Babel-on-the-Bay – Page 331 – Babel-on-the-Bay is the personal website of Peter Lowry. It is a vehicle for political commentaries.

Just days to a Ford-free Toronto.

October 9, 2014 by Peter Lowry

Toronto has had bluster, BS and bad news for the past four years. There is light though in the distance. It is relief at the end of a long tunnel of trouble. Toronto has endured enough. It is time to end the Ford era. It is time to call your friends and make sure they will vote for the candidate for mayor of Toronto who will replace the Fords. It is time for Torontonians to get solidly behind John Tory.

And they will. Despite the foolish doubts of the media, the confusion of the pollsters and the arguments of the candidates, we know that John Tory will win the mayor’s chair. Even if a post-cancer Rob Ford manages to win back his Etobicoke council seat, some sanity will come back to city council.

But John Tory’s opponents are still railing against him. Their charges against him become more rabid and shameless by the day. Take the op-ed piece by Judy Rebick in the Toronto Star the other day. The stalwart New Democrat supporter of Olivia Chow claims that John Tory is not an option for feminist voters. The picture that statement brought to mind would feed an editorial cartoonist’s family for a week. Ms. Rebick is so predictable in her attack on Tory, you actually feel sorry for Chow that she cannot get more balanced support for her candidacy.

But the bombastic Doug Ford shows even less concern for balance. In bitch slapping John Tory on various issues, Ford ends up pointing out the weaknesses in his own campaign to try to hold the mayor’s chair for his brother. One radio commercial for example attacks details of Tory’s Smart Track policy for transit. What the ad really emphasizes is the lack of depth in Doug Ford’s—or really his brother Rob’s—subway strategy.

Whether Doug Ford was running for himself or his brother, the voters are also tarring him with the same failings as his brother. While nobody claims he uses crack cocaine, he has been smeared by association. He carries Rob Ford’s baggage along with his own braggadocio, bluster and inexperience.

While Ford was counting on Olivia Chow’s campaign to pull enough votes from Tory to allow Ford Nation to come through the middle, it cannot happen. Chow’s support continues to fade and Ford Nation is reduced to too small a cohort.

In checking with supporters of all three candidates across the city, Toronto might as well have the vote today. Nothing is changing.

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It’s High Noon for the Hair.

October 8, 2014 by Peter Lowry

The Hair is strapping on his six-shooter, saying goodbye to the missus and heading to meet the bad guys on the noon train. He did not wait for the House of Commons vote that might have enabled him to deputize a Mulcair or a Trudeau for some moral support. The Hair is going it alone. In one of the most ill-conceived military exercises ever attempted, the Hair is going to war with brigands.

We call them brigands for lack of a better term. If they were sailors, they would be pirates. They know no allegiance. They pose as zealots when they are an abomination.

But who are they? The few pictures they release of themselves show them to be highly trained, disciplined gunmen. Rumours say they were trained in Jordan. Why Jordan? Rumours say they were funded from Saudi Arabia. How can they capture tanks and field artillery and suddenly know how to use them? And how do they get their ammunition?

This group called an Islamic State are neither true believers nor a state. They now support themselves by selling stolen oil through Turkey and on the ransoms of careless westerners—the ones they do not decapitate. They are thieves and murderers. They desecrate mosques. They murder men, sell women into slavery and indoctrinate children. They are also highly knowledgeable of Internet social media. They know how to garner publicity in the west and threaten open societies. Yet it is unsafe for any journalists to see what is behind their bluster.

The Hair thinks these brigands are a rabble—a problem to be handled and forgotten. He fails to question their objectives. He uses their atrocities for the same propaganda objective as theirs—to draw in the infidel for another foolish crusade. It makes the Hair a fool. He has been duped and believed the propaganda of people who can disappear into the countryside.

If the Hair really wanted to accomplish something in the Middle East, Canadian Jets would target Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Take out that bastard and the battle for Syria would be easier to support.

