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

The news media are not your friends.

by Peter Lowry

One of the hardest lessons that political candidates eventually learn—the hard way—is that the news media have a job to do.  The media are not there to be helpful.  They are not there to report fairly.  They are definitely not there to be your friend.  They are there to earn their pay from their publisher or station owner or news service.  And you, you poor political postulant, are just another miserable gob of asphalt to be flattened on their road to earning their paycheque.

And every politician we have ever met has made the same mistake.  The only possible exception to that was Pierre Trudeau.  He despised news media people.  Maybe that was based on his experience in founding Cité Libre, the intellectual, left-wing publication created to attack the repressive regime of Maurice Duplessis in Quebec.  Trudeau never met a news reporter whom he considered his intellectual equal.

This was unlike Brian Mulroney who desperately tried to be one of ‘the boys’ with the media.  His uncouth language and risqué jokes made them uncomfortable, while making their jobs more difficult.  Those of us from the time of Diefenbaker and Pearson were used to a far more gentlemanly and respectful relationship.

The most strained relationship for the media is probably the one with Stephen Harper.  There is no relationship as he holds the media reporters in distain and at arms length.  He trots out his wife and children and plays the piano to try to appear human but the media people trying to cover this imperious prime minister know better.  It is the bias of those signing the worker-bees’ paycheques that keeps them in check.

The only problem is that there are fewer and fewer people doing the signing.  It is the greatest risk to Canada’s democracy today, this concentration of the media into fewer and fewer corporate hands.  Bell Canada for example, a body that cannot run a telephone company, now controls the dominant radio and television media in English-speaking Canada.  There is nobody reporting fairly on this worsening situation.

The only hope left to grasp for under these circumstances are the social media.  While you really need hip-high waders to slog through much of the blogs, tweets, posts and commentary of the Internet, there are truths emerging.  There are also scurrilous lies.  There are silly rumours and the compounding of errors.  As much as the social media are out of control, their anarchy is their strength.  Truth is no longer the only defence for slander—belief can become truth.  As many churches will tell you; if enough people believe, then it is true.

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

Babel Liberals were in a bit of a bind,

Provincial cousins they couldn’t find.

They found that our departing MPP,

Chose to foul the nest for all to see.

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Post election. Eating crow.

by Peter Lowry

The proper way to eat crow is to take small bites, chew thoroughly and resist the urge to regurgitate.  You should only have to eat crow when you have really screwed up.  And we did.  Big time.  We made our assumptions about the election outcome two days after the national debates.  It was premature.

It was not that we did not recognize the problem in Quebec.  It was there for all to see.  Despite his forcefulness in the debates, Gilles Duceppe and his party were fading.  The Bloc had run its course with Quebec voters.  Change was necessary.  There was a determined youth movement that could not abide Harper, but bought the bad memories of their elders and Harper’s lies about the Liberals and saw the Bloc’s narrow focus as self defeating.  Only the NDP was left. What helped the NDP in Quebec is they are close in social policy to the provincial Parti Quebecois.

But that hardly explains Ontario.  Ontario voters got sandbagged.  The phenomenon in Quebec was played in the media as a national experience.  The media skewed the figures and said it was alright to vote NDP in Ontario because Harper would only win a minority.  The threat of the NDP helped drive the Conservative voters to the polls.  And the decimation of the Liberals carried into Ontario as the split of NDP-Liberal votes allowed the Conservative victories that Harper needed for a majority.

We lost our election bets.  In Babel, we lost with a very decent Liberal candidate.  Maybe he is too decent.  The NDP candidate came second in her second time around.  The Green candidate was a gentleman as always.  The Conservative is an incompetent who brings nothing to the table in Ottawa but another mindless vote for Harper.

As we chew on our crow, we contemplate four to five years of a Conservative majority.  God help us.  We are faced with four years of a vindictive and vengeful Stephen Harper.

Expect the Ottawa opposition parties to kiss their voter subsidies goodbye.

Suck it up seniors and forget those old age subsidy increases.

Just wait until Jim Flaherty does his Michael Harris number on Ottawa’s mandarins!

And you though our international reputation was slightly tarnished?  Just wait until Emperor Harper does his world tour.

Corporations can go ahead and pollute for fun and profit.

It’s the big corporations that get all the goodies now.

There is no help for small business.  There will be no help for innovators.

We can probably expect the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to become a fond memory.

