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

Doug Ford’s Besties.

by Peter Lowry

Has the label business been slipping lately? Has the Ford family fallen on hard times? One of the premier’s daughters had a wedding celebration last year and it is surprising that the happy couple have so many close friends in the business of urban development.  Frankly, I wish I had thought of having a stag and doe party before my wedding, with an ask for up to $1000 per seat with a minimum of $150.

Of course, Doug Ford tells us that his family has been involved in politics for over 30 years and knows hundreds of developers. It certainly is amazing that developers would be major users of adhesive labels. We know that the groom is a police officer and there are unlikely to be many developers on that side of the aisle.

Where Doug Ford must have met all these developers is at Toronto city hall. Toronto city hall should put a bounty on developers to solve the budget shortfall. The developers and their lawyers clutter the halls and meeting rooms of city hall. They are underfoot everywhere. The Ford Nation of Rob and Doug Ford spent four years together at Toronto city hall. And we now have Doug Ford with all his BFFs paying for his daughter’s wedding.

But hold it. Let’s not get carried away here. Doug Ford tells us that the wedding is a private event. He even had the provincial integrity commissioner agree with him that if he has no idea of where all this money came from, then there is no ethical question.

But to be fair to the premier, weddings are expensive these days. The premier is only paid $200,000 a year. Is it his fault he has so many daughters to marry off?

And it might be odd that so many of his best friends who are in the development business have received ministerial zoning orders for land in Ontario’s Greenbelt. And maybe it is coincidental that so much of this Greenbelt land, that is being swapped, is next to serviced land.

It is probably about time the integrity commissioner learned to ask the right questions.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

John, But Not Forgotten.

by Peter Lowry

Did you know that there was a time in Canadian politics when the established news media did not report on the peccadillos of politicians? We should go back to those days. Or is the lady in question complaining? What right has the Toronto Star to dig at information about who is sleeping with whom, if neither party wants to be known?

Does the Toronto Star have some salacious interest in what’s going on in the bedrooms of the nation? I would suggest that the Toronto Star should take the advice of John Tory’s wife, who told them that it was a personal matter. She should have told the reporter to ‘get stuffed.’

And John Tory should not have resigned. Like it or not, the Toronto Star is not in charge of morals in the city. Nor is a sleaze such as our over-inflated premier. This was the guy who was looking for a travelling bedroom to take him around the province when he first got elected. Did you really think he was in need of a good night’s sleep?

Our media should pay attention to the French approach. Both the wife and mistress and probably some of the dalliances of François Mitterrand attended his state funeral after serving the longest as president of the republic.

And closer to home, you do know that Franklin Roosevelt’s favourite bedroom companion was his secretary for those years in the White House? And then there were the Kennedy’s of oh-so proper Boston fame. They learned from the parent who bought a movie studio so that he could sleep with its star.

And the atmosphere in Ottawa is no different. I usually found I was being updated more at the press club bar than anywhere else. People are human everywhere. Men are attracted to women and women are drawn to men and sometimes there are same sex liaisons. We all have our interest and our degree of interest. We react to different stimulants. Which is probably a good thing.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Lost Liberalism.

by Peter Lowry

We have a problem in Canada. His name is Justin Trudeau. Since being handed the leadership of the liberal party in Canada back in 2013, he has dismissed the structure and strengths of the liberal party. From the very beginning, he dismissed the liberal senators who helped supply organizational experience, fund-raising, party experience and knowledge. Trudeau filled the void left by these party stalwarts with his friends among the elites.

Liberals did not see that a political party without a membership fee was unrealistic. They did not realize that Justin Trudeau expected them to be his personal bank machine. They did not expect constant demands for financial support.

It reminds me of a similar mistake Justin’s father made in 1972. Pierre Trudeau thought he knew more about getting elected than the liberal party. I remember sitting in the party’s advertising agency boardroom in Toronto as Pierre Trudeau announced the 1972 election. He told us his theme for the election: The Land is Strong.

Luckily, most of us did not know how to get to the roof of that downtown Toronto building, so we could jump off. I just went home. It was about two weeks later that Senator Keith Davey called me and said Pierre Trudeau really needed some help. Keith and I spent a lot of time filling in the holes in the Ontario structure of the party in that election but the party was still two seats short of a majority across Canada when the votes were counted.

