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

The Good Guys are Going.

by Peter Lowry

Canada lost both a staunch liberal and a much-loved conservative in the past week.  It is a rare situation when we wonder at how difficult it will be to replace either.

I first met Marc LaLonde in prime minister Lester Pearson’s office in 1968. He laughingly referred to himself as an ‘eminence gris.’ I already knew he was a friend of Pierre Trudeau and I figured he would go anywhere he wanted in Pierre’s incoming administration.

The only time I had reason to be annoyed with him was, when as finance minister, he cut the government’s miserly $60 million support for basic health research to zilch.

Instead of going to him directly as president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, I arranged to talk to the parliamentary finance committee that was chaired by one of our Toronto MPs. I was addressing them on behalf of friends in Montreal who had organized to support health research. It was so bi-partisan that it was an NDP MP who had my speech ‘read’ into Hansard.

My office got the call that afternoon from Pierre Trudeau’s office that Marc had found $60 million to continue funding basic research.

The other casualty of time in the past week was former senator Hugh Segal. Hugh was a conservative. I guess it is too late to ask him to please do something about that nasty little man Pierre Poilievre. He isn’t Hugh’s kind of conservative.

Hugh must have had a stroke when that ignorant fool Doug Ford came into the premier’s office in Ontario, five years ago, and immediately canceled the provincial test of the effects of the province having a guaranteed annual income. I could have told people that the test was working but Ford didn’t want that news out.

But it was something that Hugh believed in. He never was the mean kind of conservative. He was affable. He was funny. He made friends so easily. He cared.

I never got to see him in his office as master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. I bet Hugh looked great there.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

“Here’s Another Nice Mess.”

by Peter Lowry

You hardly expect the conservatives at Queen’s Park in Toronto to go after their own government but premier Doug Ford will be hard pressed on this goof. It is right there in the playbook for a Laurel and Hardy short film out of the 1930s. Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk laid the indictment out in a 93-page booklet and she has almost defied the provincial police to ignore the substance of her report.

What is missing in Lysyk’s indictment is the direct route of the malfeasance to the premier’s office. It looks like Doug Ford is getting the credit from his developer friends but it is some guy named Ryan Amato who might do the time. It seems that Amato is chief of staff for the housing minister. It is quite a story he is reported to have told Lysyk about going around collecting the material from the developers as to what part of the Greenbelt they wanted for development. I’ve seen that twist in politics too many times in the past. When doing something that you know is wrong, you line up the fall guy in advance.

But what puzzles me is that these developers knew what they were doing. They knew the politicians were lying to the public. There would never be geared-to-income homes built in the Greenbelt. Yet, I know some of these development people and I know that some of them even have a conscience.

What is starting to niggle at me is the question of what is going to happen to Ontario’s housing needs if this outrageous scheme gets the challenges it deserves. Is anything going to get built?

There is certainly no way we should worry about the billions in the Greenbelt that have been speculated on. First of all, this is obviously not serviced land. Somebody has to be at the local municipal engineer’s elbow today directing attention to the needs of providing roads, sewers, electricity, water, cable or fiber optics for some of these proposed homes. Do you want to bet on how long it takes for today’s farmland to be ready for some lucky families to be moving in?

Oh yah, I have heard about the time limits on getting there but I am also well aware that extensions can be arranged for friends of Mr. Ford. And there will certainly be lots of funding available for re-electing the Ford conservatives.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry             

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

[email protected]

Rebuilding Poilievre.

by Peter Lowry

Nobody worries about polls, this far between elections, but there seem to be a lot of questions about conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. The most serious is, if this guy is looking so good in the polls, why is his party so hell-bent on changing him?

The first thing the party did was to take away his trade-mark glasses, leaving him squinting at the photographers.  The most recent step was to spend a few million dollars on a Hollywood remake of his wife and kids. That might have been a good idea in the age of Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies, but nobody is electing the family to anything. And, as it turns out, they don’t really have a family to run them against. Emphasizing Trudeau’s marital problems is not going to get them anywhere.

The basic problem with Poilievre is he spends all his time maligning Trudeau and claiming that he is responsible for everything from gum disease to bowel problems.

The problem is that the world is waiting for Pierre Poilievre to tell us what the hell, he would do as prime minister? It is all very well to blame poor Justin for causing the world-wide inflation but if a Canadian PM has caused it why can’t a Canadian PM fix it? If Poilievre has some magic wand, isn’t it about time, he told us about it?