Why should Harper support abortion anymore?

Forget same-sex marriage.  Forget peace-keeping.

Now the Conservatives can lie to the House of Commons with impunity.

Be quiet or they will start hanging people again.

And how will they fill all those jails they want to build?

O’Canada, who will stand on guard for you?

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

Election conspiracy theories will abound,

As media and pollsters have been found,

Stampeding the Quebec vote to the NDP,

As Harper said: They split the left for me!

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The Democracy Papers. Revisited.

by Peter Lowry

The Democracy Papers were written in 2007 in answer to the Ontario referendum that year on electoral reform.  The referendum was defeated but the need for reform continues to rankle.  We believe Canada must have an elected Constitutional Conference.  Electoral reform is just one of the topics to be brought to the gathering.  For this reason, the Democracy Papers are being updated and rerun.

Chapter 1

It was the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform that suggested a ‘mixed-member proportional’ (MMP) electoral system be voted on in a referendum in the October, 2007 provincial election.   It was courageous because the citizens’ Assembly consisted of a majority of people who had no experience with politics, political parties or the various electoral systems they reviewed.   They must have assumed that the rest of Ontario’s voters were as confused as themselves.

The citizens’ assembly naively suggested in their deliberations that people have two votes, one for a candidate in an enlarged riding and the other for a party.   In this manner, they believe, there could be a fairer representation in the legislature of the popular vote between parties.   They never explained why this should be necessary.

The assembly members were under the impression that just because a party’s candidates receive maybe 15 per cent of the popular vote, then that party should be allowed to have 15 per cent of the seats.   The unasked question is: ‘Why?’

With only 15 per cent of the vote in a general election, your party is a loser.   Reality is that if your party cannot garner more than 15 per cent of the popular vote, it really needs to improve its platform strategy, reconsider its leadership and take a long hard look at its candidates.   To reward any party for this showing is to encourage mediocrity.

What used to happen to this 15-per cent party is that it got maybe three or four candidates elected.   This could be because these are outstanding people and the voters recognize this and vote for them despite their party affiliation.   It could also be that there is a large concentration of people sympathetic to the party’s ideals in that riding.   Or maybe so many people in that riding are related to the candidate and s/he cannot lose.   Whatever the reason, it does not take long to figure it out.

If, for example, you are the New Democratic Party, it is not hard to understand that the party can do well in areas of the province with a strong union vote.   While the party fields candidates in electoral districts where there might be little union support, such as in the more affluent parts of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), these party stalwarts are there to establish their credentials in the party. Realistically, they know to limit their campaigning to showing some signs and making appearances at all-candidate meetings.   And any long-term NDPer is realistic about how that works.   Most of the good workers in these throw-away ridings are asked to put their efforts into ridings with better possibilities.  And if the throw-away candidate makes a good showing despite the situation in the riding, they might be offered a more NDP-friendly riding next time.

Conservatives and Liberals have had to spread themselves over far more ridings.   While there is always a tendency to slack off a bit in ridings where an opponent seems entrenched, there will be a renewed effort whenever the incumbent shows any sign of weakness.

Until the early 1990s, Ontario political parties were ‘riding-centred.’   This meant that local electoral district (riding) associations used to have the right to choose their candidate without too much interference from party headquarters.   While the system tended to produce the occasional maverick, everyone agreed that the stodgy legislature needed some livening.   One of the problems with this was sometimes it was hard to find the right riding for a star candidate favoured by the party leadership.

Today, of course, party leaders control the ridings because they sign off on candidates so that they can be funded with taxpayers’ money.   The day of the maverick has ended.   Instead of being riding centred, Ontario has been forced into a centralized political structure.   One thing that the citizens’ assembly MMP voting could ensure is that Ontario politics stays locked into being centralized.

And there is no question that centralized politics is a natural breeding ground for corruption.   The classic study of this is New York City’s Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party organization that controlled the city and its boroughs for 80 years.

Ontarians do not have to look far to see the potential problems with a centralized system.  Québec’s federal Liberals have been a good example.   The Montréal-based party organization appointed Liberal candidates across the province.   And that is another reason why Paul Martin’s Liberals were dragged from power by the sponsorship scandal. Successive prime ministers, Chrétien and Martin had ignored the corruption-prone system at the roots of their Québec support.