It was David Lewis and the NDP who made the deal with Pierre Trudeau to keep the liberals in power for the following two years. It was a stronger liberal party that returned to a majority in Ottawa in 1974. Justin Trudeau’s father could learn from his mistakes.

Not so for Justin Trudeau. He blew his lead and won only a minority of seats against conservative Andrew Scheer. He managed to do the same thing against Erin O’Toole two years later. And once again, it is the leader of the NDP who is keeping a Trudeau in the driver’s seat.

But only an elitist such as Justin Trudeau would be dumb enough to declare that he will stay for the next federal election.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Ups and Downs of Polls.

by Peter Lowry

The paranoid parties of the Prairies are having a polling contest. They are seeing who can waste the most money on polls four months before the election. They sure are a bunch of nervous nellies. From the day the united conservatives of Alberta picked that loser Danielle Smith, the NDP’s Rachel Notley has been smiling. That lady is using her comeback face.

And Alberta needs her. It all reminds me of the brief tenure of Joe Clark as prime minister of Canada for six months in 1979 and 80. He trusted Brian Mulroney and ended up playing second banana to Mulroney until the federal conservatives crashed and burned in the rout by the Chrétien liberals in 1993.

I suspect there will be lots of Calgary voters checking behind them to make sure their secret ballot for the NDP candidate remains their secret. Calgary has done it before and can do it again.

The one thing I can guarantee Alberta voters, lie all you want to the pollsters who call or send you an automated call, you can hardly lie to yourself. That screwball libertarian, Danielle Smith, will make lots more mistakes between now and election day in Alberta. She is the only politician to so publicly weep crocodile tears for the unvaccinated in the province. Has she tracked the number of COVID-19 dead?

But it was her Sovereignty Act that said the provincial government does not need to pay attention to federal laws with which it disagrees. This is the capper. You felt sorry for those truckers who misplaced their trucks in Ottawa’s busy streets. How can any province have a premier who has no idea what-so-ever as to the constitution of Canada?

The one thing for sure that Alberta voters know is that only the NDP will do anything concrete to fix the province’s healthcare problems. That is top of mind for Alberta voters as the May 29 vote gets closer..

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

One Taxpayer, Many Politicians.

by Peter Lowry

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say to just one level of government: “Hey stupid, Fix it.” Instead, we have provincial governments and territories squabbling over tax point divisions and jurisdictions.  We have municipal governments struggling to get some money to do an impossible level of services for people. And then we have a federal government trying to pull the whole mess together.

And don’t judge us by those nincompoops south of our border. The Americans have just as big a mess, only theirs is bought and paid for by incompetent millionaires.

At least, in Canada, we don’t have a sleaze such as Donald Trump trying to buy the top political job with those millionaire political slush funds. We might not be perfect but we aren’t that stupid.

We haven’t got people running around with baseball hats proclaiming that we are going to make Canada Great Again. We might just have a bunch of anti-vaxxers parking their trucks in inconvenient places, but most of the time, we just keep chopping wood and drawing water for our American neighbours.

I really hate following the Americans in their ridiculous attempts at international relations. We are much to small a country too want to piss off the Russians or the Chinese. It will be a long time before this country can say that it is nearing capacity to feed, house and care for our citizens.

But, at the same time, we hardly need klutzes such as Doug Ford in Ontario trying to sneak privatized medicine back into the mix in this province. I had to have an ophthalmologist look after my cataracts a few years ago and the son-of-a-bitch kept pushing me with patient-pays options. I got the feeling that he was abrupt and uncommunicable with me was because I was not making any extra money for him. Mind you, I have never met an impoverished ophthalmologist.

I think what really annoys me about Doug Ford’s approach to privatizing medicine in Ontario is how cheap he and his government are with the nurses and other support staff. He doesn’t realize that good medicine is a team effort.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Cheapskates in Charge.

by Peter Lowry

Did you know that Ontario is the richest province in Canada? Did you also know that it is currently being run by the cheapest politicians in Canada? The Ontario conservatives remind me of that cute song Ontario’s own Shania Twain brought out in 1997: That don’t impress me much.

