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

Crombie Causes Concern.

by Peter Lowry

It is good to see that Bonnie Crombie has already put the fear of God into the conservatives at Queen’s Park. While she has already been to the Ontario Legislature to meet with her liberal caucus, the new liberal leader will not be turning in her mayor’s chain of office until January. She wants to leave things shipshape in Mississauga before taking over the liberal reins.

But the conservatives are already firing salvoes of criticisms at her to see if anything will stick. No election is likely in Ontario before June of 2026. Much can happen in the next two years. While Crombie will want to start by visiting electoral districts throughout the province, she also needs to be ready to run in a byelection. The public needs to see her in action in the legislature, for her to be credible in the coming election.

What is particularly amusing in this interim, millionaire Doug Ford is running advertising saying Crombie is an elitist. It does seem odd that when Ford went to such lengths to make some of his developer friends’ billionaires that he is jealous of Ms. Crombie also having a few dollars in the bank.

For those of you who put some stock in the public opinion polls this far from an election, I would be willing to bet you that she has those same polls standing on their heads two years from now.

It is easy to see what our late friend, former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion saw in her when she supported Crombie to replace her as mayor. She certainly proved that she was more than capable of doing the job. The times I have now seen Bonnie Crombie in action, I can certainly concur with Hazel’s assessment.

But the one thing for certain is that Crombie needs a much stronger and better directed liberal party than Justin Trudeau will have two years from now. There needs to be pride in being a liberal. It needs to be a party that stands beside its elected wing, not under it. And there is nothing wrong with asking liberals, occasionally, to put a few bucks in the collection plate. Just stop the constant begging.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Ford is No Academic.

by Peter Lowry

Earlier this month, Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star tried to tell us that politicians do not care about universities. I thought at the time that I could add something to Regg Cohn’s observations.

The only real difference between Martin Regg Cohn and I is that he is a senior fellow of the sadly renamed Ryerson University and I was only appointed a fellow of McLaughlin College at York University back in the 1970s. All the ‘Fellow’ title really meant back then is you are never paid for anything.

But I enjoyed my role for the college and I think I helped. I particularly enjoyed the times when I would have a lecture hall turned over to me to discuss subjects such as business ethics with business and economics undergrads. It led to travelling around Ontario to many of our universities lecturing business students. Hobnobbing with all those academics, I found they were always willing to unload their financial concerns on the supposedly well-paid business executive.

But I ended up persona non grata at the business school at Western University in London, Ontario. I presented a paper I prepared for a province-wide gathering of business academics at the University of Toronto.  I had criticized Western’s use of the case study method in its business school, for teaching students to be competitive instead of encouraging ethical business practices. What amused me about it was when the Dean of Business at Western called the president of my company (who happened to be a Harvard MBA—Harvard is credited with creating the case study method) to complain about my remarks. The president told the Dean that he had read my presentation and agreed with every word of it.

But back to the cheap politicians in Ontario. Oddly enough there were no loud whimpers from the community colleges and universities in Ontario during the McGinty/Wynne era in government. There seems to be some coming through loud and clear about the Ford administration. If there was an attitude coming out of Queen’s Park, it is the premier’s dislike for his higher education experience. Ford is a loud and opinionated salesman. He dropped out of Humber College after just two months.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Bums on the Doorstep.

by Peter Lowry

One of the challenges of publishing a blog is the daily sweeping away of the myriad of organizations who send you story ideas to influence your output. The worst of this bunch are the public relations firms in the U.S. who want you to run stories about the awful Democrats. The worst of these is the one that uses the name Jerry McLothlin to send multiple story suggestions and people to interview every day. I have tried telling McLothlin et al that I am not really interested, but without success.

I suspect that they are having some limited success so they ignore your pleas to cease and desist. I like to think of them as bums on your doorstep that you have to sweep away each morning. If they really were bums, I would at least give them a toonie to get a morning coffee at Tims.

But these bums insult me. This is not just a stand-alone blog. I am also included in the collective known as Progressive Bloggers. You would think that would scare away these right-wing crazies.

One of those McLothlin missives landed in my in-basket today saying that President Biden’s Ignorance of “What is Happening at the Border Could Create a Major Crisis for the U.S. Before Christmas.” I am sure that one has the U.S. Secret Service puzzled. It reads as more of a threat unless the President caves into the demands of the Republicans. You would swear that Republicans should be more afraid of Putin and his merciless drive for more land to burn.

