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

Busker Bob battles on.

by Peter Lowry

The buskers who entertain us on the streets while we wait for the heavy hitters have a tough job.  Even getting a little attention is encouraging for them.  Imagine how Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae feels out on the summer barbeque circuit.  In the midst of backyards full of local Liberals, a reformed New Democrat can feel lonely.

In the doldrums of summer, a little interest from the news media can be a godsend.  The media tend to act like lawyers in a courtroom and do not ask any questions to which they do not know the answers.  It saves having to write down what the interviewee is saying.

The first question is predictably about the NDP’s Jack Layton and cancer, MP Nycole Turmel and the Bloc Quebecoise.  The answer calls for the right level of concern for Jack Layton’s health and the right level of indignation about Jack’s hand-picked stand-in.  Consider the nerve of that woman to play footsie with the separatists as well as the NDP.  It is not as though Bob knows nothing of flitting between parties.

The turmoil around Turmel is also opening the door for Rae to address Prime Minister Harper’s gaffs.  He gets to make scathing comments about Mr. Harper and Harper’s friend Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to the delight of Liberal audiences.  Whether this helps Bob’s friend Dalton McGuinty remains to be seen.

If Bob could just redirect a little of that media stardom that he is presently enjoying to what Mr. Harper is currently doing in Brazil, it would be even more helpful to Canadians.  After ignoring South America, in fact, everything in the America’s south of Mexico over the past five years, Harper has a lot of catching up to do.  Not that the Liberals have a much better record in the southern half of our hemisphere.  There are economies down there that are defying the global trends and we can gain much by making more friends and doing more business.

It is just that international affairs are supposed to be Bob Rae’s specialty and he should head to that opening.  He has to remember that he is a caretaker and, if nothing else, he should keep things looking operational.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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

The American angst of the summer of 2011.

by Peter Lowry

What is going on south of that Canada-United States of America border?  Democrats are turning on Obama.  Republicans are disavowing their motley leadership. The rock that used to be Standard and Poors has turned thumbs down on the American economy.

With the plunging stock market, those of us on fixed incomes have just seen our retirement savings go south again.  The stock market does not crash these days, it just bounces like a perpetual motion India rubber ball—not higher and higher, just lower and lower.  We are all getting mad as hell and we are not going to take this any more.  (You might have heard that before but so what?)

Americans are telling their politicians how mad they are and you can hardly blame them.  It is bad enough that the greed of Wall Street drove us all into recession three years ago.  For the American politicians to create a stupid, destructive, ignorant artificial crisis such as an arbitrary, unfounded debt limit was a vicious and flagrant disregard for the people they were supposed to serve.  They should all be spanked and sent home and the voters should replace them with adults.

One of the obstacles we repeatedly run into calling for a Canadian Constitutional Conference is the people who are deathly afraid that you want a system of government similar to the Americans.  Good grief no!  Canadians have indirectly suffered the worst effects of the American Constitution for over two hundred years and hardly deserve such a flawed system of government themselves.

But as has been said many times, democracy itself is hardly perfect.  It is just much better than the alternatives.  The basic problem of the American Constitution is that it is based on a union of states and not a union of people.  Even the subsequent civil war that the country suffered only produced necessary band-aids to the problems rather than solutions.

This writer would not have the temerity to suggest what the Americans should do to clean up their act.  What they might do is reflect long and hard on the original objectives of their constitutional congress.  They were supposed to assure Americans of the individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Concentrating on making that happen would be a damn good start.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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

Dalton McGuinty goes to war.

by Peter Lowry

It is amazing.  Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has gone to war.  It is a smart war.  It is strategic.  Why are we so surprised?

The opening salvos have been lobs.  They are firing for effect.  When McGuinty claimed Harper’s focus was on Western Canada, Harper, with few words, brushed it aside.  Harper later retaliated by saying that he wants the provincial Conservatives to win the Ontario election on October 6.  He used the analogy of a hockey hat trick.  Thinking he was speaking to a solely Conservative audience, Harper went too far by saying the ‘left-wing mess’ that he inherited in 2006 and that Rob Ford inherited in Toronto last year will be the same for (Provincial Conservative Leader) Tim Hudak in October.

This could launch a war of words that will carry through the election.  And it will be a war that Dalton McGuinty can fight alone.  Stephen Harper has stated his position and that was all that was needed from him.  Harper is now the straw man that Dalton can fight instead of Hudak.  Why fight lesser players when you can take on the Federal Conservative Leader?

