Babel-on-the-Bay – Page 134 – Babel-on-the-Bay is the personal website of Peter Lowry. It is a vehicle for political commentaries.

“Most stupid people are conservative.”

March 9, 2020 by Peter Lowry

This will be of small comfort to premier Doug Ford of Ontario. A friend reminded me the other day of the quote from 19^th Century philosopher John Stuart Mill that “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” And the Ford government keeps on proving it.

Mind you, I am concerned that Ontario’s teachers might have not yet recognized that they have won their battle. It is time for them to take a victory lap and get the hell back to work. They have inconvenienced the parents long enough. Goodwill is a fragile commodity.

All teachers should have two side-by-side pictures in their classroom. Both pictures should be of education minister, Stephen Lecce. In the first, you will be able to admire the fine cut of that expensive suit, the positiveness of his demeanour, the toothy smile and the smooth trim of that immature beard. That is the first picture.

The second picture should show him snugged into his straight jacket, the wild look in his eyes, the mussed hair and the craven look of defeat. This should be what victory looks like.

But I warned the friend that despite the general consensus in Ontario that Doug Ford is something of a jerk, about 25 to 30 per cent of the voters are yellow-dog conservatives. And that, no matter what, they still want to vote for Mr. Ford and his conservatives. Short of putting a bounty on them, they are going to the polls and voting that way.

The problem is further befuddled that another 25 to 30 per cent of Ontario voters are yellow-dog liberals. They might have a slightly different attitude. The only real difference between them is that they tend to be city mice. They are also inclined to be a bit more progressive.

It should also be noted that there are those who are of the dying breed of socialists who like to sing Solidarity Forever. These NDP still have about 15 per cent of the voters supporting them. It is more for the sake of nostalgia than any idea that it will take them anywhere.

But this still leaves a bunch of voters who are not really committed. These are the people who vote against something or get behind the voting screen and say, “Eeny, meany, miney, moe,” close their eyes and vote. You would like to think these people really decide the election but they often just go with the flow.

Obviously, it is not just conservatives who can be stupid.

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Well, that was a waste of time.

March 8, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Ontario liberals have a new leader. It was a fairly decent event. I only caught some parts of it that were streamed on the Internet. It was a good technical effort but I think the party brass scrimped on the lighting and technical equipment.

The numbers there were credible for a party that knew who was going to win. Not many of us want to spend our Saturday morning listening to political speeches but some of it was fun. The robot was a bit silly but I liked some of the things Mr. Tedjo was saying.

He was saying something very important about education in Ontario. I made the mistake of saying the same thing as a candidate 50 years ago. The government has to get out of the religion business in schools. We need a single education system that puts the student first. It might not be a good one-size-fits-all approach at first but it allows the scope needed to accommodate. We are wasting money on religion. (Mind you, French language classes should be mandatory from grade one.)

But back to the results of the liberal leadership: It will not be long until Ontario voters wonder what might be the difference between this leader and the last one. All I can say is that the last one was the one with hair and personality.

What was wrong with this event was that it was that it had no excitement, no surprise—if you discount the robot. It was a bit forced.

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Riding the bubble.

March 7, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It helps if you think of the main aspirants for the federal conservative party leadership as Bland, Blander and Who(?) This perception was highlighted the other day. It seems one of them promised—if chosen—that they would immediately try to force an election to rid the country of those despicable liberals. The other two immediately chimed in with a “Me too.”

All three want to ride the bubble. The bubble is something that occurs whenever there is a leadership change in a major party. It is that sudden, and temporary, lift in the opinion polls that the party gets from the publicity surrounding the choice of a new leader.

It works, sometimes. The last time I saw it work well was in 1968. We called it Trudeaumania. Our present prime minister’s father got the impression that he was omnipotent in that election. He later learned that omnipotence has a short shelf-life.

Trudeau Junior thought he was riding the bubble back in 2015, when he had such an easy victory and a majority government. That was no bubble. Justin was cashing in on the voter exhaustion with the machinations of the Harper government and the hope that Trudeau was like his father. It took the voters the next four years to realize they might have bought a pig in a poke.