You wonder what is wrong with those MAGA supporters in the U.S. The silliest stuff comes from Texas.

It is not as though Canada does not have its own Looney-Toons politicians. I always get an up-tick in my U.S. readership when writing about that screw-ball premier we have in Alberta. I have always thought of Alberta as the most Americanized province in Canada. And if you ever want to meet a female version of Donald Trump, she is currently hanging out at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton. Just follow your nose north until your nose freezes off and you are in Edmonton.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Poilievre’s Protagonist.

by Peter Lowry

There is only one target that interests conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. It is the prime minister’s job. It is the job the conservative wants and it is one he has worked towards all of his adult life. We can all wonder how he will react, if and when he discovers he will never reach his goal.

Poilievre’s problem is what the conservative communications people discovered too late, after he had been chosen leader. The conservative leader is not likeable. He is a mean and unfeeling little man and that is becoming better known all the time. Instead of hurting Trudeau with all his barbs against the liberal leader, Poilievre is pushing some of that audience to Trudeau’s side of the fence.

The most telling thing about Poilievre’s very expensive advertising campaign running over the past year is it is failing in its purpose. Take the ads with the children to start with; they clearly show that this man is uncomfortable with children. Look at the one with the little girl. That puzzle they are supposed to be working on together is way beyond her age group. She isn’t interested in it, other than maybe to see if any of the too small pieces taste good. Poilievre was not as interested in her as he is to look like he can put a couple pieces together.

What bothers me most in Poilievre’s attacks on Trudeau is that there is more than enough with which to criticize him, without sounding stupid. The only person, for example, I have seen criticize the Canadian prime minister for causing world-wide inflation is the conservative leader. He should let that complaint go.

He could weave a far more interesting story about Trudeau in regards to the strained relations with India rather than the silly remarks he has been making. And Poilievre should have been paying attention when the declared feminist, Trudeau, fired his justice minister. Poilievre is also not making friends with his complaints about the Trudeau government spending its way through most of the pandemic.

And one of the facts of governing of the Bank of Canada is that the prime minister does not tell the bank’s governors what to do. Nor does the leader of the opposition. Maybe Mr. Poilievre should do his present job in opposition a lot better, before aspiring to establish his extreme right-wing form of government in Ottawa.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Conservative Comrades?

by Peter Lowry

They are certainly not comrades at arms. Recently Toronto Star writer Martin Reg Cohn wrote that the cancellation of the splitting up Peel region into the stand-alone municipalities of Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon was cancelled at the behest of Brampton mayor Patrick Brown. That would be assuming that Ford and Brown, both conservatives, are bosom buddies. They are not.

If anything, the former Ontario conservative leader Patrick Brown hates premier Ford for denying him the opportunity to run for Peel County chair in 2018. He had to settle for the mayoralty in Brampton instead. The only thing the two conservatives might agree on is that they are both afraid of Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, who will soon be moving into her new role as leader of the Ontario liberals.

If anything, Brown deeply resents Ford’s easy trip into the premier’s office in Brown’s place. At least Crombie’s target is Ford’s job at Queen’s Park. She has other reasons to be appalled at Brown and his shenanigans.

It was the panel of conservative appointees who were supposed to help the three municipalities in Peel County to come to a new arrangement. Somebody must have told them of the complaints about Brown in Brampton. Instead of doing their job, the panel told the premier that the split would cause too many problems for the three municipalities, such as higher municipal taxes, and was not worth it. If they had been telling the truth, they might have also said they did not want to spend the next couple years fighting with Mr. Brown.

One of the complications in the separation of the three municipalities was the water supply for Brampton came from Mississauga. If Brampton paid for a stand-alone water system, it would take a major increase in municipal taxes. The separation of the two municipalities would lower Mississauga taxes and put the water costs where they belong. Paying higher municipal taxes in Brampton could be balanced in part if Mississauga could stop paying towards Brampton’s water supply.  

There are many other concerns but the panel of conservative appointees did not waste their time in dumping the job.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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The Trouble in Toronto.

by Peter Lowry

Have you heard what Toronto Council has done now? They have renamed Dundas Square at Yonge and Dundas Streets as Sankova Square and Centennial Stadium in the old Etobicoke Area for that fun-loving, crack-cocaine smoking late mayor Rob Ford. This is just one more reason that Torontonians are having trouble finding their way around their city.

