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 Weakness of Democracy.

by Peter Lowry

Nobody ever said that democracy is perfect. It is just expected to be better than any of the alternatives. After more than a few years of trying to understand democracy, as we practice it in Canada, I find it frustrating that people do not give it the thoughts and inspection it needs to serve us all better. A good example of the problems is what is happening in regard to the byelection in Toronto next Monday for a replacement mayor.

It is important to note that this byelection is not for a temporary position. It is for the next three years. It is at a time when Toronto faces serious problems. The city is tying itself in knots with its successes. It is becoming an unaffordable place for people. It is a city built for motorized delivery systems, where the streets are clogged with personal automobiles and systems for moving people have become too expensive and too politicized.

It is a city needing compassion. The homeless are unwanted and largely ignored. We live in a climate where you have to house the indigent. We need permanent housing, not just emergency solutions at the time. The bright lights of the city attract them. We have to accommodate them. And yet we continue to hurt them.

And how does this mesh with our democracy? According to the overly broadcast polling, we will elect someone ill-inclined to help solve the problems. In city council and in parliament, Olivia Chow has proved she is but a nebbish, taking, not giving on city council or in parliament. She practices a harsh socialism, without compassion.

Maybe there are just too many in the race for the byelection to really understand the potential of some of the candidates. There are only two though who bring some expertise to the problems facing the city council. In an effective democracy, inquiring minds would be searching out these two candidates and getting out and supporting one or the other.

And the critical need is leadership. Which of the two is capable of leading city council over the next three years? I give you Ana Bailão and Mitzie Hunter. They both have the skills needed, though Mitzie Hunter is the more experienced politician. If you really want to do something worthwhile next Monday vote for one of them.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

When Byelections Prove Nothing.

by Peter Lowry

There you go Mr. Trudeau. You have your reading on the voting intentions of Canadians. The byelections in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba proved, once again, that some ridings tend to vote consistently for one party.

I hardly think NDG-Westmount in Montreal has ever voted anything but liberal since Justin’s father won the riding. Yet young Trudeau’s friend Anna Gainey, who helped Justin destroy the liberal party, had to face criticism for the federal government support of those bigots and their language laws in Quebec City and still won the riding easily.

There was a similar situation in Ontario’s Oxford riding. The first time I was in that riding back when Bob Nixon was liberal leader in Ontario, he explained to me that Oxford has the best cared for roads in the province because it always votes conservative. And it did this time, despite conservative leader Poilievre parachuting into the riding, one of his better workers.

And the reports from Manitoba’s two riding byelections came to the same conclusion. The city of Winnipeg voters most often vote liberal and the rural citizens tend to vote conservative. Well, it’s the same old, same old.

But Trudeau should take no encouragement from the status quo. I really don’t like the chances the liberals are taking with Trudeau in the driver’s seat. He needs to look around for a potential replacement. That is the type of reset the liberal party needs. Sure, we need to rebuild the party. We also need to redefine its direction. I can’t believe that Poilievre is making laissez faire sound reasonable to some people. It is not just his lies and his diatribes.

The other day I was discussing with a friend who likes to talk politics, the similarities of Poilievre’s approach to the truth as much like Donald Trump in the United States and Adolph Hitler’s speeches to the German people back in the 1930s. He looked at me seriously and asked if I was old enough to have been there. Oddly enough, I do remember as a young child hearing this person screaming in a guttural language on a radio broadcast and learning during the Second World War that the screamer was Adolph Hitler. To this day, I do not like people who preach falsehoods and are stupid enough to think people believe them.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

They are all Super Mayors.

by Peter Lowry

The idea of Barrie’s mayor being given undemocratic powers by the province is hilarious. In a poll to determine the least competent mayor in Ontario, our mayor might be, at least, a close runner-up. This is the guy the local conservatives sent to Ottawa as an MP by some 86 votes, and only stayed for one term. Maybe he found it difficult to find the parliament in Ottawa when the house was sitting. Maybe it was because they didn’t give him anything important to do.

It is damn lucky that this guy is permanently out-voted on city council by his conservative peers. The very thought of him having any power to do anything is frightening. This is the guy who supported Maxime Bernier to be leader of the federal conservatives. He came back to Barrie and, I guess, nobody seemed to want to rush to give him a job, so he ran for mayor. And won, because people knew his name.

He was following a mayor who actually did some hard work for the past 12 years. The mayor ran for the Ontario liberals last year and got creamed. Last I heard, he was working for the regional council up in Muskoka, probably helping them keep Muskoka for tourists.