But the Hair and his western allies will never win unless they figure out who they are supporting on the ground. Air superiority is a waste of time if you do not understand the ground game that you are playing.

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Mediocrity is a step backward for democracy.

October 7, 2014 by Peter Lowry

Now the Toronto Star is also trumpeting ranked ballots for municipal elections in Ontario. When Premier Wynne pulled the idea out of her hat the other day, the first reaction was to note that the ranked ballot, as she envisages the system, allows losers to decide the election results. And losers tend to elect mediocre politicians.

The Toronto Star believes that ranked balloting would keep us from electing people such as Doug or Rob Ford. This is based on the assumption that politicians such as the Fords would be nobodies’ second choice. That is not a safe assumption.

The problem with ranked ballots is that the ultimate choice is made from the second, third or even fourth choice of the losers. It is choosing from the bottom instead of from the top.

What the editorial writer envisages is election campaigns that are more like love-ins as all the candidates will want to win secondary support. It will tend to hide information from the voters rather than be open and honest.

The only honest and democratic method is run-off elections. When nobody has the confidence of more than 50 per cent of the voters, the voters need the opportunity to rethink their vote. You would still eliminate those candidates with the least votes. The citizens should then be entitled to an opportunity to reconsider and vote again.

This has been most often rejected in the past because of the time and cost involved for the process. It is becoming less of a problem as we head towards using the Internet to elect. The improved security of Internet voting, the low cost and the speed of releasing results can make run-off elections practical.

But until the politicians smarten up in this regard, we will still have politicians such as Premier Wynne and Toronto Star editorial writers blowing smoke, thinking they have the answers to these questions.

One can only hope that Municipal Affairs Minister Ted McMeekin knows how to do his job. Before proposing any new electoral law for Ontario municipalities, he needs to hear from election experts and citizens on how they see the future of municipal voting. He might get some surprise answers.

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Rogers: An old song for a tired audience.

October 6, 2014 by Peter Lowry

Hold tight Canada. You are about to be dazzled by the same people who have abused you before. You never learn do you? There is always another generation without the memory. We are talking about Rogers here. Rogers is the communications giant that blocked all communication with the hoi polloi many years ago. They do not need to talk to you and they are hardly going to bother now. Propaganda you will get lots; communication no.

Any senior business person has heard the old saw many times that “Customer service is journey, not a destination.” Some Rogers shareholders were actually wondering why God did not strike him dead when Rogers CEO Guy Laurence said that to them back in April.

As our old preacher used to say, “These people need to be saved, to be washed in the blood of the lamb, to witness for their saviour and to bloody well smarten up.”

There is a festering hatred in Canada for Rogers. It did not start that way. Founder Ted Rogers was originally admired and liked. He made a gamble on a new type of radio signal called frequency modulation (FM). He was right. People liked it. His original station CHFI FM became a dominant force in the Toronto radio market.

He next addressed the quality of our analogue television signals. He built his first cable television service into an international giant. Then he made a right turn and got into cell phones. And we supported this because he was open and his managers were accessible.

But not anymore. Now that Rogers is a television giant, the company uses faceless, mindless, automated, bureaucratic, unimaginative and basically rude call centres, hired at the cheapest price that seem to be there to annoy and dissuade Rogers’ customers from calling again. The day that CEO Guy Laurence decides to publish his own business number is when we might believe he is starting to understand something about how to communicate with customers.

In the meantime, he is going to discover that Canadians are very loyal to their sport of hockey and its traditions. Hockey Night in Canada is hallowed ground and he has dared to defile it. He has commercialized hockey across telecom platforms without understanding how people want to view hockey. He has tried to personalize a sport we share with friends and family. Who wants to watch hockey alone?

While people might seem more isolated today in their Facebook, blogs and tweets, they are still a social animal. Some of the pleasures of life involve more than one person.

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Democracy is not hurried for Premier Wynne.