That is one of the problems with the bubble. You are often getting lots of publicity at the time but it is without substantive content. And sometimes a picture really is more effective than 1000 words.

But the bubble is real. Some people will say that in the 2018 provincial election in Ontario, you could have painted any idiot blue and he would have beat Kathleen Wynne and her liberals. And, they did, and he did.

The bubble worked that time because there was just not enough time. If Ontario voters had time to think about it, more time to understand Doug Ford, there might not have been the landslide that they are now regretting.

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Net Zero plus Net Zero is still Zero.

March 6, 2020 by Peter Lowry

This is a time to be a sceptic. When somebody tells you Canada will be net zero in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 30 years, give them the raspberry. Do you, or they, expect to be able to check it out or prove it in 30 years? It is a hollow promise from shallow people. Only actions can hold promise.

We can start by reducing our carbon footprint now.

Despite the steadily increasing population in this country, Canada has stayed in the range of 700 million tons of GHG emissions for the past 20 years. We drive gas-guzzling cars, we heat our homes, we fly around our country, we even pass gas. And despite the efforts to conserve, such as ending coal fired electrical generation in Ontario and the mainly unplanned reduction in manufacturing, we have no reduction to report.

It is too bad that there is no general agreement that a carbon tax is an effective incentive to manufacturers and farmers and energy producers. The problem is that a tax of $50 per ton of GHG is never going to be effective. It is when the tax is in the $250 range that manufacturers and investors will see the value in reducing emissions. The cost savings in reducing emissions have to be meaningful.

Canada could never expect to reach net zero emissions if the government had approved the Teck open pit mine in Northern Alberta. That extraction process alone was slated to produce 260,000 barrels a day of tar sands bitumen. Whether you upgraded that to synthetic crude oil in Canada or in India, it was going to add millions of tons more of GHG emissions to be refined into oil products and then burnt in cars, trucks, planes or diesel equipment. You can hardly ship it off shore and not be responsible for the emissions.

As it is, there is no need for the Trans Mountain pipeline to be twinned. It will take time to reduce bitumen production but eventually the capturing of the carbon produced and its safe storage more than a mile in the earth will allow for net zero refining.

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A weekend of infamy.

March 5, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Ontario liberals are wasting their money this weekend as they gather in Mississauga to confirm a new leader. With a new leader, about half a million in the bank and some good media coverage, the party should be ready to roar back at Doug Ford’s hapless Tories.

But it will not be long though until Ontario voters wonder what might be the difference.

It is the same problem as the American democratic party is having with its corrupt system of choosing presidential candidates. If you look at the history of those boring delegated conventions in the U.S., you realize that, in the main, they drill down to the blandest candidates. It is all manipulated anyway.

What happened to the republican party four years ago was that a pompous ass kept threatening to buy the republican convention, so they gave it to him. Donald Trump bought that convention at a fire-sale price.

To nobody’s amusement, New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg tried the Trump technique on the democratic party this time around and nobody bought it. Bloomberg wasted some of his billions.

But, thankfully, the situation is different in Canada. It would be foolish to say it cannot happen here but we are actually seeing variations of that in Ontario in recent leadership contests.

When Patrick Brown bought the Ontario conservative leadership in 2015, it cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where the money came from is only conjectured. Brown hired the organizers from Hindi temples and Muslim mosques. They sponsored parties throughout Ontario to which they invited both citizens and recent immigrants from the Sub-Continent. Of the 100,000 of these people in Ontario, the organizers signed up close to 40,000 as members of the Ontario progressive conservative party. They could pay the $10 membership fee or the organizers would pay it for them.

In Del Duca’s case the membership fee was $20 (for two years) but he only needed to sign up 14,000 to swamp the existing liberal party membership. Back when I worked on the party newspaper in Ontario, the party had 70,000 paying members. That was back when Ontario parties were run with a higher regard for honesty.

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The downhill dance of Doug Downey.

