Babel-on-the-Bay – Page 206 – Babel-on-the-Bay is the personal website of Peter Lowry. It is a vehicle for political commentaries.

“What the world needs now…”

March 12, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Got an interesting e-mail the other day from a fellow commentator on Canada’s left coast. He had an excellent suggestion on what Canada should do about the currently growing estrangement from a badly run United States of America. He sees it as an opportunity for an independent Canada to become an honest broker for our world.

He wants us to create peace rather than be failed peace keepers. He sees our newfound freedom from the Americans as an opportunity for Canada to not only offer to broker but to enforce the peace. He sees us as taking Canada to a new level in world affairs.

He sees Canada as having been used as something of a foreign Legion by the Americans. The best example of this is when the Americans dumped their failed Afghanistan campaign on us.

I thought of it as Art Eggleton’s war. He and Prime Minister Paul Martin were duped by the Americans and their own military experts. It was the only war Canada ever lost. We were just another bunch of foreigners feeding our rations to the Pashtuns. They have been killing foreign soldiers for centuries and are getting very practiced at it.

He and I both agree that it was shameful that Canada never had enough troops in Afghanistan to make a difference. Thankfully we got out and those left came home to mourn our dead.

The problem I see to this plan for enforced peace is that we need a larger and better equipped military capability to undertake the role. We need ground support aircraft and aircraft that can give us control of the sky in troubled areas. We need rapid mobility and better intelligence in likely areas of need. We never want to go in blind. And it has to be clear up-front that decisions on the ground take precedence over the armchair experts at the United Nations.

We could be the world’s problem solvers. It would take commitment. The biggest problem is that these small police type actions often create more problems than were there in the first place. The Middle East for example is like a wack-a-mole game that nobody is allowed to win. We got rid of that dictator in Libya and have done worse in the long run.

Our advantage in this are the people from those troubled countries, who came to us for refuge and a better life. We need to interview and study what these people have to say about their former home and its needs. It can help come up with solutions.

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Donald Trump Lite and the Ontario PCs.

March 11, 2018 by Peter Lowry

After spending Saturday afternoon watching Rosemary Barton and CBC News struggling with the Ontario Conservative fiasco, I was not sure whether the party or the news media did the worst job. It was embarrassing. I actually paid the CBC $6.85 plus GST for the right to watch that screw-up on streaming video. And I want my money back.

I spent a career working on news conferences, conventions, political rallies, candidate selections and leadership contests across Canada. I always worked to the rule that whatever happens is supposed to happen and you live with it.

But I never considered that you could have a disaster such as the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership announcement.

The worst of it was that nobody seemed to be in charge. There seemed to be nobody willing to deal with the news media. There was no information shared with the attendees. They waited for hours without anyone coming to the microphone to apologize for the delays and then they were sent home without answers. Like wayward children, they were sent to bed without their supper.

What really amazes me is that when you are using computer collection of data (such as voting) that you would not write the simple program needed to count those votes. The only time I complained about the weighting of the ridings is when I tried to simulate a program to do that in preparing Babel-on-the-Bay’s Morning Line.

I estimated that there would be less than 70,000 votes cast. It was also clear that Tanya Granic Allen was the fringe candidate. She did better than expected but still came fourth.

It was the collapse of the Caroline Mulroney campaign that surprised us. Like her father, her campaign was just hot air. She blew it.

But it was the attempt to make all electoral districts equal that left the Tories in a mess. Like the electoral college in the U.S., the Tories had an undemocratic system. In the end, Christine Elliott won the most votes and Doug Ford won the election.

All I could think of last night was that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne had a chance to resign last year. We can only hope that she takes a look at what Hillary Clinton did wrong in the last U.S. election. She has to remember that there are lots of angry conservatives in Ontario. Her and her party have to win the rest.

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‘Chuckles’ Scheer, meet Donald Trump.

March 10, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Did you hear that Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa, wants to move the Canadian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem? He must have heard that is what U.S. President Trump intends to do. That is a very bad move by Chuckles.

The problem is that the Canadian conservative leader wants to pander to the Jewish vote in Canada. He assumes it is the same reason as Donald Trump is supposedly pandering to the American Jewish vote. That is wrong.

Chuckles does not seem to be aware that Donald Trump is not political. He never has been and he panders to nobody but his lumpenproletariat followers. He has been doing business with New York Jews all his adult life. They have likely influenced his attitude about Arabs and Muslims. It boils down to: Jews good; Arabs bad. It would take a good psychiatrist to break that down into the whys but it means Trump sees Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu as an ally.