But for the apolitical citizens’ assembly in Ontario, political history such as this would have been a bore.   They were given the option of several voting systems.   They thought they were doing their job when they chose one of them.   They just did not have the political experience to know in what direction their option would send the province.

©Copyright 2007, 2011, Peter Lowry

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

Toronto Star, you have gone too far,

Supporting Layton, lowering the bar,

That sure as hell is much too bizarre!

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That great speech.

by Peter Lowry

Some people think of a speech as being an end result.  How often have you said, that this or that person ‘gave a great speech.’  What that really says is that the speech was not successful.  If the speech did not motivate you to do something, it fails.

We were thinking of this when writing recently about political stump speeches.  These speeches have changed over the years as they have moved from the ‘vote for me’ talks delivered from a stump, the back of a train, a stage in a park or in a local arena.  Today these speeches are beating the drum to refresh the effort by already committed workers.

To understand great speeches, you need to analyze speeches such as Shakespeare’s recreation of Marc Anthony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, Winston Churchill’s classic Some chicken; some neck! speech to the Canadian parliament and Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s momentous I have a dream. They were not just rich in their use of the English language, nor just adept at alliterative rhetoric.  They were built on what writers refer to as power phrases and are brought to repeated and all-consuming climaxes with an unerring sense of timing.

A great speech is structured.  It is not something that is done off the cuff.  Words have to be carefully placed within the sentence to reach the listeners’ ears in the right sequence.  Words that are weak or weaseled are wasted words.

A great speech is an epic journey that travels from mountain top to mountain top.  It is interrupted repeatedly by planned, anticipated audience reaction.  It is structured for the audience to voice and indicate approval.  The speaker’s pauses are part of the planning.  Each round of applause builds on the previous.  It rises to a crescendo of approval.

And that is all in the timing.  Timing is a critical factor, not in the length of a speech, but in its delivery.  Like the great comedians, great speakers know that the crucial pause is what can make the difference between polite agreement and an ovation.

The hardest thing to teach a person who aspires to be a good, if not great, public speaker is to read the audience.  It can be as simple as; are they looking at their watches?  Are they nodding in agreement?  Are they looking bored?  Are they looking around to see how others are reacting?  Can you see puzzlement and segue in an ad-libbed clarification?  You have to think of a speech as a conversation and always be ready to adjust your remarks to fit the needs of your audience.

There are some darn good speakers today.  President Obama of the U.S. comes immediately to mind.  What is probably missing is great speech writers.

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

We embarrassed ourselves yesterday,

Admitting that we had nothing to say,

But that English wedding is oh so gay,

At least, Harper will not have his way.

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Write about election or wedding? An easy choice.

by Peter Lowry

That seems to be the choice today.  You can write about the election or the wedding.  Since we are at a low level with drivel these days, the wedding loses.  Mind you, we read in the notoriously monarchist Toronto Star that only 39 per cent of Canadians are even thinking of viewing the spectacle.

The wife had the idea that we could record the wedding and watch it the next day when we were awake.  This was discouraged when it was explained to her that seven hours of high definition blather might not be easily accommodated on our personal video recorder.  There is also no guarantee that, even on fast forward, we would be able to stay awake through the event.

That left us with the election.  That is bad news too.  We can only hope that the pollsters are proved so wrong afterwards that they are banished for all time from forecasting any level of elections.

The promised fall of the Liberals at this time, we know, is premature.  The rise of the NDP to power is even more unlikely.

Our bets are based on Ontario.  The bets all revolve around the Liberals getting better than 30 per cent of the vote in the province with more than a third of the seats in parliament.  That spells minority for Harper.

What guarantees the minority is that Harper’s hopes have all but crashed in Quebec.  The news media have probably stampeded some Liberal votes to the NDP in the Atlantic.  That part of the country is always a bit behind the curve.  And Harper is going to get the majority of the votes in the Prairies.  While the Prairies are still part of Canada, that just makes them look narrow minded and mean spirited.

And then there is B.C.  We have absolutely no idea what the voters are going to do in Lotusland.  Neither do the voters.

When younger and less empathetic, we used to say that the damn silly voters get the government they deserve.  That is a cruel statement today.  Frankly, there seems to be a difference of opinion about whether Harper is a mean, red-neck or not.  Maybe we are just too vehement in trying to keep him from being declared emperor.  We should always remember that even Napoleon started with the best of intentions.

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

The media think Jack Layton is on the brink,

Those who dreamed that up, need a shrink.

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