I think it is very gracious to encourage our émigrés from Ghana who speak the Twi tribal language to participate more fully in the life of Toronto. It is unlikely that they constitute more than one-tenth of one percent of the population but we have to start somewhere to make people feel more welcome. I was amused to see that the word Sankova in Twi literally means “Go back and get it.” Twi is claimed to be one of eight major tribal languages in Ghana—which is likely the reason the West African country uses English as its official language.)

It must be a very smooth-running city council in Toronto that they have all this time and money to waste on tearing down statues and changing the names of many highlights of the city experience. To me, it will always be SkyDome where I used to go to see the Blue Jays play, and Maple Leaf Gardens, the temple of the Maple Leaf hockey team. No doubt the O’Keefe Centre has had a couple other names by now    Mind you, these changes are lost on this Toronto booster.

And don’t try to tell my wife that Ryerson University has some other stupid name. We both know why the name was changed and to us it is not only ridiculous but was an insult to anyone who spent time on that campus over the years. My wife was very proud of the time she was at Ryerson. Whomever participated in the name change had no understanding of what Egerton Ryerson contributed to the development of public education in Ontario. At the time of the creation of the residential schools, it was common thinking that this was something to help our aboriginal population.

I wonder if when we realize the harm separate schools in Ontario cause our children, will we vilify the people who thought they were doing something honourable?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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The Turn-Around Tories.

by Peter Lowry

The Ontario conservative government has broken another record. It has turned around and cancelled more schemes than thieves trying to figure out how to rob a police station. What Doug Ford and his cronies often announce with great flurries of publicity, they quietly and meekly admit they will not do.

The latest plan for the conservatives to cancel was the plan to separate the three component municipalities of Peel Region. This plan was introduced to so much cheering, we really thought they had a winner in which we could all cheer.

But no such luck. It was less contentious than Highway 413. It did not get the interest of the police like in the billion-dollar boondoggle in the Greenbelt. It was not as silly as the ‘Buck a Beer.” It was not as mean as passing laws saying nurses and teachers could not have the raises they needed. It got so bad with the Greenbelt fiasco, they had to promote Stephen Harper’s apologizer Paul Calandra to municipal affairs so that he could weep over the failure in making more Ontario developers billionaires.

One scheme that they are actually resuscitating is beer in the convenience stores and big box stores. We thought we would have to wait for many more years before any Queen’s Park government got sensible and gave the convenience stores something to keep them alive other than milk and lottery tickets. Mind you the blue stocking types have yet to have at our premier and they can sometimes be resourceful.

But if the Peel County dissolution was successful, the Tories were prepared to look at more regional municipal complexes in the province. The problem was that they rushed the Peel solution at the behest of the late Hazel McCallion and did not do the analysis that was needed. When the provincial panel that was supposed to assist the three new municipalities in the transition realized some of the complications involved, they panicked and advised the province to cancel the plan.

What they should have done was to help by examining ways to solve the problems. One of the alternatives was to recognize the connections between Mississauga and Brampton and if put those two municipalities together as one city. That would have provided far more cost savings in the long run.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Poilievre’s Hell.

by Peter Lowry

There should be a special place reserved in Hell for a political poseur such as Pierre Poilievre. I was reading a column by Jaime Watt of Navigator in the Toronto Star recently and he was bragging of the skill of the conservative leader in the House of Commons in using social media on the Internet.  Watt seemed particularly impressed with a recent release from Poilievre that he referred to as “Housing Hell.” I took a look at that effort the other day and found it amateurish, misleading, full of factual errors and a series of repeated slurs on the prime minister.

I do hope Mr. Watt’s public relations company had nothing to do with such a scurrilous piece of garbage. This is not fair political comment. It is malicious and mean and deliberately inaccurate. We all know that the conservative leader wants Mr. Trudeau’s job and spends far more time maligning him than proposing solutions to Canada’s problems.

Despite Mr. Poilievre’s opinion, Mr. Trudeau is not responsible for world-wide inflation. He was hardly the cause of the escalating costs of homes across Canada. You sometimes wonder if Mr. Poilievre has any knowledge of what is going on in the real world. Canada is still trying to shake off the vestiges of the pandemic. World routes for trade are still stabilizing.