Netanyahu was visiting Washington the other day and in their joint news conference, the news media tried to get some clear answers from the American president about his proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum. Netanyahu was visibly amused by the byplay. It seemed to this political apparatchik that Netanyahu should be asked by the Canadian Jewish community, why he thought the proposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum were that funny?

The preponderance of Jewish voters in three electoral districts in Toronto and two in Montreal can be important in federal elections. Those five MPs are usually Liberals. Stephen Harper used ever trick in his book to try to win Irwin Cottler’s Mount Royal seat in parliament when Cottler stepped down at the 2015 election. Despite the concerted effort, a Liberal still won.

What Scheer also does not seem to understand is that Canada has maintained a very clear policy. As a friend of Israel, we maintain Israel’s right to exist and believe the time for moving embassies around is when there is a clear and lasting peace established by Israel and its Arab neighbours.

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The Ontario PCs in Wonderland.

March 9, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Vic Fedeli is hardly the Alice in Wonderland who foolishly headed down the rabbit hole. Yet it was Interim conservative leader Fedeli who first let on that Patrick Brown might not have been telling the whole truth about party memberships. And with three of the four candidates still in the running asking about “tainted” memberships, it sounds like they are laying the groundwork for potential challenges to the outcome of the leadership contest on Saturday.

We would never question why Doug Ford and the Mulroney camp would know how to create false memberships. It is when both camps demand that memberships paid by prepaid credit cards be rejected they seem to know what they are doing. They certainly do not want all those cards voting.

Vic Fedeli seemed even less forthcoming when he told the news media that he could not find 67,000 of the supposed 200,000 memberships that former leader Patrick Brown claimed were signed up by last November. In as much as Patrick Brown signed up about 40,000 from the Indian Sub-continent in 2015 to swamp the PC Party membership, it is highly unlikely that any of those temporary memberships have been renewed.

(It absolutely amazes this old politico that the news media keep buying into the idea that the social conservatives won the leadership for Brown in 2015. It is unlikely that Tanya Granic Allen’s vote will be announced on Saturday but she will likely be the first candidate dropped from the count. She might get as much as 10 to 15 per cent of votes cast but that could take every possible “Right to Life” vote in the party.)

The reality of voting in the party’s confused voting system is that the winning candidate has to not only win the most votes but to have them distributed proportionally across enough electoral districts. The voting system is designed to work against the candidate who has his or her vote concentrated in just one area of the province. It is why in the last all candidate appearance in Ottawa, Doug Ford must have mentioned being in every area of the province except Toronto. Ford Nation cannot help him without strong support from outside Toronto.

The heavy betting seems to be on Christine Elliott. The only question is that if she does not win on the first ballot count—where would she get the second-choice votes to go on to win? There might be further twists and turns before this race is decided.

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“We stand on guard for thee.”

March 8, 2018 by Peter Lowry

The last time our parliamentarians screwed around with Canada’s national anthem, they were trying to make it gender neutral. What they accomplished was to have some of us singing different words, others of us confused and all of us stuck with awkward phrasing. And it is tough to fake that you are singing along under those conditions.

But we can all be robust in song when we come to standing on guard. We know those words and we all concur in their meaning.

And, these days, we all want to stand on guard against that incompetent ass Donald Trump in the American White House.

But be warned. That bastard is trying to get us angry, He wants us to retaliate. It will launch a trade war that he will win only when he puts North America into the grip of a depression. He is more than willing to damage his own country to prove himself right. He will blame Canada. We all know of his disrespect for Mexico.

Foreign minister Chrystia Freeland can threaten retaliation but no wise person would carry it out.

Trump will do that for us. He is raising the price of softwood lumber on the west coast of the United States. Canada has already passed the 50 per cent mark in shifting our B.C. softwood lumber sales to China, Japan and Korea.

The steel markets he is threatening are more complex. It would take several years for America to replace the rolling mills in Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario that supply much of the rolled steel to America. Americans will hardly appreciate the cost increases inflicted by Trump in the meantime. Nobody is worried about aluminum tariffs as Canada and Norway share the ability to supply world markets of aluminum at the lowest costs. Trump’s lumpen proletariat will just have to bite the bullet of a higher cost for their beer cans,

In the meantime, we should let our friends and relations know that a loony spent in the United States might be less than 78 cents but it helps pay for Trump’s pomposity. We are already paying too much for products from the United States and it would pay us to cut back when we can.

And after the winter we are presently experiencing, is the southern U.S. that much better a place for a holiday? Why not enjoy a Caribbean holiday or a trip to Mexico instead?

Frankly, we should all be doing what we can to give Mr. Trump the one-finger salute.

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The troubled travels of Trudeau.