October 5, 2014 by Peter Lowry

In sending what she calls ‘mandate letters’ to her cabinet, Premier Kathleen Wynne has even sent one to herself as minister of intergovernmental affairs. It seems that she has finally noted the major population shifts in Ontario. She must have been told that the federal election next year will be based on new federal electoral districts in Ontario. Since Ontario pretty well tags along with the same boundaries as most federal districts, Ontario voters have been wondering when some balance will be returned in provincial voting. “Not soon,” Wynne tells herself.

For some reason, Ms. Wynne is not going to bother changing voting boundaries or the number of MPPs until after the 2018 provincial election. With representation based on Canada’s regular census held every ten years, Ontario will not have even one regular election based on the 2011 census before the ridings will again need to be adjusted. Why the Ontario government cannot make the change when the federal government has already done 90 per cent of the work, Premier Wynne does not tell herself.

With six Greater Toronto Area ridings now having populations of more than 160,000 each, they are difficult to represent properly. With the average riding having a population of 106,000, Ontario has been allocated 15 new federal ridings. Without Elections Ontario making the same changes, that means more than 1.5 million people in Ontario are not fairly represented at Queen’s Park. Does Ms. Wynne care?

Whether you agreed with former Premier Mike Harris linking provincial riding boundaries to federal boundaries in 1999 or not, he sure saved Ontario a lot of time, money and needless bickering over riding boundaries. Mind you, it was embarrassing as hell to listen to a bunch of local Conservatives telling the last federal redistribution commission how smart they were when our local Barrie riding was sliced in half and added to rural areas. Nobody seemed to be concerned that it was sure to improve the Tory vote in the new ridings. The local Liberal associations in Simcoe County had no idea how badly they had been rooked.

But it is obvious that Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals are going to do well with the new federal boundaries next year. With Ontario having 121 federal seats, the federal Liberals are in a good position to capture more than 70 of them next year.

It is sometimes surprising to realize Premier Wynne is a poor political strategist.

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The stateless state of ISIS.

October 4, 2014 by Peter Lowry

How do you go to war with stateless brigands? How do you bomb the locations of thieves who move about usurping the homes and authority of people weakened with years of oppression and destructive war? How do you bring ill-trained soldiers into an effective force to fight these brigands when all the conscripts know is the fear of totalitarian regimes? How do you wage war against people taught to welcome martyrdom?

But, Prime Minister Harper—being smarter than other Canadians—is leading us to war with thieves. He wants to fight people who call themselves an Islamist state and are neither true believers nor a state. He thinks an F-18 pilot flying at over 200 kilometres per hour can distinguish between a friendly or unfriendly Bedouin herding his goats.

Harper wants to be there with the big kids, kicking sand in the face of those who want to make jihad. Barack Obama of the U.S.A. and David Cameron of Great Britain are already on board. These comic crusaders think they can bomb the jihadists back to the Stone Age. The only problem is that these masked gunmen already live in the Stone Age.

And who buys the oil they steal? And who sells these criminals the weapons of war they use on defenceless populations?

You would think that over a couple thousand years we had learned our lesson about Middle East crusades. No westerner ever wins. Nobody won any of the Iraq wars. We are always welcome back to visit with the poppy growers of Afghanistan. If we want to fight more Taliban, Pakistan will produce more for us. We made a legend of Osama bin Laden. His replacements are plentiful and grow from the fields where the west has sown the dragon’s teeth.

Before Mr. Harper makes any more stupid pledges of another crusade, he needs to tell Canadians what we achieved in the first Gulf War? He needs to tell Canadians what good Canadians brought to Afghanistan—and why we left Canadian blood behind?

Air superiority matters only when there is a cohesive force on the ground to mark the target and sort out the good from the bad after the air strike. That works. That makes sense. To use air strikes alone against these brigands who call themselves ISIS without a trained force of Arabic-speakers on the ground to finish the job is sad and stupid, and a waste of time and money.

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Letting losers elect is no answer Ms. Wynne.

