There is nothing strange about it.  Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak can hate Toronto Mayor Rob Ford on his own time but publicly, the guy is his best buddy.  It is all about the politics.

The people who voted for Ford as mayor last year are the same people as Tim Hudak and his Conservatives need to vote for them in the provincial election on October 6.  Hudak would kiss Ford’s bare behind in the middle of Nathan Philips Square if Ford could guarantee those votes.  (Luckily for Hudak, there are no guarantees!)

Whether the Ford brothers can really deliver much of their last year’s vote to anyone is a matter of conjecture.  A great deal of buyers’ remorse has set in among Toronto voters.  They now know that there is no gravy train at city hall for the Ford boys to end.  It was all hot air.  More recently, between screwing up a perfectly good transit plan for the city and their really dumb plans for the Toronto Docklands, the Fords might be lucky to get re-elected as councillors.

But no politician can count on that.  You have to play the game that is on the table.  Both Premier Dalton McGuinty and NDP Leader Andrea Horwath have also made nice with Mayor Ford.  It would be bad manners and bad politics not to.  McGuinty knows he has to hold the provincial seats he has in Toronto to keep his job as Premier.  He does not win anything by fighting with the city’s mayor.  Also Horwath has to look like a premier to her supporters.  There is no win for her in pointing out the obvious with people like Ford.

Having spent much of our life in politics, we can report that when you see a politician, drape an arm around the shoulders of another politician and tell you what sterling character traits the person possesses, take it all with a grain of salt.  It is probably B.S.  All it means is that politician ‘A’ wants something from politician ‘B’ or vice-versa.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

One of the frustrations of the G20 fiasco last year was that citizens felt there was nowhere to turn.  It was the police against the citizens and the cops had the muscle, the numbers, the guns, the batons and no moral cares.  The normal protections of the citizens, the law, the lawmakers, the provincial special investigations unit and the police board were nowhere to be seen or heard.  Our safeguards were silent.

But behold, a year later, there have been stirrings from an unexpected source.  The Toronto Police Services Board has discovered intestinal fortitude.  The members have discovered that they have the power to turn aside the chief of police’s recommendations for police promotions.  It has been reported that they actually refused promotion for police officers who had been found to have taken off their name badges while confronting citizens at the G20.  This is a rare phenomenon.

The system of police boards in Ontario is not a perfect system but it is better than most.  It takes us away from direct control of the police by the politicians but only by a short step.  Police service boards are politically appointed.  In Ontario, the municipality usually appoints the mayor (or regional chair or reeve, depending on the local municipal structure) under the ancient custom of being chief magistrate.  One or two municipal councillors are also appointed by the local council, along with one or more citizens who are neither a judge nor a lawyer practicing criminal law.  The board is then rounded out with a couple citizens appointed by the province.

In Babel, being a small city, we make do with just a five person board.  We have the mayor, a councillor, a council-appointed citizen and the two citizens appointed by the province.  The danger with any of these appointments is that the appointee might think of oneself as some sort of super cop.  There was a councillor appointee in Toronto once who even figured out a way he could get to carry a gun.  That spelled trouble.

One part of the problem is that some chiefs of police, who are the operational head of the police service, tend to encourage this super-cop fantasy.  It co-opts members of the board into becoming avid advocates for the police.  And with a small board such as Babel’s this is not very difficult.

At a recent council meeting, Babel saw the chair of the Police Services Board making the case for spending millions on a new and larger cop shop and a member of council, who is on the Police Services Board, insisting on the scheme.  These two people are supposed to be setting policy for the police services in our community.  What the hell are they doing trying to convince us to pay more for the comfort and convenience of the cops?

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

It has started already.  The media are complaining about the low turnout of voters before the voting even takes place.  Between now and the final election day on October 6, they are going to be reporting that that only about six out of ten Ontario voters will vote in this provincial election.  You would think that we hardly need additional voters who have no clue for whom or why they should vote.  We should tell them: “Thanks but we already have lots of people who do not know what they are doing.”

It has always been our feeling that we should have a two-step voting process.  The idea is that first you prove that you have paid attention to the candidates’ platforms, have understood what they are telling voters and then you are allowed to vote for one of them.  It would certainly change the outcome for many elections at all levels of government.