Canadians are currently going through the hottest summer the world has ever recorded. Now, we understand that most conservatives think this climate change business is just a hoax to raise taxes but, as Dorothy can tell you, it is not just happening in Kansas anymore. And if Pierre Poilievre is the little man behind the curtain in Oz, he should tell us now.

Frankly, I think an honest poll might show that most Canadians are getting tired of Poilievre’s bitching about the failings of the liberals and they want him to tell us what he could do any better. Has he got some answers to the affordable housing problem?  Or do I have to start building my own igloo for the coming winter? And, make no mistake, winter is coming with all the certainty of that confusing Netflix series.

All I know about Poilievre is that that nasty little man is not interested in the needs of Canadians. He has this idea of himself ruling us with an iron fist. One of these days we might pay attention to him.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Filling the Field.

by Peter Lowry

In yesterday’s discussion of the Ontario provincial liberal leadership race, there was no dismissal of the part being played by the other three candidates. In any race of this nature, the political mind automatically sorts the candidates into their pole positions. While much of the news media attention is devoted to the obvious front runners with the higher profiles, you ignore the also-rans at your peril.

If they can raise the entry fees, these candidates can buy into higher party positioning and future cabinet roles. You would not bet your kid’s college funds on the chances but with to-day’s fund-raising figures, a hundred thousand is not that difficult.

And I think all three are worth it. Yasir Naqvi has already proved his loyalty and strengths for the party and I see him a worthy caretaker, but not a leader. He was an adequate Ontario party president.

But whomever in the Ontario party followed the stupid federal decision to eliminate annual membership fees was not doing anyone other than Justin Trudeau a favour.

(As an aside here, I have no proof of my membership in the party other than the hundreds of fund-raising e-mails I have received in the past several years.)

I had been wondering what moved Ted Hsu, MPP for Kingston and the Islands. It was premature for him to jump into this race before he had more of a track record with the party, though I welcome his confidence to step forward. As the race moves on over the fall, I am going to pay attention to this candidate’s long-term vision for the party. It could be very interesting.

The final candidate is Don Valley West MPP Adil Shamji. It is probably a good thing that we are getting more doctors involved in politics these days. After the pandemic, we need to have more expertise at hand in making the decisions about the long-term impacts of changes in medical services. And besides, we always have enough lawyers in politics but my GP and I are both convinced that you get the most experience in politics in the cut and thrust of doings at the Ontario Medical Association.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Picking a Liberal Winner.

by Peter Lowry

Sorry, there will be no Morning Line from me on the current liberal leadership contest in Ontario. The opinion piece in the Toronto Star by Bob Hepburn last week tended to sum up the situation. The timing of this race is awkward and over extended. And it will not end well with a ranked ballot.

If the liberals had timed the announcement party for some time in September with a single winner-take-all ballot, or even a run-off vote for the top two, in the event nobody had more than 50 per cent of the vote, it would be a happier situation.

But that is water under the bridge. Anyone who has studied ranked ballots knows that the method can result in surprise conclusions, that make few happy.  The conservatives had to throw one of their contestants under the bus to break the pattern in their last leadership.

This will be the first really honest liberal leadership in Ontario in 50 years, and I guess I should be satisfied with that. And nobody has an ethnic group ready to be signed up en masse, to tilt the scales.

Since the conclusion that both Bob Hepburn and I have come to is that the real race is between Bonnie Crombie and Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, I would like to see Nate in the driver’s seat to remove Doug Ford from Ontario politics.

Mind you, I still like Bonnie Crombie. She has a lot going for her. If my friend Hazel McCallion liked her, she must be a smart person. The only thing that stopped me was that remark about Kathleen Wynne being too left wing. And I hardly think she was kidding. There are no ‘ifs ands or buts’; Ontario needs a progressive to lead and rebuild our medical capabilities, build homes that people can afford and stand up to those who would profit outrageously from inflation.

I just want to make sure that Nate’s team has the right music to march to in taking over Queen’s Park. I want to help him knit his platform into a single idea. I want to see him with a team of people with big hearts taking over on behalf of every man, woman and child in Ontario. Its their province.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Stupid Polls.

by Peter Lowry

It is often worth a minute or so to answer the polls run by our local Barrie Today Internet Newspaper. The publication hardly gives the Toronto Star or Globe and Mail any concern but is the most aggressive of the totally bad choices of local media here in Barrie since we lost our long struggling newspaper the Barrie Examiner, which did a reasonable job of reporting the city’s news and obituaries for some 153 years.