It is a major strategic coup.  It denigrates Hudak to the lesser role of someone yapping from the cheap seats but not allowed in the ring with the big kids.  At the same time, it elevates McGuinty to the federal level where his federal counterparts are, at the moment, laying low.  McGuinty is more than free to attack Harper on the long-term funding needs of Medicare and on Harper’s poor stance on environmental issues.  The federal Liberals will appreciate the help.

The only risk in this for McGuinty is the NDP.  For every vote he gains in this attack on Harper, he is siphoning off some support to the Provincial NDP.  The federal and provincial members of that party are used to working together and the lack of Jack Layton’s leadership can benefit Andrea Horwath as she is the next most prominent spokesperson for the party.

The battle of Ontario is a three-way fight.  Nobody is forecasting an NDP breakthrough but it has happened before.  Nobody really believes the polls that show Tim Hudak in the lead but some people could not believe the Rob Ford would win in Toronto last year.  If you make any bets on this election today, you had better hold out for long odds.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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

Babel media spar during summer’s dog days.

by Peter Lowry

The dog days of summer are actually rooted in the past but today it an excuse for the media to produce some really cornball material.  It is as bad on television as it is in newspapers.  They all act as though they have nothing to write or talk about.  It is getting so bad that one of the two chain newspapers that ill-serve Babel wrote an extensive editorial about its print competition.

Talk about the skillet calling the frying pan black!  This is the blunderer complaining about the incompetent.  The Torstar publication, a free distribution grocery and furniture store wrap, the one we call Babel Backward, ran an editorial by Torstar Chairman John Honderich.  Entitled Accountable to no one, the editorial complains bitterly about Sun Media, owner of the Barrie Examiner, quitting the Ontario Press Council.

The Ontario Press Council is near and dear to the Toronto Star which helped create the Council.  It has made Torstar look good over the years while other people get to arbitrate when someone claims to have been wronged by the publication.  It cuts down on cost of lawyers to handle the law suits and usually resolves any incorrect utterance with a deep and moving apology.  And who cares?

Sun Media, the print media accumulation of Pierre-Karl Péladeau’s integrated media empire, has dumped all links to other media through such cooperatives as Canadian Press and the Canadian Newspaper Association.  It was very amusing to hear that one of Péladeau’s executive’s accused the Ontario Press Council of being ‘Politically Correct.’  It is hard to imagine Péladeau understanding what that term means.  It certainly does not apply to his flagship newspapers Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec—publications that could make Rupert Murdoch blush!

What Péladeau is creating across his media empire is best described as editorial anarchy.  Conrad Black, no matter how much we hated him, at least brought a level of discipline to the newsrooms when he owned newspapers.  Talking to one of the few real reporters at the Sun Media outlet in Babel, we once remarked that the Canadian Press Style Book had stopped spelling a farmer’s plow or a snowplow as ‘plough’ more than 50 years ago.  He laughed and told us that the publisher did not care and the reporter liked spelling it the old way. ‘So there!’

John Honderich should try to read some of the sorry excuses for newspapers that Torstar produces across Ontario.  The newspaper industry is not dying because of the evolution of electronic media but because of the greed and uncaring attitude of the Canadian newspaper industry’s corporate ownership.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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

Contemplation in a summer of hope.

by Peter Lowry

It has been that kind of summer.  It has been a restorative time.  Far too hot to be active but very pleasant to sit on the balcony with a cold drink, watching the boats, the swimmers, the children at play.  The only books taken out to that balcony are historical, offering insights into the past.  It is more fun to sit and contemplate the future.

Many of the concerns for the future have revolved around the Liberal Party of Canada.  Where the party might be headed is a recurring theme for writers as the historical governing party has mainly withdrawn from public life to lick its wounds.

The answer to the federal angst is positive.  “We shall rise to fight again,” is the rallying cry.  We just have to be a different kind of political party.  We have to define our party.  We need to seek out our coalition of voters and speak with them and for them.  We need to be proudly left of that vague, amorphous political centre.  We need to represent justice in a world of injustice.  We need to understand that while we have to use the law and to make law, we cannot lose sight of the individual.

The Liberal Party must recognize the power of one.  This is the individual and the individual no longer owes existence and rights to the state but the state owes the individual for its acceptance and existence.  Similarly, the police to not bring order to the populace but are the delegated force of the populace and owe allegiance to that populace.

Our politicians must be our servants, carrying out the wishes of the populace, always conscious of protecting of the rights and wishes of the individual.  These servants protect our environment for now and for the future.  They mind our health, they bring order to commerce, they build the infrastructure to meet the needs of all our society, and they assure our rights to learning.  There is no fixed list of tasks to be achieved, there are just the needs of people in a successful society.