For example, we could ask voters what it means when a candidate tells you it is time for a change in Ontario.  The answer obviously is that the other guys are in and that candidate is out and wants a chance to be in and take his or her turn at screwing things up.

The trick question for voters is why does the guy who is in power get the blame for all the taxes?  Voters who know that this is how we pay for all the government programs that we demand the government provide, should get to vote first.  The voter who says that nothing else matters but cutting taxes should be taken to a hospital, after they are in a traffic accident, just when the hospital can no longer pay its electric bill.  That voter did not vote because of their untimely death.

Of course, there are those who subscribe to the suggestion that we really should have stupid politicians to give stupid voters someone to vote for.  Why should stupid people be deprived of representation?

There is a law of natural selection that takes place in election campaigns.  If you are an incumbent, you already have 20 per cent of the votes going for you.  If you do not piss off too many people and just remind them that they were smart enough to vote for you last time, you will probably win.

If there is no incumbent and no candidate has strong name recognition, you better have lots of workers because you have to knock on a lot of doors, identify people who might vote for you and then have the workers drag them out to vote.  That wins elections.

But woe betide you if some numbskull pushes people out to vote who never paid attention, never read a newspaper, don’t know who the candidates are, have never met or heard one of the candidates and think they are voting for the party leader.  It is enough to make those who care cry.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

Print media in Canada either spend their editorial efforts on appearing thoughtful or on being shallow.  Both efforts—the honest one and the dishonest one—needlessly kill a lot of trees.  The subject de jour for the thoughtful media is the merger of Canada’s Liberal and New Democratic Parties and the leadership of each or the one that is produced by the merger.  It is certainly going to use a lot of ink and newsprint.

Speculation about potential leaders will be the saviour for harried editors when they have no fires to report.  The first leadership will be for the NDP and that is expected to be in the early part of 2012.  The Liberal Party intends to wait until 2014.  The Liberals will give editors a chance for speculative stories on all 34 current Liberal MPs, several dozen provincial Liberals and assorted others in that time.

The most amusing pseudo think piece so far was the one today in the Toronto Star by left-leaning writer Thomas Walkom.  He is touting Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae for the top NDP post.  He thinks it would be a natural for Rae but admits that it might be tough to swallow for some of Rae’s former NDP cohorts.

Rae’s Liberal leadership hopes are also a stretch for many Liberal Party members.  What Rae proved as Premier of Ontario in the early 1990s was that he is a good campaigner, a so-so premier and a lousy politician.  If he will just stick to his promise the other day to keep Stephen Harper’s Conservative’s feet to the fire about jobs for the next two years, he will earn an honoured position with the Liberal Party.  It will just not be the top job.

The NDP has its own problems.  If you read Jack Layton’s last letter in its entirety, you will discover it is not an NDP document.  Find where it mentions the Canadian Labour Congress which shares control of that party?  Where are the class struggles and the collectivism that built the NDP?  The letter has been crafted as a social democrat document and left-of-centre Liberals would have no cause to disagree with what it says.

An early front-runner in the NDP race to replace Jack Layton is Deputy Leader MP Tom Mulcair from Montreal.  Mulcair was a Quebec Liberal cabinet minister until he split with Premier Jean Charest over a purported environmental issue.  He should ask Stéphane Dion, the former federal Liberal leader, what being an environmentalist gets you in Canadian politics.

Bear in mind also that there are active Liberals and NDPers who will never take the possibility of a merging of the two parties seriously.  A merged party will not include a sizeable number of right wing Liberal members in that party.  This includes Liberals such as former leader Paul Martin and MPs such as Ralph Goodale.  A merged party would also be an uncomfortable place for some of the older, embittered NDP socialists who think of Liberals as the enemy.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

And here we thought Deb Mathews was one of the brighter lights in the McGuinty cabinet.  We all make mistakes but Mathews offer of doctors providing house calls for seniors could be a serious stretch.  While we all understand the logic and economic sense she is making, there is no question that she has things backwards.

First you have to have doctors who will accept seniors as patients.