If I did not have a summer cold, and feeling like crap, I would probably be in a better mood. If you wanted my advice on media in Barrie and if I was in a better mood, I would suggest finding a radio station you can tolerate for breaking news and getting the Saturday Toronto Star which is chock-full of interesting obits.

But this commentary is about a particular stupid poll, the electronic newspaper was taking and the disgusting results. They asked their readers to tell them who was the best prime minister of Canada in the last half century and then the worst prime minister in the same period. I was disgusted that they forgot all about dear old Joe Clark, prime minister from June 1979 to March 1980. He was prime minister of a conservative caucus who unfortunately could not count.

Funny story about that; I worked for an American computer company at the time and the then American president of the Canadian company was interested in politics. I took him to a fund-raising dinner for the conservative prime minister in Toronto. While eating our dinner, I remarked that it was very appropriate that the conservatives were throwing a turkey dinner on American Thanksgiving. He looked down at his dinner and said, “This is Rock Cornish Hen, not turkey.”

I answered, “The turkey is the after-dinner speaker.”

He agreed with me after the dinner when he conceded that the best speech of the evening was when prime minister Joe Clark was introduced by the then premier of Ontario, Bill Davis.

But what annoyed me about that poll was that a third of the Barrie voters picked Stephen Harper and less than 20 per cent picked Pierre Trudeau. It is likely that only about half of Barrie voters would be old enough to have seen and heard from Pierre Trudeau. This country needs better history books.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Mixed Complaints.

by Peter Lowry

This is something I complained about a year ago. These people who think they are doing something good by saying they are protecting Lake Simcoe and they want to stop the Bradford Bypass and block Highway 413 are a bunch of amateurs running in circles. Judging by their ill-thoughtout news release in Barrie Today recently, I truly wish they had professional help. Their movement desperately needs focus. 

And Barrie Today is hardly helping them by running the group’s news release without professional editing. How many of the readers of Barrie Today would immediately know that construction just north of Bradford on Yonge Street is probably one of the bridges for the Bradford Bypass? If a person paid attention to all the bridge work and road widening related to Highway 400 over the last ten years, they would know that is all related to the growing traffic.

It might frustrate some NIMBY’s (Not In My Back Yard) that they cannot prevent something for the common good. Highways 400 and 404 in Ontario has been developed over the past 70 years to improve access to Ontario’s summer and winter playgrounds in the lakes-regions of Central Ontario. The cottagers, tourists and skiers have created an economic bonanza for Ontario. The Bradford Bypass is critical to splitting the streams of traffic, both commercial and tourist and Ontario residents. Those roads should not only be linked through the Town of Newmarket.      

If you want to complain about the very idea of the proposed Highway 413, I am with you 100 per cent. This plan was discarded by the last liberal government of Ontario for very good reason. The highway was not needed. The ministry of transportation is always busy looking at possible solutions to traffic needs. In Ontario and in most sensible jurisdictions, we do not build highways to satisfy the greed of our developer friends. Most of these builders are upstanding citizens and would not dream of getting insider information of where highways are going to be built.

Judging by the amount of time it takes to plan, design, get approvals and funds for a major highway project, combined with the mysteries of municipal approvals, you could be sure that if you were a young person when you got the inside information, you would be a very old person before profiting.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

No Rest for the Wicked.

by Peter Lowry

It hardly seems like Ontario premier Doug Ford’s summer is going as planned. The conservative populist is neither conserving much of what he rules over nor has he improved his popularity with Ontario citizens. And it just might be driving him to a point of showing signs of paranoia.

And that would be the last thing we need, a premier who becomes convinced that people are out to do him in. We are going to have to come at this problem with care.

There seems to be no question that he does not trust others. Why just the other week, he accused his attorney general, Mr. Downey of re-instituting the King’d Counsel title for use by Downey himself, and other deserving conservative lawyers, without telling his boss. You get the feeling that Ford is regretting his failure to stay in university and make something of himself. Instead, he sold labels for his daddy’s firm.

I am a layman when it comes to psychiatry but I have seen someone with paranoid symptoms close up. These are people who can be very defensive and easily offended. You sometimes have to walk on tip-toes around them.

But what I cannot fathom is this defensiveness for some of Doug Fords plans for Ontario. Ford certainly does not know how to respond to a response such as “that is a really dumb idea.” And he is getting it too often these days.