October 3, 2014 by Peter Lowry

You have to love it when a politician decides to wing it and comes out with another really dumb idea. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne thinks that municipal voters can have their concerns for democracy resolved by instituting ranked voting in municipal elections (wherein you vote indicating your first, second and third choice). For some reason, she did not suggest it for important events such as provincial elections. Maybe she realizes we need to think longer and harder about the idea.

Democracy is hardly served by having the losers pick the winners. After all, Ms. Wynne ended up as premier because she was the choice of losers. In the corrupted voting at the last Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention, it was Sandra Pupatello from Windsor who won the first three ballots. It took the combined support of four losing candidates to give the premier’s job to Wynne.

The worst place to try such a dumb idea is Toronto. There appears to be 64 potential losers in the mayoralty race in the city this October 27. If we had ranked voting now, the people counting the more than 800,000 ballots likely to be cast for mayor would need some fairly sophisticated computer help. With having to drop off losers and count their second votes until they got a winner could have surprising results. You could even have a situation where loser number 37 has 50 second votes for loser number 34 and the program would have to reinstate loser number 34 until that person again is the loser.

But what you get with pre-planned second and third choices is usually the same judgement as you got in the first vote. Someone who chooses a loser in the first go- around is just as likely to pick a loser in any subsequent choice.

That is why we get so annoyed with people who claim that in first-past-the-post voting your vote does not count unless you pick a winner. Through a lifetime of voting, you would be amazed how many times we have deliberately picked a candidate that we knew would be a loser. That was our right. And we took some pleasure in doing it. We wanted to show our dissatisfaction with the person we figured would win.

As computerized voting becomes more secure and the Internet becomes the preferred voting system, it will cost us very little to have run off elections. That is when we can insist on having 50 per cent plus one to become elected. The run off is the only truly democratic method.

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PKP will be TNT for the PQ.

October 2, 2014 by Peter Lowry

Pierre-Karl, known as PKP, scion of the Péladeau family wants to be leader of Quebec’s Parti Québécois. That is an absolutely excellent idea. It is an idea that will help ensure the destruction of the failing Parti Québécois and grind it into the dust of history in Quebec.

In contemplating the ‘Je ne sais quoi’ (I have no idea what) of this, you have to admit that the Parti Québécois belongs in the sleaze of Quebecor’s Journal de Montrèal. It would seem that the very touch of a Péladeau will degrade and lower any respect for anything that the PQ has accomplished for the province over the years. It will tear away the false elitism of the Parizeau and Bouchard regimes that tried to tell Quebecers that they knew what was best for them.

PKP’s total lack of understanding of what is involved in leading a political party might be the least of Quebecers worries. Not that we think he will lead the PQ anywhere. We have never been particularly impressed with his business acumen either. The merger that created Quebecor World—one of the largest printing companies in the world—led to its falling into Chapter 11 restructuring in the U.S. because of its inability to keep up with changing technology. Since his father’s death gave him control of Quebecor, it has been obvious that PKP is a most prominent person in his own mind.

As a péquiste, PKP is in the ‘pur et dur’ category which merely means that he is pure separatist and hardened in his attitude. The term goes back to the days of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale when the group joined with René Lévesque to form the PQ. These are the hard-liners who have little patience for negotiations or any other delay in declaring independence.

It does seem strange that a novice politician such as PKP could be a leadership front runner in a party that was originally conceived as centre-left and socially progressive. PKP is detested by many union people and left-wingers in Quebec and his reputation for union bashing is well earned.

As we saw in the recent Quebec election, PKP is poison to Quebec voters. Maybe they voted for him in Saint-Jerome because he likes to ski but the rest of Quebec reacted strongly against him. As leader of the PQ, he would certainly not do much for tourism, business or the people of Quebec.

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As the horses are in the final turn.