This is not just a problem in Ontario, it is a disgrace that is impacting millions of families.  While the Ontario Medical Association has said that doctors are not to discriminate against seniors, nobody enforces it.  The Ontario Human Rights Commission ignores it.  Hospitals not only allow doctors to discriminate but they actively support them in it.

While tens of thousands of seniors, the people in greatest need for properly controlled health care, lack a family doctor, McGuinty runs around the province touting his government’s accomplishments in more families getting doctors.  Why he wants to take the credit for the new doctors who made the decision to go into medicine during the Harris Conservative government years, is not clear.

What is clear is that these new doctors only want to serve young, healthy families.  Why?  Because that is how they will be paid the most by the government.  There is no percentage for a new general practitioner to take on seniors.  The old people have complex problems, take up far too much time and are a strain on a new practice.

The McGuinty government deserves the credit for coming up with the sensible arguments for an ‘Aging at Home’ policy.  It seems to be the steps needed to make it happen that are tripping up the government.  In the meantime, there are probably more than 10,000 seniors in Ontario on the waiting lists for nursing home beds.  The Harris government might be blamed for the problems in the system but the waiting list has become almost three times as long since McGuinty took over.

The person who wrote the dialogue for the 1949 Humphrey Bogart-John Derek movie Knock on any door certainly spoke for Ontario seniors when he advised people to live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

Prime Minister Stephen Harper might not have thought through all the potential effects of a state funeral for Jack Layton.  This was the first state funeral for an opposition leader in 100 years and that last one was for Wilfrid Laurier who was a former Prime Minister.  Where Harper might have miscalculated was that he provided Stephen Lewis, a former  Ontario New Democrat leader, with a national audience for a highly partisan eulogy.

It was a beautifully crafted speech that contained standing ovation after standing ovation.  It went way beyond a celebration of the life of Jack Layton.  And how often do you have standing ovations at a funeral?  When the wandering cameras came to rest later during the service on Stephen Lewis and his wife Michele Landsberg, you were seeing one of Canada’s best orators with one of its best writers.  That is a powerful combination.

You could see the effects of the speech on the faces of people in the crowds outside Roy Thompson Hall.  They were rapt, they were cheering, they were involved and they believed.  It was hardly just an NDP audience.  Federal Cabinet Ministers Tony Clement and John Baird were sitting there looking a little shell shocked.  Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty looked like his seat did not fit him for some reason.

It was too bad that, under election rules, the NDP could not pass the hat at the event.  It could have been a good haul.

But they will look at the memberships they pick up in the weeks to come and that should give the party a boost across Canada.  It was especially telling that there was repeatedly strong representation at the event in French.  There was a particularly striking rendition of the song Croire (Believing) that left no doubt of the importance the NDP is placing on the party’s Quebec breakthrough in the last election.

While there is adverse reaction being voiced about the excesses in the news media over the past week, there is no question but Jack Layton’s common man approach struck a cord with the Canadian people.  Whether the New Democrats can fly to greater heights on that image remains to be seen.  Ask that question again in October.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

You had to know that the Harmonized Sales Tax was going to come back into the limelight and bite Ontario’s Premier McGuinty on the ass.  Now there is going to be a call for referendum legislation in Ontario to enable people to challenge the government’s tax laws.  Just six weeks before the provincial election, the timing is bad for McGuinty.

It is the fault of those people out in Lotusland.  The British Columbia electors voted almost 55 per cent against the harmonized tax that had been implemented out there.  They not only voted to change back to separate provincial and federal sales taxes but they are going to lose the $1.6 Billion bribe that the federal government paid to get them to do it. This will cost B.C. voters more than they have bargained for.

But nobody has ever accused B.C. electors of voting in their own best interest.  This is the province that voted in various forms of provincial Social Credit governments.  It used to totally confuse pollsters as when the experts would ask people why they voted as they did, nobody would admit they voted for their new government.  In federal elections, all bets are off west of the Rocky Mountains.

You would think that McGuinty would have a free pass with both opponents—Horwath and Hudak—admitting that they would not cancel the HST.  He does, in effect, but not with the voters.  His problem is that he and his Finance Minister are going around insisting that the HST is good for business in Ontario.  The reaction to that is voters are saying: “That’s all very well.  Let business vote for you!”