What caused this thinking was my new Ontario health card arriving in the mail this morning. All that missive reminded me of was another birthday in the offing. At my age, that is no favour. Oh sure, the wife will remember to buy me a new sweater or some socks. She might even find me a funny card in hopes of cheering me up. How are you going to feel when you realize that more than half the people you knew and liked in your age range are already dead? There is no consolation in old chestnuts such as that only the good die young.

But I think Ontario voters should be enraged by the paucity of this renewal health card. Sure, the original red and white Ontario health cards where easy to counterfeit and they did not contain much information. The replacement green cards were a definite improvement. They had our picture (twice), they had our health number, they had our date of birth, they had our signature and they had an expiry date for the card on a future birthday. We could even use this card for photographic identification, if we did not have our driver’s licence handy.

This piece of plastic junk, those cheapies at Queen’s Park sent me, looks like a bad counterfeit. They replaced my picture with a trillium blossom. Nobody would every accuse me of looking like a trillium blossom. Its blotchy, its messy, they dropped my signature and the only change was in the expiry. They increased the expiry to five years and I will do my best to be here to renew.

That would mean that I would also be here to help defeat that very bad government at Queen’s Park. I figure if I can stay healthy, I’ll still be here in three years to help vote out those cheap bastards.  

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

We Get Letters!

by Peter Lowry

It is tough to be a liberal in Ontario these days. You get letters to add to your opinions. One frequent flyer with Babel-on-the-Bay wrote the other day to say that maybe I could start a letter writing campaign to entice the new leader of the provincial NDP to jump ship to the leadership of the Ontario liberals. That seems like a non-starter when I have already said that I lack enough information to decide if she could do the job for the NDP.

It reminds me of the career of Bob Rae. I have never been a fan of Mr. Rae. Between the liberal government of David Peterson (1985 to 1990), the NDP government of Bob Rae (1990 to 1995) and the conservative government of Mike Harris (1995 to 2002), I would have a tough time deciding which was the worst  for Ontario. I think David Peterson’s was the most disappointing. Bob Rae’s was the most incompetent. And Mike Harris’ was the most malicious.

What really stunned me with Rae’s bunch at Queen’s Park was his listening to Thomas D’Aquino’s libertarian business council that continues, to this day, to think it has the right to direct our politicians. That business with Rae over what became the famous unpaid “Rae Days” of his regime came from D’Aquino marching into Queen’s Park and demanding that Rae and his poor bewildered treasurer balance the provincial budget. It was the worst possible advice, at the wrong time and it left Ontario in the incompetent hands of Mike Harris.

I had given guest lectures in most of the universities in Ontario in the 1970s. They were mostly to business classes and were on the social responsibility of business. If I had to give those lectures today to members of the business council, I think I would have to start with an analogy to the children’s book, The Three Little Pigs. The truth is that business was supposed to have given up the idea of telling governments how to run their operations with the demise of corporatism under the Italian Fascists.

There is no question but that business and government can work well together but it has to be clear to all concerned that the government is the boss. You always want politicians who have some experience other than politics. And you also want some experience in helping people—not just in telling them what to do.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Ideological Cant of the Cons.

by Peter Lowry

It must be so easy to be a conservative. The ideology saves you from the danger of too much thinking. You have to believe that people such as Donald Trump in the United States must have a marvelous filing system to keep track of his lists of lies. Liz Truss—one of a long line of incompetent conservative leaders in the UK—advocates tax cuts for the wealthy, in a period of hyper inflation. And as Pierre Poilievre can tell you: When in doubt about it; lie about it.

Last week that nasty little man turned his vindictive heat on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. That is a bad area for drug overdoses in the city but it is also an area getting a lot of attention from the city and local volunteer groups. Instead of recognizing the efforts of the province, the city and the citizens, Mr. Nasty condemns the provincial government, the citizens efforts and calls the area a “hell on earth.”

But where Poilievre gets off at condemning the British Columbia efforts is just displaying his ignorance for all to see. And to suggest that B.C. should follow the Alberta example is ludicrous. The drug problem is flourishing on a per capita comparison in Alberta that is almost as fast as in B.C. The conservative leader stayed true to his usual stance, he, somehow, found a way to also blame the prime minister.