October 1, 2014 by Peter Lowry

This is stupid. The law has got to let us run a totalizator on the Toronto election. We could put it on the tote out at Woodbine when there are no ponies running. Punters could check the action on the 24-hour news channels. Here it is October 1 and the candidates are in the final turn. The Toronto mayoralty race alone could make a million bucks either for charity or the government coffers.

From here on the candidates are pounding down the straight-away. The dirt is flying from steel clad feet. The jockeys in campaigning colors are urging on their steeds. Do you not just love the excitement and the drama? The crowd in the grandstand are on their feet and screaming on their choice. There are only furlongs to go on an increasingly muddy track.

And look at those horses in the lead: Olivia Chow might be the smaller horse that is falling back into the pack but there was a lot of early money laid on her. There will be no fewer oats for her back in the stable for placing second or third. While she is still the favourite of a core of supporters, there is little joy in their urging her on. They can only hope for the miracle.

Look at that big thoroughbred dressed up as a dray, struggling to catch up with the leader. Brash and bold, loud and angry, Doug Ford fills the card for his brother’s entry. He wallows in the mud of the stretch drive and kicks it at his adversaries. He thinks everyone should get out of his way as he charges for that seemingly far finish line. His hopes are slim but his backers want their revenge. For these angry people are Ford Nation.

And way out in front picking his way carefully through the flying mud is the frontrunner, John Tory. In the distance, he sees redemption for a mixed career in politics. In the distance he sees better solutions for his city. His whole being is devoted to this stretch run. It has been a long campaign. He did not start strong but he has gained momentum as it progressed.

There has been many a slip in these final furlongs of such a hard and confusing race. There are no guarantees. All drive for that finish line. It is too bad we cannot keep the tote open as there might still be a lot of late bets on this race.

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Looking for war in all the wrong places.

September 30, 2014 by Peter Lowry

In Orwell’s novel 1984, Big Brother’s regime uses never ending far away wars to control the population. He makes war a critical component in sustaining the totalitarian regime. War is to blame for the regime’s economic failures, the shortages, and the beggaring of the proletariat. Big Brother has victories. The people suffer the losses.

But there is a caution that needs be noted for those seeking to create their ideal totalitarian regime in Canada. The one component that Orwell added to the mix in his mythical Oceania was total control of communications. This is where Mr. Harper and his lackeys in the Prime Minister’s Office have failed so miserably. Their nemesis the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation still runs exposés on their chicanery. And, for that matter, Mr. Harper can never really trust his friends at CTV, Shaw or TVA.

Canada is in an awkward position in going to war. It might have been alright with Canada’s Muslim community to go after a particularly despicable dictator such as Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and to try to police the poppy growers in Afghanistan but boots on the ground elsewhere in the Middle East can only assure Canadians of a large number of casualties and growing dissent at home.

And as much as the Tories might reap votes from the Ukrainian Diaspora, nobody in Canada wants to go to war with Russia over who owns the Eurasian Steppe—or the North Pole for that matter.

Harper needs to face the fact that while Canada has always done its job at war, it is hardly a sabre-rattling nation. We are multicultural, tolerant and peaceful. We prefer to be peacekeepers and referees. The Americans are the gunslingers. They have their National Rifle Association that thinks the only way to keep the peace is carry a bigger gun. They seem to relish the role of being the world’s policemen—until they realize what it costs.

Nobody in the Middle East has paid much attention to Harper or Baird sabre-rattling on behalf of Israel. They know they are only playing to the Jewish vote back home. Most Canadians are only embarrassed by Baird.

If we had never seen the downfall of the World Trade Towers to al-Qaeda, it would be hard to believe all the spin-offs from those terrorist roots. We keep hearing of new jihadists who seek to wreck havoc on the fat capitalists of North America. Maybe we have earned these new bogeymen but we cannot cower in our fortress in fear of them.

The people being overrun by brigands such as ISIS need humanitarian aid from countries such as Canada. It really is up to the Arab countries to put a stop to these international brigands who are taking advantage of the civil wars and disruption in the Middle East—it only encourages more totalitarian regimes.

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