What nobody seems to understand is that the HST in British Columbia and Ontario was never planned nor dreamed up by the provincial governments.  It was conceived by the Harper government and sold by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and carried out by the two provinces, Liberal governments.  They bought Flaherty’s blandishments.  They accepted Flaherty’s bribes of our money.

If Ontario voters had given the proper level of government credit for the HST, the Harper government would still be a minority government.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

If you and I should chance to meet,
I guess you wouldn’t care;
I’m sure you’d pass me in the street
As if I wasn’t there;
You’d never look me in the face,
My modest mug to scan,
Because I’m just a commonplace
And Ordinary Man.

Robert William Service

Jack Layton’s secret weapon in the May 2 federal election was that he was Jack.  Jack was an ordinary man.  He was a Quebec anglo from Hudson but Jack was alright with ordinary Quebeckers.  He was also alright with ordinary voters across Canada.  For he was Jack.

Jack Layton’s party could not win the federal election but he took second prize with obvious delight.  He earned it.  The fates then conspired to rip that prize from his weakening hands.

Americans would see it as Jack being Mr. Smith, the ordinary man storming the gates of Congress.  In Canada, he was that quiet guy from down the street who was there to help his neighbours. The reality was that in the 2011 election he was every professional campaign manager’s dream, the perfect candidate: who could only do as he was told.

It will be extremely difficult to replace the mix that was Jack.  Here was a political science professor talking the talk of the ordinary man.  Here was a municipal pothole fixer discussing federal government issues.  Here is that regular Joe, married to a Chinese-Canadian lady who is also a Member of Parliament.

Jack was one of the toughest opponents you could ever face in an election campaign simply because he could look so innocent.  There was a very telling camera shot of Jack in the English-language television debate with the other leaders last April.  The camera angle was high and it looked as though he was looking up at Prime Minister Harper with a slight smile on his face.  It was the kind of smile that on a politician says somebody is going to get nailed.  Surprisingly it was not Harper but Michael Ignatieff Jack went after.  It was an attack on Michael’s attendance in the House of Commons that Jack knew was a cheap shot.

The willingness Jack showed in doing that told us he was not running his own campaign.  He had to agree with his team that he could not beat Harper but he could beat Ignatieff.  The fact that Michael Ignatieff did not respond told insiders even more.

Jack’s only problem was his party.  His illness shielded him from the worst attacks of his political enemies.  His illness meant props were used to help him through the ardour of the campaign.  It kept him free of the minutia demands of the party and its candidates.  And the strategy worked.

Canada will miss Jack Layton.  The New Democratic Party will miss him much more.  Without that ordinary man perspective, the party will slide back to its third party status.  Even when the Liberal Party moves more convincingly to the political left, there is little likelihood of a merger of the parties.  Jack Layton never seemed to want to preach the collectivism that the NDP represents.  It was because he was unique.  He was the ordinary man.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

Prime Minister Harper is going to fill his new prisons one way or another.  And, if he has to borrow a page or two from Orwell’s 1984, he just might do it.  He has already started. If you have read George Orwell, you know that Big Brother loves you and will look after you.  He will rewrite history for you.  He will watch you and have all your neighbours watching you.

Mr. Harper’s government has already published pictures of people so that their neighbours can report them.  Harper’s Cabinet minions have been quite pleased with the results.  They immediately expanded their ‘most wanted’ postings from international criminals to people who might be in the country illegally.  You just have to start with people it is easy to hate. The Tories will quickly find they can target child pornographers and sex perverts.  They could include oil company executives charged with price fixing.  With luck these people would be picked up by the R.C.M. Police before our usually mild mannered citizens lynch them.

The government will go on to expand their searches. Eventually they will find out about that parking ticket you forgot to pay.  Your own children will report you to the police for that infraction.

This is how Big Brother operates.  He starts slowly.  He gets you agreeing with him.  It becomes insidious.  When he has you up doing callisthenics in front of a webcam on the television every morning, it will be too late.

There is no question that Big Brother wants you to think right.  He wants you to be right.  He wants you to be just like him.  He wants you to love him.

We can all join the principal character at the end of Orwell’s 1984 and say it in unison: “I love Big Brother!”

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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