To create this new approach to politics, we must also change our thinking about how a political party works.  It has to be there to work for its supporters.  It is there to organize the political priorities.  It produces the people who can serve us best in government.  It is the conduit for direction from the populace.  It is an information network.  This will take very hard work to create.

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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

The possible and the spurious.

by Peter Lowry

Watching the television news about the American debt battle in Congress, the wife turned and asked “What comes after a trillion dollars?”

The answer was immediate and regretted: “Confusion.”

We should have said “quadrillion” and let it go at that.  Instead we got into a silly discussion of the differences in how Americans count.  The problem is that the way Americans count, a billion is only a thousand million.  In other systems, a billion is considered to be a million million which is a thousand times as much.

The rest of the world has had to go along with this Americanism but one is still best to check the number of zeros after a number to confirm.

But while that discussion can be considered spurious, hopefully politicians in the United States are now dealing with the possible.  They have an annual budget running over three of their trillions of dollars per year which is a lot in anyone’s language.  Their right-wing, small government advocates are asking them to start paring this down by an average of about US$20 billion per year which they might be able to do if they are not fighting too many foreign wars and the U.S. banking system cleans up its act.

But trying to balance the U.S. budget and finally gaining some cooperation will not make the foolish right-wing nuts like the Tea Party go away.  We have the same problem in Canada with Toronto’s Ford Brothers and Johnny-one-notes such as Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak.  And in the meantime, we are on pins and needles waiting for the federal Harper Conservatives to decide where to strike.

Other than that, it really is a pretty summer.  We are enjoying it.  Hope you are too!

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All material in this blog is copyright © Peter Lowry

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

Let’s hear it for Babel’s Impresario Brown.

by Peter Lowry

You have to admit, Patrick Brown is far better at being an impresario and promoting fund-raising events for some of our local charities than at being a Member of Parliament.  It figures that the Conservatives had to find something for him to do.

The only question we have is whether this is a very expensive way to help these select charities?  Is the job he is doing worth the $157,000 per year we pay him as a Conservative Member of Parliament?  Over the past several years, he has set new records in taxpayer funded mailing costs to promote himself.  He even has the distinction of being censured by the House of Commons Speaker for spending federal taxpayers’ money to promote the re-election of a city Councillor.

Another of those grey mailers from Patrick arrived in the mailbox the other day.  It is for another fund raiser for our favourite hospital.  This time it is for an upcoming half marathon (first annual, it tells us) for more Royal Victoria Hospital expansion.  (If they keep expanding that hospital, we are going to have to move Highway 400 over to give the hospital more room.)

Brown wants us to run a marathon or at least half a marathon or maybe just five kilometres on August 14.  We will pass on that, thank you.

But what concerns us is that Brown keeps spending taxpayers’ money on these selected charities.  Is that fair?  What about our favourite charities?  Do they always have to be his favourites?  After all, it is our money he is spending to promote these events.  And there are lots of worthy charities.

That leads to another concern.  Impresario Brown has been promoting a hockey night event for a few years.  It makes money for the hospital.  We would like to know who else benefits.  Does Mr. Brown benefit or does he figure he gets all that publicity for free?  Are there tax receipts given to sponsors?  We would really like to see an audit on that event.  Mr. Brown does not seem to be above playing fast and loose with our tax money.

We hate to raise these questions but sometimes, we are not sure that Impresario Brown really knows what he is doing.

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

The obduracy of the right.

by Peter Lowry

The first inclination was to refer to the pig-headedness of the right wing in our North American society.  Since ‘obduracy’ means the same, we can sound a bit more refined.  What it does not preclude is the opportunity to rail against the ham-fisted idiocy of those people on the right-wing of politics whose destructive obduracy causes so much trouble in our society.

We can see the obduracy at all levels of government.  We can see it in Canada and in the U.S.A.  It starts at the municipal level.

The Ford brothers in Toronto are an excellent example of the ignorance on which obduracy can be based.  The Toronto Mayor and his lieutenant brother think they can casually close libraries and daycare facilities while laying off police to meet their imagined tax savings.  They offered a frustrated electorate a chance to end the gravy train and now they learn that they are the gravy train.

It is a lesson that Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak has yet to learn.  It is an ignorant elector that will go along with the bad economics of Hudak’s foolish promises.  The problem is there are lots of ignorant people who vote.  People believe what they want to believe and logic does not trump emotion.  Hudak can only be defeated by a stronger emotional appeal.