March 7, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Good advice is a treasured commodity in government. Bad advice is plentiful. It seems that our current prime minister has plenty of the latter and not enough of the former. It could also be that Justin Trudeau has lots of good advice but chooses to ignore it. That was how his father behaved in his first term in office. He almost did not have a second term. And watching Trudeau the Younger these days, we are wondering if he even knows in what direction he is headed?

After an easy election despite the obvious weaknesses of his advisors, Justin Trudeau had a good start. He made the point that it was 2015 after all and he was a new broom. We said: Go for it, tiger!

We were not aware that we now had an elitist for prime minister. We were unaware that he wanted to take family vacations with the rich and famous. We had no idea that he would turn appointments over to elitist panels.

He did not seem to know that real men support feminism because they are proud of what women contribute in our society. Their respect and the equality of the sexes is self-evident and accepted. Real men and real women have little to prove.

Justin Trudeau’s devotion to his family is evident and commendable. His family is a truly charming representation of our country.

But when they travel abroad they are representing our country. They are not there just as tourists. They are not there to ape the dress and manners of their hosts. For the children to try native dress is charming. For our prime minister to repeatedly try native dress is distressing.

Stephen Harper would travel to excess to escape what he saw as the boredom of parliament. Justin Trudeau travels to escape what he sees as the nagging of parliament. If he does not find better sources of advice, nagging will be the least of his problems.

Watching ‘Chuckles’ Scheer paraded through the talk shows last weekend, it is obvious the shift in his position in his Conservative party. The move is from an interim fill-in to a possible success. The day they think of Scheer as a possible prime minister, I thought there would be at least three moons in the daylight sky.

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The Bully Pulpit of Donald Trump.

March 6, 2018 by Peter Lowry

President Theodore Roosevelt said, more than 100 years ago, that the White House is a bully pulpit. It means something very different to the bully in today’s White House. Roosevelt saw the bully pulpit as a position for good. Trump sees it as a position to abuse the less powerful. He is a bully in the full sense of the word.

Even Trump’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiators, meeting in Mexico City in the past week were caught off guard by the tariffs Trump proposed on aluminum and steel. He was so proud of this that he twitted his plan to bully his country’s neighbours. He is going to bring them back to the table cowering to accept his conditions for an American version of NAFTA. (Otherwise known as ‘beggar your neighbours.’)

Trump’s negotiators have repeated told him that there is little reason for Canada and Mexico to want to “Make America Great Again” the Trump way. A trade agreement such as NAFTA can be of great benefit to the economies of the participating countries but it requires goodwill and fair dealing.

The bully in Trump tells him that it should be the most powerful nation that makes the rules. While neither Canada nor Mexico are the largest producers of steel, there has been a brisk three-way business in steel between the three countries. It has meant lower prices, more variety, adequate supplies and a fair market between the three countries. Trump is sure as hell, he is going to fix that. His tariffs will greatly increase the costs for American construction and products made with steel. He is trying to put thousands of Canadian steelworkers out of work in Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie but will jeopardize the jobs of even more in Pittsburgh and Gary, Indiana.

Trump’ followers will likely pay the higher cost for their aluminum beer cans. Canada’ aluminum smelters are located in the middle of an area of the cheapest hydro power production in North America and will carry on regardless.

Trump is waiting for Canadians to retaliate to the repeated tariff challenges for soft-wood lumber, dairy products and now aluminum and steel. He wants a trade war. He needs Canadian retaliation to get approval in his country for his trade war. It would be the end of NAFTA. That is why Canada is carefully counting to ten each time the bully makes a move.

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Small men. Big rockets. Bad news.

March 5, 2018 by Peter Lowry

What are the similarities between Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un? They all think they have the biggest, fastest, most invincible nuclear weapons. They all think of themselves as wielding immense power. They all fear for their position in a true democracy.

How would Mr. Putin survive in a country with a free news media? Would he get away with arresting his political opponents? Is North Korea allowed to have political opponents? Mr. Trump might like to get rid of his. In the mean time he is busy convincing his claque that they have to ignore the fake news of the news media. How many followers does he have for his twits this week?

How can a country such as Russia be the first to circle earth with its Sputnik and brag of the super speed of its rockets when it cannot even make a decent refrigerator? How can North Korea brag of rockets that can reach North America, when its people cannot get enough food? Maybe all three of these leaders are putting the emphasis on the wrong objectives.

Mr. Trump has been particularly bad at selecting priorities. His immigration stand has been hateful and hurtful to people less able to defend themselves. In a nation built by those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” as described by Emma Lazarus, Mr. Trump is a boor and bigot, channeling his tunnel vision of the world to America’s millions of jingoists, religious right and other losers.