March 4, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It is all Caroline Mulroney’s fault. Nobody wants a member of the legislature who constantly embarrasses the people in his riding. We sure got that in spades in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte. And if only Caroline Mulroney knew more about Canadian and Ontario legal traditions, she would still be attorney general.

Instead, Ontario has the embarrassing Doug Downey, a small-town lawyer from Severn, Ontario, as attorney general. Ford parachuted him into the Barrie area seat to keep Patrick Brown out. It is not that I think Downey is stupid but he seems to be in dereliction of duty when he does what his boss, Doug Ford tells him to do. Consider Downey’s struggles to change how we appoint judges in Ontario:

Downey’s boss is not a highly educated person. He is a great believer in cronyism. He wants people in positions of power in Ontario to be good conservatives—this includes judges.

But how is Downey going to tell the good guys from the bad guys if he is only sent two recommendations of qualified people, when he asks the independent committee to give him some recommendations?

There might have been more than a couple of formal letters go back and forth here. The upshot was that he finally asked the committee to send him a list of all the applicants. It would appear that Downey was going to put cronyism ahead of having qualified judges.

That might have made sense to Downey but it outraged many of the legal community in Ontario. The province has an envied reputation throughout Canada and the U.S. for its non-partisan judicial appointments.

But what should be obvious to all in Ontario is that this guy Downey does not seem to have read the specifications for his job at Queen’s Park. As chief law officer for the province, he has a responsibility to advise the premier and the various ministers of the crown on how to stay out of legal entanglements. Failure to provide this advice and/or having it ignored is not acceptable for an honourable person. He should resign.

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Like talking to the wind.

March 3, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Our politicians need more experience in dealing with our native peoples before they announce they are meeting milestones. Milestones are just road markers for those who can read them. Talking with our native peoples is a process. It is like talking to the wind. What is carried where is always a matter of conjecture.

These are peoples with only an oral history of the times before Europeans started arriving on their shores. Their tales were told and retold in their lodges and wickiups and around campfires.

What other Canadians will skip over in a conversation, our native people will cover in detail. It is like cabinet member Carolyn Bennett probably didn’t notice the other day that the milestone she reached with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs had little to do with the problem of their supporters blocking train tracks.

Canadians, whether native or not, know that there have been many missteps in our relations with each other over the years. Sometimes Canadians meant well and really made a mess of it. Sometimes the native peoples were obliging and also regretted it.

But today, we are all tired of the failures of our politicians in seeking reconciliation. While we try to be polite and observe the rights of our native peoples to their treaty and ancestral lands, the actions of a few of them in blocking trains and roads has frustrated the general population who often have no idea what is the cause of the disruption and what can be done to rectify the problem. What it is doing is making race relations more difficult.

In an interview with grand chief Joe Norton of the Kahnawake First Nations in Quebec, Mercedes Stephenson of Global Television gave him a platform to state his complaints. What we heard was how limited his knowledge was of the concerns of the West Coast natives of Wet’suwet’en. His solution was that he could send some of his native police to B.C. to replace the RCMP (who are the B.C. provincial police) who seem to be disliked by the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs. That would certainly add more confusion.

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The Joiners.

March 2, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Remember the old Blues Brothers number: Everybody wants somebody to love. I was thinking of that last week as people were wreaking havoc on hapless commuters and train travellers across Canada. I am always curious about the joiners, looking for their fleeting 15 minutes of fame.

When others are looking at the police seemingly standing around contemplating the time wasted on this duty at these blockades, I look at the joiners. And that is what they are: they are joiners.

At one site on a rail line, there was one stupid kid standing around waiting to be arrested and he had a bandana over the lower part of his face. He must have thought the bandana made him look like some kind of desperado. All it did was look silly. The kid did not act as an aboriginal might. He had no such connection. He was just a joiner.

Joiners go to the action. They were in their glory last year when they joined a couple million people in celebrating the basketball win by the Toronto Raptors. Even I was impressed by the size of that turnout. I watched it on television.

Joiners used to get religion, join some holy rollers group and stay out of trouble. Lately they have found that going where there is trouble is more interesting. They saw how these more obnoxious groups like Black Lives Matters and Canada’s native peoples can screw over trains and automobiles, block bridges and traffic and even get even with police. This is much more fun than smoking a joint with other losers. Especially when cannabis is not even illegal any more.

