he wants the Ontario liberals to choose someone other than Crombie as their new leader. It is also why he is unlikely to be accommodating in letting her get elected to the legislature in a by-election after the December announcement of the new leader. Ms. Crombie knows how to ask the right questions in the legislature.

And there is a second corollary to the low expectation of politicians. Mr. Ford must have missed the lesson that said: “Don’t get caught.”

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Alberta’s Arithmetic.

October 9, 2023October 8, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Canadians must be embarrassed by the arithmetic we are hearing out of the premier’s office in Edmonton. Nobody would expect the premier to be a world class mathematician but for her to make such a fuss and make such a fool of herself is to be unfair to the sensible people of Alberta. If we get to expect people from the province to be unable to add two and two, it will cause a surge of hiring only people from out of the province to be cashiers or bookkeepers.

Face facts. How long would Tim’s stay in business if you go in for your morning double-double, give the cashier two five-dollar bills and you get a twenty in change?

We are talking here about that looney-tunes premier in Alberta who is threatening to have Albertans to dump the Canada Pension Plan and have their own Provincial Alberta Pension Plan. I wrote about it when she first told us, thinking that she was saying it for laughs.

Okay, so maybe she thought people who said bigger was better, were talking about something else. The truth is that when it comes to pension funds, the big ones are the ones that can handle the money better in the ups and downs of stock markets.

Big makes better in this type of endeavour. And what makes it even better is that if there are any serious downturns, the whole thing is backed by a federal government on behalf of more than 30 million Canadians. In this big is better world, Quebec went their own way but being about twice the population of Alberta, it has done alright.

The important concern in this matter is if Alberta taxpayers accept the stupidity of their premier’s claim that Alberta is entitled to 53 per cent of the funds in the Canada Pension Plan. It might have something to do with the age of Albertans as opposed to the rest of Canada’s population. It could also be as simple of someone inputting data and getting a fly speck confused with a decimal point and some computer going crazy. It is no excuse for this foolishness.

The simple facts are that Alberta, with less than 20 per cent of the participants in the plan, is hardly entitled to 53 per cent of the funds. Give that premier a good shake.

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Talking Turkey.

October 8, 2023October 7, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Who would be so rude as to sit around a delicious turkey dinner discussing the price of the bird? Nor should we assume that there will be much discussion of politics at this time of family gatherings. There is the possibility that the recent success of the new democrats in Manitoba might be an indicator of a new breeze in the other Prairie provinces but those provinces have two to three years before their next elections. Much could happen in that time.

Frankly there might not be that much discussion of the federal situation. We might hear a few snorts of derision if the attempt by the federal liberals to do something about the cost of food is mentioned. It might not be the role of a younger member of the family to wonder what the heck, Mr. Poilievre would do differently. After all the conservative party leader is a free-range right-winger with no instinct when it comes to the business of business. He knows nothing. He says nothing constructive. There are no saviours in politics.

But there are families sitting at that festive (?) board, that are struggling gamely at solving the needs of the Canadian grocery purveyors. What we are seeing is increased shoplifting and greater impetus to rising prices. When was the last time those politicians talking to the grocers went shopping for their families?

We were even assured the other day that inflation is easing. We were given some abstract figures for the year-on-year inflation figures, that were meaningless. The price of groceries is not an abstract. Doubling the prices of milk and eggs is not a year-on-year increase of 9.8 per cent. Who would ever believe that a loaf of bread would be a special this week at just $3.50?

We hear from the lips of industry minister François-Philippe Champagne that Canadians will “soon” begin to see some results from the federal effort. And if you believe that, I have some lovely swamp for sale up near Bancroft, Ontario.

The business of business might be business but it is the business of politicians to not only give a nod to the problems their constituents face but to do something concrete about them.

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Never Promise A Rose Garden.

October 7, 2023October 6, 2023 by Peter Lowry

If you ever want to teach a class of neophyte politicians how to raise the funds they will need, you should start with lectures by municipal politicians. This is where basic fund-raising begins. It is also why I have always been a proponent of funding politics through the Canada Revenue Agency.

This comes to mind after hearing the two Ontario liberal leadership candidates, who are federal MPs, challenging Bonnie Crombie’s fund-raising skills. Crombie is mayor of a city of over 800,000 and what she (or her team) would not know about fund-raising, probably hasn’t been invented yet. The low-hanging fruit for municipal politicians are the developers.

There is a story in this subject that goes back more than 50 years. It was my suggestion to the Ontario liberal party executive at the time, that the 75,000 paid-up members of the party, both federal and provincial, be asked to help fund a couple provincial by-elections. This was a novel suggestion back then and it caused a good deal of discussion around the boardroom table. The result was that I got the funds to test a mailing to our membership asking for funds. The treasurer of the party thought I was crazy but he actually was quite helpful in getting out the mailing.