And he is always getting even with the people he thinks have disrespected him. One of the first things he did when moving into the premier’s office at Queen’s Park was order the city of Toronto to cut their number of planned members of council in half—even though the campaign had started. It appeared to be a pay-back for the treatment he received when at Toronto city hall. He made the job of the elected councilors almost impossible to carry out effectively.

When he decided to promote the proposed highway 413 that the liberals had rejected because it was not needed and ran through some of the better farming country and wet lands of Ontario. If you ever want to see a fat guy dig in his heels, tell Doug it is a highway to nowhere and not needed.

The spa he has arranged for at our Ontario Place islands at the Exhibition Grounds is a disgrace and a very bad use of what is supposed to be a park and why he would want to put a half-sized science centre with it is beyond my understanding. Maybe this would be a good time to upgrade the mental health services at Queen’s Park.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Playing the Race Card.

by Peter Lowry

You go after this subject with some trepidation. I have always been proud of our multi-racial Canada. I abhor racists and their writings. I have also been paying close attention to this current leadership of the Ontario liberals. I admired Yasir Naqvi when he was attorney general of Ontario. I also like Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s progressiveness as an MP and Bonnie Crombie’s outspokenness as mayor of Mississauga. I have yet to meet the other two contestants and therefore have not commented very often on the ongoing race.

Whether Yasir Naqvi wrote the op-ed in the Toronto Star or not is not relevant, he signed it. It was saying some unnecessary things. As a child and as a young man in Toronto after the Second World War, I listened to many of the frustrations of my friends had in dealing with the old-country complaints of parents who raised their children here. It sounds like Yasir’s parents were very supportive. There were parents who regretted their decision to come to Canada. I admired those young people who could keep peace with their parents while enjoying the greater freedoms of our society.

In my view, we are all Canadians. Instead of promoting religious, ethnic or racial barriers, we are one.

I hardly care when your ancestors came to this bounteous land. They could have come 15,000 years ago, a century ago or last week. I wish we could make it easier for people to make the adjustments necessary. I remember an artist acquaintance who emigrated to this country from Austria and told me that to make money, he had to dig ditches. Oddly enough, he wasn’t complaining. He was proud that he could do it. He soon returned to his art and was very successful.

But I do have some prejudices. I abhor religious schools. They work to divide peoples and I object to that. I always believed in the old adage: You go to your church and I will go to mine but we can walk to them together.

I think that the ‘black-lives-matter’ group in Canada hurts our black citizens. I am appalled at those who want to tear down old statues or rename streets because they think it might make up for errors in the past. I would never want to elect a Catholic or Anglican bishop, a Hassidic Jew, or an observant Sikh to any position where they might put their religion ahead of the needs of their electorate. They have too many conflicts to serve.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Playing the Trump Card.

by Peter Lowry

There is no doubt about it: Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is making Justin Trudeau look better every day. You can take away his glasses, his starched shirts and his insipid ties but the boy is still turning out to be the prime minister’s best friend. What has clinched it is when he plays the Trump card. It is when he fails to win the support of people in his own party.

The first campaign any new party leader must wage is with the naysayers in his or her own party. These people might not have been onside for your leadership campaign but their objectives are the same as yours and there is no easier ally than someone with the same objectives.

If you have been following the ups and downs of Donald Trump in the United States, you will note that he tends to be as vicious with Republicans who have opposed him as he is with Democrats. It turns out that Pierre Poilievre has the same failing.

The recent by-elections exposed the conflicts that are tearing at the conservative party. The Oxford debacle in Ontario drove some conservatives to not only support but work for a liberal candidate. The conservative party can write off most of those former supporters who have felt the sting of Boy Wonder.

And where does Poilievre get off in dumping on Jean Charest and Brian Mulroney in Quebec. They might be has-beens where Poilievre comes from but they are still worth some votes in Quebec and Poilievre needs all the votes he can get in that province.

And then look at Ontario. Good old conservative Ontario. Where the deer and the Fords Play. With a nutbar such as Doug Ford driving things in that province, do you really expect federal conservatives to make headway there? Ford and his conservative government not only ignore the Ontario greenbelt but think it is a great place for their friendly developers to build. With friends like these, the Boy Wonder might have to rethink his entire strategy.

What he is not doing is building any credibility as a leader. For him to spend all his effort on tearing down the liberal government, and its leader is ridiculous. He offers nothing concrete. He would deliver nothing. Why is he wasting our time?

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]