One of the reasons you have to laugh at all this super mayor business is that the key words in the provincial announcement are “To support us.” In other words, you get to have these super powers as long as you do what you are told. Municipalities in Ontario are not only creatures of the provincial government but now they are enslaved to it. A friend, who loves chatting about politics, speculated that this might be all very well for the Tories but what if an NDP government follows them at Queen’s Park? And all those conservative mayors start rebelling.

Never forget we have this fiction in Ontario that there is no party politics at the municipal or school board levels. That is crap. All parties tend to select people who have gone through the starter stages of politics with school boards and local councils. This is to determine if they are the stuff for higher office. Even Doug Ford had to start at Toronto city council to determine if he could survive at the provincial level. Mind you, even our mayor in Barrie could pass on a few political tips to Doug Ford.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Windfall Profits and Taxes.

by Peter Lowry

Why are all the grocery stores bragging about their higher profits? And why is the government not taxing those excessive profits at a higher rate? It wouldn’t do anything to help the consumer, but she would at least have the satisfaction that the grocery chains aren’t gaining as much by their mistreatment of the consumer.

The parliamentary standing committee on agriculture and agri-food weaseled out on recommending an all-encompassing ‘windfall tax’ when the competition bureau finds evidence, by suggesting that it only be for the grocery chains. There needs to be a windfall profits tax on all industries that are profiteering because of the world-wide inflationary pressures. They could start with the big oil companies that raise their prices long before increased crude oil prices hit their refineries.

I sometimes wonder why companies believe they are entitled to a profit. Nobody guarantees them a profit. A profit should be for successes. A profit should be for when you innovate and do something well. A profit should be for when you are doing something worthwhile. Copying what your competitors charge doesn’t say much for you or your company.

Obviously, the passing of entrepreneurial companies from the founder to the idiot child is a very bad idea. It is irresponsible. When you think about it, you realize that the practice dates back to the era of Nero in the Roman Empire. You would think humans would learn a few things over thousands of years.

The point is that when the entrepreneur gets the credit for the success of a company, it is really the employees who built the business. The person fronting for the company can be as dumb as Elon Musk. It takes more than a single person to build a Tesla. And turning him loose with Twitter is a really stupid idea.

I have always been a believer in employee ownership of companies. Shares should always be part of the compensation for your work. The only concern I have is how employees will treat those shares in their will. Maybe they should become worthless when the recipient dies. Maybe I should keep thinking on it.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Wishy-washy Doesn’t Cut It.

by Peter Lowry

This is an important time to be an Ontario liberal. It is not just the time to take on a new leader, it is a time to pick the direction the party will take into the near future. It is the time to decide what kind of a party the liberals want and the Ontario voters need. We can go the down the middle of the road to oblivion or we can rev-up and give Ontario the type of pro-active, progressive leadership that it desperately needs.

What scares me the most about this current leadership race was Bonnie Crombie’s statement that she thought Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne were too far to the left. Bonnie is still young and might not realize that the Ontario liberals have not had a left-wing leader in the last 60 years.

When Kathleen Wynne knew that Ontario voters were tired of all the restrictions on alcohol, she launched a painful process of cautionary expansion almost one super grocery store at a time. It became a joke. It sure was not progressive. It was the reluctant approach of a grandmother.

Mr. Ford might be a bully, a braggart, and a ham-handed conservative. He might be a lot of things that people dislike but the bastard gets the job done, as he sees it, and he has a large cohort of voters that agree with him. I think he, and people like him, are taking us into a world of wild fires, tornadoes, floods and ruined crops. They are careless and not thinkers. They are trying to patch social problems without caring to understand the causes or potential remedies.

We need strong, effective, progressive liberals to lead Ontario and Canada down a better path. Ontario needs to be showing how we can meet the needs of a changing environment. We have to find solutions to building durable homes for more people. We have to have the good farm land needed to feed us and others around the world. We have to have the clean energy needed for our industries and homes and transportation. We need to make sure our children have a better education, better trades training and better retraining as needed to meet increasingly complex needs.

The needs of our citizens are far too great for a laissez-faire approach to politics. We need to be pro-active. We need to be there for future generations. Liberals can do that.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Do We Need This Help?

by Peter Lowry

It seems every time there is someone of note jumping into this or that political race, we get the morning line in the media with the new entries. The other day in the Toronto Star we got a news page headline reading “Crombie leads Liberal pack.” When you read the story, you find that this ‘pack’ is from an on-line panel run by a marketing research firm. The researchers appear to divide the responses of their panel (in this case 1000 respondents) into plus, positive, negative, neutral and unsure categories. In all my years of politics and reading polls, I am obviously out of touch with modern polling. I have no idea what a ‘sure’ panelist means.