And what can you really say about Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  The anger, chagrin and frustration with him will build to a crescendo over the next four years.  We have barely scratched the surface of his government’s right-wing paranoia.

The American right-wing adherents are also hardly wallflowers.  The Tea Party supporters in Congress have tied that government in knots fighting for their economic plans.  The fact that most of their plans cannot work does not seem to bother them.

But the truth in all of this right and left fighting is that nobody has all the answers.  The voters have the power to end the nonsense by forcing politicians to sit down with each other to discuss the issues.  Cooperation makes for poor media headlines but it certainly makes for better government.

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

Adversity becomes Jack.

by Peter Lowry

Jack Layton has always been a strong opponent.  It was 26 years ago when we first seriously campaigned against him in downtown Toronto.  At the time, the City of Toronto councillor was managing the provincial campaign in Fort York Riding for the NDP.  He is one heck of a scrapper.  Our Liberal beat his candidate in that election but he came back stronger the next time.  That area now is a big part of his wife, Olivia Chow’s, federal electoral district of Trinity-Spadina.

We were probably as surprised as he was when he easily won the leadership of the federal NDP in 2003.  He had come a long way from his roots in Montreal.  Mind you, it was his facility with Quebec French from those roots that made him a natural for the NDP leadership.

Jack performed well in his national role.  That tenacity of his paid off with increases in seats in 2005, 2006 and 2008.  He initially supported Liberal Paul Martin’s minority in 2005 and then brought him down, opening the door for a Stephen Harper Conservative minority.  His recent fight with prostate cancer and then a hip operation did not seem to slow him down.

It was only when we saw the teleprompters he was using at the NDP set pieces during the election this year that we realized that he was not as well as he was making out.  We expected teleprompter use for Stephen Harper to stay tightly scripted but Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff were experienced lecturers and did not always need this type of aid.  We watched him more closely and while he used the cane as an effective prop, you could see that he needed it.

His colloquial French was what won him approval during the 2011 election.  The slipping away of Bloc Quebecois support in Quebec and the endorsement by the Toronto Star in Ontario were the critical factors that put him into the position to win second place and the role of Opposition Leader.  His splitting of votes with the Liberals also gave Stephen Harper his majority government.

In wishing Jack a speedy recovery from the new cancer concern, you could almost imagine some sincerity in the Prime Minister’s voice.  With Harper’s wooden style, it is hard to tell.

But we can sincerely wish Jack well.  It is always better to compete with the opponent you know.

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

Where is the leadership in Ontario?

by Peter Lowry

It never really pays to analyze leadership.  It is there or it is not.  It can fit the diagrams of psychologists or it can be beyond their patterns.  You can use their diagrams to define a leader but the diagrams cannot produce a leader.  The secret is more in alchemy than in chemistry.  When there is no leadership, the fate of an election becomes more dependent on the interplay of the protagonists and the perceptions of the voters.  That is certainly the case in the Ontario election fixed for this October.

Neither of Premier McGinty’s previous two elections was won through any perception of leadership.  In 2003, McGinty became Premier of Ontario because of the lack of leadership by Conservative Leader Ernie Eves who had been too long in the shadow of the discredited Conservative Premier Michael Harris.  Eves could not defend himself in the demonizing of Harris.  McGinty offered a strong caucus, few promises and the fact that he was not Harris.  That was not leadership. It was being there.

The 2007 campaign was McGinty’s to lose as by this time the Conservatives had corrected their error and picked a leader who had strong leadership characteristics.  John Tory was charismatic, in tune with the times and brought solid values to the provincial Tories.  What he lacked was the key leadership need: direction.  He tried to solve this lack of direction by trying to expand the conservative base vote in Ontario by appealing to the right wing religious vote.  He offered this segment of Ontario society financial support for their parochial schools.  What he gained in the religious communities, he lost in the deeply affronted older W.A.S.P. vote across the province.

For the 2011 campaign, the Ontario Conservatives have fielded a manufactured leader.  Tim Hudak, a young Member of the Legislature from Fort Erie, was an acolyte of Michael Harris.  Deb Hutton, whom many considered the brains(?) behind Harris and certainly his platform, not only picked Hudak but married him and groomed him for the provincial leadership role.  He is a pit bull on the campaign trail but no leader.

Andrea Horwath of the NDP is the wild card in the 2011 election campaign but has yet to show what she can do.  She is the only one of the party leaders with a sense of humour and she also has more street smarts than either of her opponents.  It is too early to say how this will play out.

What we know for sure in this provincial election is that the voters in Ontario are wary of this lack of leadership and are looking for change.  At this stage, we have no idea what that change could be.

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