And despite his lack of solutions for the opioid problem, he tells us that a conservative government would cancel the provincial test program to decriminalize small amounts of drugs and use the Alberta non-solution.

But what would you expect from Poilievre when his enthusiasm for Bitcoin has been tempered by its struggle to get back into more positive territory. No doubt, he is eager to see the Bank of Canada fail to keep a leash on inflation that is being fueled by war on the Eurasian Steppe, oil prices, shortages of food and world-wide supply chain failures. The one thing, we know for sure is that Poilievre is no economist.

What also annoys me about the conservatives is their climate stance. Like most conservatives, Poilievre ignores climate change and its causes. He panders to Alberta and its tar sands exploiters.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Nice is Not Enough.

by Peter Lowry

It was disappointing. The coffee in my cup was just lukewarm as I finished reading a page and a half of the Toronto Star the other morning. The overly long story was about Ontario’s newly-anointed new democratic party leader. Her name is Marit Stiles. She certainly seems a step up after 13 years of the lack-lustre leadership of Andrea Horwath. Whether Ms. Stiles can ever figure out where the provincial NDP needs to go is the question.

At least she was saved the fund-raising and travel strains of a contested leadership. Competition might have helped her focus some of her thinking on the party’s direction. It is the same problem former Ontario MPP Jagmeet Singh is having with the federal NDP. The labor relationship of the NDP belongs back in the party’s inception in the 1930s. You would think, some new thoughts would come to mind when closing on 100 years.

As long as the NDP remains locked in its reactive stance, it is going to be looked on as a being out of touch. The party does not seem to understand that 90 per cent of communication skills rely on listening skills.

Yet Stiles spoke to the folks at her party’s meeting on the weekend about their party being founded by labour, farmers and progressives. That was true for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunners of the NDP, but the NDP forgot the farmers.

I remember a conversation I had with Saskatchewan MP Hazen Argue back in 1963 after he had lost the leadership of the new party to Tommy Douglas and had moved to the liberals. Hazen had some important truths to tell us about the farm vote. His particular concern was that having two national parties splitting the progressive vote was creating opportunities for the conservatives.

What Canada really needs is a liberal democratic party. As it stands today, it is the unions shopping the political parties for the best deal that is producing results such as the low turnout in the last Ontario election and four more years of very bad government. Ms. Stiles won the NDP leadership through default, rather than effort. Nobody knows whether she is a misstep or not.

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Fighting Past Battles.

by Peter Lowry

With due respect for the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert, we should only fight past battles with tiny toy soldiers. I was sorrily disappointed the other day when Chantal waded once again into the Elghawaby affair. We should leave the lady alone. We have enough trouble just spelling her name. What I cannot understand is what she can contribute to fighting Islamophobia in Canada.

Ms. Elghawaby has not helped matters by apologizing for something she wrote a couple years ago. Who would you hope to convince by flip-flopping on calling the Quebec government bigots? They identify their own culpability by using the constitution’s not-withstanding clause. Neither Ms. Elghawaby’s apology nor my opinion matter very much to that sorry bunch in the Quebec National Assembly.

But we do need to worry about the ingrained distrust of Muslims in Canada. Not all of us grew up in, and appreciated, the multicultural environment such as Toronto offered. Sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan always was a bad idea. In fact, all the crusades since the Middle Ages have been very much a wasted effort.

And then there are people who want to keep on fighting. Chantal mentions a misstep taken by the Ontario government over teaching French back in 1912. Is this supposedly the same as the Quebec government’s suppression of English in 2022? That is ridiculous. You would think that we would all become more tolerant and understanding over the intervening 90 years. Maybe the education system still fails us. I did not have much trouble in school with French until our Ontario-trained teacher in grade 10 tried to teach the class French, with a German accent.

But unless Ms. Elghawaby has a strong pedagogical background in addition to her being a writer, she is unlikely to help solve the problem. We need to start in kindergarten teaching our children to play nice with each other. And since we persist in separating children by their parents’ supposed religion, that effort would hardly have full effect.

And that leaves us with an elitist prime minister who seems to make his appointments on whims. What makes him think that an Ontario journalist who happens to be Muslim can help to combat Islamophobia in Quebec?

-30-

Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]