I always found that there was a considerable number of joiners ready to sign on for an election campaign. If you signed up a bunch of young ladies first, the young guys were sure to follow. They were never much for the heavy lifting in the campaign but they sure looked good for crowd scenes to impress the media.

What politicians such as Doug Ford do not understand is that these joiners will buy your BS as long as you buy the beer but then they wander off. You have to work hard at keeping them feeling important.

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Where have all the leaders gone?

March 1, 2020 by Peter Lowry

You get the feeling that we are talking about a ghost. Everybody is looking for leadership. Nobody has seen it. Talking to a friend about it, he said the problem is that there are too many rowboat people and not enough canoeists. He explained it as most people row a boat facing where they have been. Canoeists on the other hand, face where they are going. We just need more canoeists.

Look at the pitiful state of our national political parties. The only ones that even matter are the liberals, conservatives, new democrats and the greens. Two of the parties are looking for leaders and the other two should. The conservatives reached their cut-off date this past week and who do you think that choice will excite? The greens are still arguing about how to manage a contest and they might not have one.

The NDP are in the worst shape. The party lost a third of its caucus in the last election because of the lack of leadership, lack of direction and its inability to raise adequate funds for a national campaign.

But the most serious lack of leadership is in the liberal party. Justin Trudeau is certainly not his father. And he is not a leader. A leader brings clarity to direction and nobody has a clue as to where we are going with Justin. And it is a lot more than our environmental direction that is concerning.

The PM was talking reconciliation with our native peoples four years ago and look how far have we come with that?

How many prime ministers get to spend billions on a pipeline that nobody wants except the greedy who do not care about the environment.

Trudeau is a hypocrite. He claims support for feminists and you might want to check with Jody Raybould-Wilson MP on that one. He enjoys travels to meetings of world leaders but what has been his contribution at those international conflabs?

Trudeau has been tearing down the liberal party as he and his underlings pester registered liberals for money. The party has been crying out for leadership.

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The end of an era.

February 29, 2020 by Peter Lowry

We were unlikely novitiates in the liberal party of the 1960s. I honestly do not remember where or when we met. Yet I do remember the launching pads of our friendship over the years. Hon. David P. Smith was an impulsive, fun-loving and caring guy. He died on February 26.

A key memory was his first municipal campaign in the 1970s. I had been out and when I arrived home, the wife came out, told me I had people waiting for me in the living room and went to have coffee with a neighbour. It was two guys named Smith: David and his campaign manager, Larry Smith. And prominently displayed on a sofa was the worst election sign I had ever seen.

“Peter, I’m gonna run for alderman in Ward 11. Isn’t that a great sign? With that introduction and that sign, I think I was struck dumb. Then, in the classic line from the movie The Candidate, he asked, “What do we do now?” It was 21 years later that prime minister Jean Chrétien would facetiously complain that Smitty had let him down by not winning all of Ontario’s 99 seats. He lost just one. (Barrie, the area I live in today.)

The only municipal election David lost was when he overreached in a crowded field and went for the Toronto mayor’s job. It was one of the rare times he annoyed me. At his opening campaign meeting around a huge boardroom table at a downtown law firm, people were introducing themselves. They were all lawyers. When it was my turn, David broke in and said I was his good luck charm and he always won when I was involved. If you have ever been in a political campaign run by lawyers, you would understand why I did not return. David lost.

He was much more contrite a couple years later when the Joe Clark conservatives fell and he called me to ask if he could run in my riding. I said sure, the liberals in the riding liked him and he had an easy win.

I was laughing along with prime minister Pierre Trudeau a few years later, when Pierre made him minister of tourism. David was the world’s most avid tourist. Not even I could help David when the Mulroney conservatives won the next election.

David was among the last appointees to really earn that Senate seat. He stepped into the national director role for the liberal party as our friend Keith Davey slipped away into the fog of Alzheimer. David was a dedicated liberal. He will be missed.

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