I will have you know that the results of the request not only paid the cost of the mailing and could have bought lunch for the board—but not dinner.

I was not there for all the party arguments over fund-raising since but there were many efforts made by liberals to clean house. There seems to have been a tradition for the liberals to fix the problem and the conservatives to make it worse.

When Justin Trudeau made the scene in our current century, I was under the impression that he had a fix in mind. When he disavowed the liberals in the Senate and got the party to eliminate membership fees, he frankly had me puzzled. And then when he started using the supposedly free-of-a-fee liberal party supporters as his personal piggy bank, I got mad. The flood of e-mail pleas for donations became so annoying that I canceled the $5 per month that I had been giving the party for years.

I am a senior on a fixed income. What people such as I bring to the party is our experience. If you are not satisfied with that, then take us off your lists.

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The Second Ottawa Convoy.

October 6, 2023October 5, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Since they could afford to fly, there are no trucks parked on Wellington Street in Ottawa this week. This convoy from the west is made up of senior executives from the Alberta oil industry as well as entrepreneurs and other Alberta industry leaders. We are told, they come in peace.

They are not exactly there to deny the comments and stratagem of Alberta premier Danielle Smith, they just smile a lot when her plans for a separatist Alberta are questioned. They have already been welcomed by prime minister Justin Trudeau. They might not want to publicize their meetings with conservative leader Pierre Poilievre—no doubt their names are prominent on the Ottawa cowboy’s donor lists.

This convoy seeks, they say, collaboration. They are selling the friendly face of Alberta. They have named the convoy as “One Alberta, One Canada” We are not overly sure just what that means but they say it with a happy face.

While the group was put together by Alberta’s oil industry, chambers of commerce, and Alberta economic development agencies, its natural leader is the executive chair of Cenovus Energy, Alberta’s largest company in the tar sands extraction business. His name is Alex Pourbaix and he seems to be central to all the interviews by eastern news media.

It is a chance for him to pump the unproven carbon capture plan of Pathways Alliance. This is a consortium of various tar sands companies who want the federal government to fund their sketchy plan. What is cramping his presentation is the advertising campaign by the Alberta provincial government saying that the federal government’s clean electricity plan, that is coming soon, will increase the cost of electricity. That is very brave of the Danielle Smith government to suggest that will be the outcome of a plan they have never seen.

But easterners are coming to expect this type of presumption from Alberta’s united conservatives. Their recent display of erratic arithmetic to claim they own more than half of the funds in the Canada Pension Plan must have taken a lot of chutzpah.

But more and more, you get the impression that Alberta premier Danielle Smith and the leader of the opposition in Ottawa, Pierre Poilievre, have the same speech writers.

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American Chaos.

October 5, 2023October 4, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It is not that we have been ignoring what is going on with the Americans. We just keep hoping it will heal itself. Past President Trump is under indictment and on trial in a few states and it seems that he sees no problem to continue running to be president again.

These are uncharted seas. The man continues to delude himself that he can again run for president. And the people who want to vote for him who are suffering from the same delusion.

The really scary part of this fiasco in the United States is that it happened before. It must have been the soap opera that entertained us through the pandemic. Watching the antics of Trump and friends in the White House was our entertainment. It was unreal. It couldn’t happen here, we told ourselves. We lied to ourselves.

We’ve got a guy named Pierre Poilievre who is further right wing than Trump and friends, thinking he can be prime minister of Canada. If you believe pollsters, two years before the voting, can pick a winner, you might be just as deluded as those poor Americans.

Can you just imagine a pissing contest between the American White House and the falling down 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa? And you thought relations were bad between Ottawa and New Delhi? Just wait until you’ve got two right-wing twits slinging right-wing insults back and forth on the Internet. And we used to think that aluminium embargoes in the East and softwood lumber in the west were a strain on our economy?

With our luck, President Trump would send a platoon of American Marines to Ottawa to arrest the Canadian prime minister. Maybe we could embed a CBC camera crew and reporter with the Marines to record the historic event. We would see the Marines asking directions of an Ottawa police officer on how to get to Sussex Drive. They could still go to the wrong side of Sussex and break into Rideau Hall in error. Imagine taking the Governor General back to Washington as a prisoner of war. Would she have to confess to the burning down the White House in the War of 1812?

Would the Americans expect the Brits to pay a ransom for their Governor General?

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Liberating Liberalism.

October 4, 2023October 3, 2023 by Peter Lowry

Listening to the candidates for the leadership of the liberal party is not doing much to promote liberalism. You get the impression that Ted Hsu MPP is the only one enthusiastic for a liberal government in Ontario. Bonnie Crombie might be the front-runner yet her ‘Big Tent’ approach might be more practical than liberal. Yasir Naqvi reminds me of the support the liberals always got from the more recent Canadians because it was liberals who always supported newcomers. Nate Erskine-Smith MP is probably the one who best understands liberalism.