But I certainly go along with the boss of the research firm when he said Ms. Crombie was the best-known candidate. I always knew that voters’ familiarity with the name of the candidate was a leg up. I never knew it was the only candidate to which the media would pay attention.

It is a sorry day when voters go to the polls and vote according to which person is better known.

I have no idea where I would end up in that poll. I admire Ms. Crombie. She followed my friend, Hazel McCallion in the role of mayor in Mississauga. If Hazel liked her, so do I. And this lady also has lots of supporters in the city.

But nobody knows for sure that she would be a good leader for the Ontario liberal party. I go back to the days when John Wintermeyer was leader of the Ontario liberals. John was a gentleman of the old school. As a leader he was not quite as effective.

Leadership is not an acquired skill. I feel like that guy with the lamp looking for an honest man. A leader is a person who looks behind and is surprised at the number of people following. A leader is a person who can take an idea, introduce it to others who can share ownership. A leader can be right or a leader can be wrong. There is no simple explanation for a Donald Trump.

Whatever that magic is, it is what you need to lead. So far, there are four candidates for the Ontario liberal leadership. I am going to keep an open mind until I have had a chance to get to know all candidates and to see how they measure up before voting.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Bell blames the Bureaucrats.

by Peter Lowry

You would think that once in a while Bell would blame their failures on their own incompetence. This is a company that bought CTV thinking it was just another way to make money. Their failures in this enterprise have been loud and often. The Bell Board neither understands the complexity nor the fast-moving nature of sports broadcasting, television show production, news gathering and news distribution. It was not realistic to expect a company deeply involved in telephone, Internet and television signal distribution to be that versatile or expert.

And lately, I would question their competence in their core business. For a company that has more than a hundred years of signal transmission knowledge, my personal experience is that they are more incompetent every day. Let me tell you of my personal Odessey with Bell Canada over the past year:

Bell is a company that I have always liked. I have had friends who worked for the company and I also worked for Bell for a while when I needed to get away from public relations before retiring. I sold Internet services and telephone services to business.

 When I retired to Barrie, Ontario, I found that I could get Bell telephone service in the condo but had to accept Rogers for television service. When I decided to move out of the condo into our present place, Rogers had the key to the cable connections and offered me their complete suite of services for just $195 per month. I went back to Bell, who had just installed fiber-optic connections on the street.

I liked Bell’s Fibe for television and Internet and despite their raising the Internet rates every chance they got, we settled down to peace, harmony and only a few glitches in the Fibe service. That was until the middle of last year, and a series of problems arose. What happened was that I got my usual monthly bill and there would be charges on it for sports channels, news channels and other options that I had never ordered and in which, neither my wife or I were interested. I would call Bell and politely ask that the charges be removed from my bill. And Bell cooperated, graciously, at first. Another problem that puzzled me was that the recording feature of Bell Fibe was acting strange. It would record some of the shows I wanted but would record some things I would never bother to record.

After more than six months of calls to Bell about this, they started to be less friendly. I was accused of a few things that I had not even considered. I was told I was a liar, a troublemaker and that I would be happier with a different supplier. I decided to turn the problem over to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom Service.

If you ever consider using this federal agency, you might be surprised to hear that I don’t think they read my complaint. They just sent it to Bell Canada and nothing has been heard of the complaint after three months.

As a last resort, I complained to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, pointing out that Bell Canada is harassing me over their technical problem. I would take the advice from one Bell manager, that I take my business elsewhere but I found all the resellers of Fibe service go to the same rates as Bell, or higher, after they have you in their clutches. I even said to Rogers that they could have me but they informed me that the cable in my older apartment building had deteriorated to the point that there was no way to deliver cable to me without rewiring the apartment building.

I am learning to enjoy reading, all over again.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:[email protected]

The King in his Counting House.

by Peter Lowry

It is classic conservative strategy. The Ontario government has been caught banking $20 billion that they claim is a reserve fund. What they are really doing is telling the public that they are going to spend the money on problems brought to their attention. And then they just put the money in the bank. When they do it, they are killing people who are desperate for assistance.

Almost a million people are recipients of the pathetic charity of the Ford government under programs such as the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and Ontario Works. Do you think, as a single person, you could live on less than $1200 per month? Those are the people that some of that $20 billion could help. They just are not conservative supporters.