It is the abject failure of politics to evolve and develop in America as a system “by and for the people” that has brought the country to a state so like the other two oligarchies of the military.

Trump saw the frustration and used it. He saw the failure of Americans to vote in a corrupted system and took advantage of it. He saw the anger and fed it. If anything, Trump out-did his counterparts in North Korea and Russia. He achieved power in a land that thought it was free. He was turned loose as a child in a candy store. He yanks at the levers of power and delights at the consternation. He abuses his country’s allies and friends.

As Orwell showed in his book 1984, it is the tensions of war that keeps the proletariat focussed on the enemy instead of the inadequacies of their leadership. Obviously, more Americans need to love Big Brother.

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The indignities of the indigenous?

March 4, 2018 by Peter Lowry

It is important that we respect Canada’s aboriginal peoples but calling them ‘indigenous’ is basically stupid. Your Oxford dictionary will tell you that ‘indigenous’ means ‘produced naturally in a region.’ Canada’s aboriginal peoples have roots in Asia and were nomadic to the point of their early ancestors crossing ice bridges to North America.

All this comment is because of the outrageous costs to Barrie taxpayers inflicted by a group calling themselves the Ontario Coalition of Indigenous Peoples. This is a spurious action and it might be fair to ask why the city’s lawyers have not been able to get the action dismissed.

The fiasco started just 200 to 300 years ago when nomadic Indian tribes would camp during the summer months at the south-west corner of what became known as Kempenfelt Bay. Later the area became Allandale Village and even later was absorbed into the City of Barrie.

The Indians would camp, fish and smoke some of their catch and enjoy the bounty of the area for a couple months maybe. During that time, the aboriginal people would give birth, live and die. Decisions about where to bury granny were made arbitrarily as specified burial grounds were for civilization. And yes, archeologists might naturally find some of granny’s bones in the area.

But those few bones hardly justify the waste of millions of dollars in development in this part of Barrie. There is no formal cemetery or burial ground under the empty and unused Allandale train station—that was painstakingly restored at outrageous cost by a spendthrift city council.

Barrie does not even use the fenced off train station as a train station. It regularly brings GO trains and busses into the area but the sale of tickets is automated. There is nobody but other travellers to provide information. There are no waiting rooms and no washrooms. It is probably the most ill-equipped train station in Ontario. They cannot even dig a hole for a privy!

But this person who works for the Ontario Association of Indigenous (sic) Peoples is preparing to do a Stage 4 archeological assessment (under the restored train station) this coming summer. It is obvious that even he does not really believe that this further digging will produce very much. You can almost see him smirking when demanding that Barrie City Council give the entire site to his organization. I somehow wonder if we would ever be quite that generous?

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The bravado of President Trump.

March 3, 2018 by Peter Lowry

Every time we have needed a warming thought in these blah days of winter, we have pictured President Trump running into a school to rescue children from a mentally ill person with a gun. It is similar to the bravado of a 12-year old suggesting that teachers be armed: ludicrous. There are times when that man would do himself good to shut up.

But Canada’s main concern should be the current North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations in Mexico City. All reports are that this session will go nowhere and the recommendation is likely to be that the discussions recess until 2019. This will enable the Mexicans to get their presidential elections out of the way and the Americans their mid-term elections for congress.

The wild card in this game is President Trump. If he reacts to the delays, as any 12-year old would, he will give six months notice of the cancellation of NAFTA. He will think that will scare hell out of the Mexicans and bring those uppity Canadians back to the table.

But the problem is that his advisers tell him that he would lose American jobs as well as Canadian and Mexican jobs. So instead, he has been attacking specific industries. Trump has actually been complaining lately that those Canadians are a bunch of con artists who have been taking gullible Americans to the cleaners for years. This is why he continues attacking Canada on an industry by industry basis: first softwood lumber and dairy and now steel and aluminum. His attacks are not only driving up costs for Americans but are jeopardizing relations between the two countries.

What Trump does not seem to understand is that Canada has been America’s best customer for many years. His problem is that Canadians will have to rely on Americans to keep the NAFTA discussions going in that country. Canadian business has to launch major sales efforts in Europe, Asia and South America to see how much American trade we can replace. We will still have trade with the United States but new tariff barriers on both sides can be expected.

The Canadian government will also be forced to impose tariffs to try to balance increased deficits in trade with the U.S. That is a no-win game but necessary. It was what we tried to get rid of with NAFTA.

The good news is that in the long run, a new American president would bring the U.S. to its senses and a better NAFTA can be written. The only difference will be that Canada will never again want its trade so tightly linked and dominated by the United States.

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