But we will miss Adil Shamji as he was the candidate who best looked up to liberalism for the benefits to our citizens. Maybe one of the key questions for the remaining debates in the leadership contest is to question the candidates on their liberalism.

We could probably count on Ted Hsu for the intellectual answer to the question. He is the candidate most likely to recognize the freedom and democratic benefits of liberalism. He obviously sees liberalism as less demanding on the individual.

While Yasir Naqvi MP is obviously the most dedicated to liberalism, his is a more visceral liberalism. He sees it as not only standing for human rights over other political parties but core to the democracy in our Canadian society.

Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie’s approach to liberalism is similar to my late friend Hazel McCallion. Hazel always took a somewhat conservative approach to running Mississauga. It helped her get the job done. She would have had a laugh when Ontario premier Doug Ford dreamed up his ‘strong mayor’ policy. She would never have needed Doug Ford’s support for anything she felt she needed to get done. The only thing she could not get done was to convince me to move to Mississauga. I was too loyal to my liberal roots in Toronto.

I think Nate Erskine-Smith’s approach to liberalism would be the most complex. He comes from the more gentrified part of Toronto’s east end. Based on his time in England, he probably has a more complicated story to tell about the origins of his liberalism. His reputation as a maverick member of parliament also is the question.

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A Cutting Contest.

October 3, 2023October 2, 2023 by Peter Lowry

The other day, we addressed the severity of the military budget cuts. The bad news is that there are more cuts to come in other departments of the federal government. It is as though Mr. Trudeau is in competition with Mr. Poilievre. He is showing the conservative leader that liberals can make as many or more foolish cuts in federal spending than the conservatives might.

To understand the federal spending in its simplest form is to consider the debts of a person making $5,000 each month. If the person only had debts of $1,000 to service each month, it would not be much of a problem. Of course, when you expand the debt to include federal agencies, the provinces and their debts plus the debts of each citizen, the right wing gets very upset. It is very difficult for the average citizen to comprehend trillions of dollars.

But at the same time, it is very difficult to compute the revenue of the government, federal agencies, the revenues from each province and the income and personal debts of Canadians. It seems that the right-wing agencies such as the Fraser Institute and the Montreal Economic Institute are in horror of our debt.

What they forget to mention in their complaining is that Canada is a country that attracts new citizens every day from around the world. We just past 40 million in population. Some might not be permanent residents as they are Ukrainians who needed safe haven away from Russia’s war. In the meantime, they are helping Canada grow.

And we are a rich nation. The products of our mines, the wood of our forests, the produce of our farms, herds and orchards join the products of our engineers, designers, planners combined with our factories are known around the world. And Canada is proud to be a trading nation. We also have access to the products of countries of this artistic and inventive world.

And we continue to grow our economy. Yes, we grew our debt a little faster during the worst of the pandemic. It was never more debt than we could handle. The alarmists who would frighten Canadians over the debt are doing it for their benefit, not yours.

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Carry On, With Four.

October 2, 2023October 1, 2023 by Peter Lowry

It is a long trudge to the December decision for the Ontario liberals. You can well appreciate the decision of Adil Shamji MPP to step aside from the contest for the leadership. Likability is not the measure Ontario liberals are applying to the current leadership contest. Winning is what is churning their decision. It is obvious the decision has been made.

The debate in Stratford on Sunday was the “We all love farmers event.” It is actually about time that the liberals called the bluff of the conservatives in usurping the support of farmers across Ontario. It is obvious to most people involved in agriculture that the Conservative party and the Ontario Landowners organization have been taking them for granted for a couple generations.

I think, if you wanted to pick a winner in this event, it was Ted Hsu MPP. This candidate is the surprise of the contest. While he lacks the experience needed to become leader of the Ontario liberals, He is by far one of the smartest people, I have ever listened to in Ontario politics. What a novelty that would be to have some brains in the premier’s office!

I always liked Yasir Naqvi. The MP for Ottawa Centre was always a go-getter in my estimation, but he lost a few points attacking Bonnie Crombie. He obviously won a few points when he attacked Doug Ford for his attack on the promise of Ontario, so maybe it balanced out.

But I really don’t think Yasir will do it again. He saw that he had gotten to Bonnie when he thanked former mayor Hazel McCallion for the homes being built in Mississauga.

Thankfully, Bonnie had to wait to answer his dig. When she did, it was a soft approach. Anyone who knew Hazel, would know that she would never leave Mississauga in the wrong hands. Hazel did not make up her mind overnight but when she endorsed Bonnie, it was with the obvious appreciation of Bonnie’s skills.

The disappointment for the day was in Nate Erskine-Smith. Everyone has an off day but Nate needed more enthusiasm for the debate. He knows that Bonnie Crombie is winning.

There are more debates planned. It would help in the upcoming debates to have a professional on the sound so that the audience are not having to change the sound levels they are getting and the candidates can hear the debate moderators.

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