And what makes this discrimination of the needy worse is that today it permeates the government funded services. I have watched as Ontario hospitals discriminate against those who cannot fight back. They will treat the homeless for example and quickly throw them back out on the street. Our hospitals have patient advocates who take all their instructions from hospital management. I actually talked to one of these patient advocates who laughingly told me he never talked to the patients. I had the experience of a hospital functionary with whom I raced to see who could get me out of that damn place, with its inadequate, overworked staff and awful food, faster.

I was very pleased to note that finally arbitration has allocated a decent increase for hospital workers (the patient facing people). For Ford and his Quislings to try to keep these workers at a one per cent wage increase each year was not only unrealistic but it was sure driving a lot of hospital workers into other lines of work.

What worries me though is that the federal conservative leader Poilievre is cheerfully telling people that he would do even more than Ford. Ford’s problem is that he is just a follow-along conservative. Poilievre is a hide-bound western libertarian who does not give a damn about what Canadians need or want. He wants to put them on a hard-times, libertarian diet—where everyone fends for themself.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Parting with Poilievre’s Perfidy.

by Peter Lowry

They are not going to have former conservative leader Erin O’Toole MP to kick around any more. He gave his farewell speech to parliament the other day. Let’s face it, the conservative party of Canada is going to hell in a handbasket—as the expression goes. And O’Toole doesn’t want to go down with the ship. You could just see the current leader, MP Pierre Poilievre, who could not wait to get home and report this offence to his mirror.

O’Toole’s message was clear. He was warning his party that they are responsible for the decline of democracy in Canada. He complained of the divisiveness, the deliberate polarization and living off the ‘Likes’ they could get on-line. It was definitely a farewell and “F— you” speech.

Despite the criticism, Poilievre was seemingly polite in publicly acknowledging O’Toole’s service to his country and his party. The two men shook hands and gave each other a hug.

O’Toole’s time as leader of the conservatives was very different from what we are seeing today under Poilievre. O’Toole earned the enmity of many MPs and politicos in the conservative party by using the right wing of the party to get him the secondary votes that helped him win the leadership in 2022. When he reverted to a more middle-of-the-road conservatism after winning the leadership, the knives came out.

What O’Toole did that really did him in though, was his standing alone in his private television studio during the election and divulging his view on where the party should be going. It was this venue as well as his inability to equate the vaccination mandates and putting a price on carbon that guaranteed his ouster. He fought the fight for a while and finally caved in.

It is hard to believe that a party that had just gone through two party leaders chosen by ranked balloting, who could not sustain their leadership against the different philosophies of their party members. You would think they would learn. And what is worse other parties are also following them with ranked ballot fiascos.

But I also think that any party that would support a leader who knowingly ignores global warming, would rather stretch the truth and spend all his (or her) time denigrating the current government and its leader rather than make any positive efforts, is failing to serve Canadians.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Tea Leaves and Chrystia Freeland.

by Peter Lowry

Reading a future in politics for finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland is challenging. She is a strong individual but I think her career in politics is about over. She is not a leader. It is not her style. She is an activist.

Freeland’s focus seems to be above the political. Two of her major accomplishments for Canada have been the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union and the revised North American Free Trade Agreement, now known as the Canada—United States—Mexico Agreement (CUMA). CETA is still in the approval stages in Europe but is already about 98 per cent effective in practice thanks to her work on the proposal launched by the conservative government of Stephen Harper. One of her more interesting tactics when dealing with the Europeans was to walk out of the discussions. It seemed to pay off.

It would never have worked when dealing with President Donald Trump in the United States over CUMA. Trump was so irrational that nobody seemed to know how to deal with him. It was like agreeing to a pact with a disturbed child. And we had no sooner signed off on the deal than Trump dumped it with Canada over aluminum and soft-wood lumber. That took a long time to be straightened out.

Judging by her career before politics, you would expect Ms. Freeland to have been happy to age in the role of journalist, editor and observer of things political both domestic and foreign. Her ability with languages is impressive. She speaks English, French, Italian, Russian and Ukrainian. As an author, she is acclaimed for her insights into the financial world. You could almost say that her support for Ukraine in the conflict with Russia is a conflict of interest but the truth is that most Canadians seem to agree with her.

As an activist, Chrystia Freeland still has much to contribute to the dealings with the outcome of the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I have no idea where we would find an honestly neutral third party to try to launch an armistice and a conclusion to this evil conflict. I do know that Ukraine will still need our support and encouragement. It is not just the Ukrainian diaspora across Canada for I am sure all of us in Canada can see the need.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]