And does Mr. Poilievre have a clue about the impact of the war in Ukraine and the concerns of the sizeable Ukrainian diaspora in Canada? And is he aware that Canadians have concerns for both sides of the conflict in Gaza? Canada took in twice the numbers of immigrants last year because of the pressures in many parts of the world and Mr. Poilievre blames it on Mr. Trudeau.

Poilievre is a mean and selfish little man who takes his lead from Donald Trump in the United States. I am surprised that he has not made his slogan “Make Canada Great Again.” Instead, he uses a vague slogan that says “Bring it home.” It implies a selfishness that most Canadians reject. In it, he seems to reject our responsibilities to help the people of Ukraine or the concern we all feel for the unfortunate non-combatants in Gaza and Israel.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

The Luck of the Liberals.

by Peter Lowry

In all the inept arrangements of the recent leadership race for Ontario’s liberals, many observers lost sight of what was really happening on the Yellow Brick Road. The event took too long, was too complex in the voting and you had to wonder if they would ever get to the Land of Oz.

Luckily, the contestants were sincere. It was those contestants who, in the end, made it all work. My inclination was to support the Tin Man in the person of Nate Erskine-Smith but I found him surprisingly disorganized. Yasir Naqvi was a stalwart from the past of the party and served as the Cowardly Lion and he came third. Ted Hsu was fourth in the role of the Scarecrow and he continues in that role at Queen’s Park. Bonnie Crombie slipped easily into the role of Dorothy to lead the contestants down the Yellow Brick Road.

I was quite disappointed in them when Yasir Naqvi and Nate Erskine-Smith tried to unite the boys against the one girl in the race. Luckily, Ted Hsu recognized it as a destructive agreement and refused to participate. The boys club idea was similar to the stalking horse attempt of Patrick Brown on behalf of John Charest in the last conservative leadership. It ended when Brown was kicked out of the leadership race.

There was the odd criticism of Bonnie Crombie during the liberal debates but Crombie handled them well. The candidates recognized that they were all liberals—just maybe of different types. Erskine-Smith wanted to look like a bit of a maverick, Naqvi was the stolid old-timer and Hsu was the enthusiastic newcomer. That left Crombie in the awkward position of being considered more to the right than the party she was vying to lead.

In fairness to Crombie, it should be noted that she is not as far right as some of the federal liberals in the Trudeau cabinet and she is a raving socialist compared to former liberal leaders such as Paul Martin federally or Dalton McGinty provincially.

I think it would be a very foolish of any city mayor in Ontario who would not want a premier such as Bonnie Crombie, who understands municipal needs.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Concerning Calandra.

by Peter Lowry

Paul Calandra is now the go-to guy at in the Ontario government for apologies. It is his ability to feel the pain. He is the guy who cried for the House of Commons in Ottawa when the MP was the appointed apologist for prime minister Stephen Harper. He is now basking in the accolades from the building industry as an MPP in Ontario.

Just last week, as the new minister of housing for the Ford government, Calandra apologised to the Building Industry and Land Development (BILD) association, at their annual general meeting in Woodbridge. They treated him kindly. They even offered him a free lunch.

With the Royal Canadian Mounted Police possibly checking his script, an unabashed Calandra told his audience that he regretted that the government could not bring people with them in their 7,400 acre give-away in the Greenbelt. It came across as though he and the Ford government were deeply disappointed that they did not do it right the first time.  It is not known just how strongly the audience felt about losing the potential billions in profit.

The particularly poignant part of the speech was the heartfelt shout-out to Silvio De Gasperis president and CEO of TAAC Developments. Calandra could not seem to say enough to this gentleman of their mutual Italian heritage. He made it sound as though he and the conservatives in government were deeply disappointed that they could not deliver to Mr. De Gasperis and friends the billions in profit that the conservatives thought they had earned.

But it sounded like Mr. Calandra was telling the builders that next time, the government will get its ducks in order before playing Grand Theft Greenbelt.

Some of the comments from the attendees made it sound as though they were puzzled by minister of housing. They complained that Calandra made it sound as though the Ontario government and the building industry in Ontario were joined at the hip.

But, all in all, it was a good time for all when Paul Calandra came to Woodbridge.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]