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

Will you be enjoying the nuptials of Kate and Bill?

by Peter Lowry

It is certainly a counterpoint to the current election campaign in Canada.  The wedding of the year will soon be upon us.  Luckily, it is at 3 am on Friday morning when wise people are partaking in a nightly ritual of a sound and healthy sleep.

It is the monarchists among us who cannot miss the nuptials.  Ye shall know them by the dark circles under their eyes the following day.  The rest of us will still have to forego watching television news for a few days to avoid the sugar high the event offers in reruns.  And the election news will also be in reruns by then so you will need to stock up with a few good books.

Not since we saw some of the solemn procession that buried the groom’s mother, have the Royals had the chance to capture such a world-wide audience.  It is really most embarrassing.  Do we colonials have to mind our manners and continue to tolerate this farcical royalty?

The royals are not only an anachronism but they went out of fashion more than a century ago.  When the Weimar Republic sent the old Kaiser off to farm in the Lowlands, after the end to the First World War, the English should have been smart enough to rid themselves of the spawn of Victoria.

It was the attitudes and repressiveness of the Victorian and Hapsburg era that tried so hard to contain the surging demands for change in Europe. The dichotomy can be traced to the rise of Bolshevism and fascism.  And ultimately, it triggered the horrors of the Second World War.

Nobody is innocent in foolishness.  The constant foisting of the royals on Canadians is an aggressive act.  It is not just done to resist change but to prevent it.  It is a causative factor in driving apart Quebec and the rest of the country.  It is a cause of alienation of youth when we promote such a double standard.  It blocks progress to true nationhood.

The fact of the monarchy continues to make the point that Canada must have a Constitutional Conference.  We must provide ourselves with a modern, democratic government, with political parties that are equally modern and democratic.

Our institutions must have their leadership chosen in a democratic manner.  We can no longer, for example, allow the Supreme Court judges to be chosen by the Prime Minister without democratic confirmation by Parliament.

The Senate of Canada had proved itself an intestinal blockage in the body of Parliament long before Mr. Harper turned it into a farce.

We have the opportunity to learn from the governing errors of the Americans.  We have an opportunity to do better.

It is time for Canadians to ‘Rise Up’ as Michael Ignatieff said.  Not just against the myopic mismanagement of the Conservatives and their vicious cabal of a government, but against the entire structure and idiocy of how we are governed.

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

Jack Layton, you are being had, man,

When did you become a pollster fan?

You want to believe, if you really can,

It’s an election scam you gullible man.

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How random is my sample?

by Peter Lowry

In many years of doing election polling and as a frequent client of research firms, one learns to be a bit sceptical.  In fact, today, you have every reason to be downright suspicious.  It appears that people are using selected poll results to try to stampede voters.

The voters have no reason to believe these pollsters who are trumpeting their polls.  There is absolutely no way those polls can be accurate.  Think about how you react to someone on the telephone asking you how you are going to vote.  Do you graciously tell the caller everything they want to know?  Are you kidding?

The problem today is that there is no way to get a truly random sample of Canadian voters.  And if you could achieve that, it would still have to be a large enough sample to allow for breakouts of regional influences.  The Bloc Quebecois in Quebec skew the figures there.  If you include that 10 per cent of the vote with the rest of the country, it is not relevant.  When you consider it can be 40 per cent of Quebec’s vote, you see why it can translate into more than 40 seats in the House of Commons.  In the same way, the disproportionate Reform/Tory vote in the Prairies skews the national figures.

As the old chestnut goes, figures do not lie but liars can figure.  To understand a poll, start with the bias of the person reporting it.  Mind you, the person does not have to lie.  All they have to do is be selective about the figures they give you.

With one-third of the House of Commons seats in the Province of Ontario, when have you heard in this election about polling in Ontario?  That is because it is the toughest area in the country to predict.  It is also the toughest area in which to get a statistically viable sample of voters.  The pollsters do not want to expose themselves.

The current flurry of polls showing the NDP strengthened, are more a phenomenon of the news media than any real hope for an NDP breakthrough.  This is not 1990 in Ontario.  You have to be smoking some fairly strong stuff to imagine Jack Layton as Prime Minister.  Jack is a small potatoes municipal politician who has not grown in his current role.  Most of that supposed growth in NDP support is in Quebec where tired PQ voters are searching for some answers.

But what the pollsters fail to explain is that about 30 per cent of the potential voters are unlikely to go to the polls.  Nobody can be sure who they are.

We used to.  Back in our early days of political polling, we used to know how the voter would vote before asking them the specific question.  It was done with qualifying questions.  Their actual voting intent helped with the equation used to determine their probability of going out to vote.  We used to do some amazingly accurate surveys.

The poll that interests us was where we lined up yesterday at the advance poll in our electoral district.  There never used to be advance poll line-ups like that.  It bodes well.  There is going to be a good turnout of voters in this election.  That is bad news for Mr. Harper.  He wants sleeping voters, not voters eager to go to the polls.  He wants a vote like 2008 when large numbers of Liberal votes did not make it to the polls.  They have much more to vote for this time.

The most accurate election surveys are traditionally what are called exit polls.  They are a quick survey done as voters are leaving the polling station.  They are more likely to tell you the truth then.

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

The people at Ipsos Reid have taken a poll,

Find out our voting intentions is their goal,

And how Catholics will vote, bless our soul!

And what breakfast cereals are in our bowl?

Ipsos Reid’s jokers will soon be on the dole.

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Babel blog bids bye-bye to Brown.

by Peter Lowry

The headline could be wishful thinking but Brown really needs to go.  He has been the Member of Parliament here in Babel for five years.  He is, beyond a doubt, one of the sorriest Members of Parliament we have ever seen.  And we have known some really bad ones during almost 50 years of activity on the political scene.

We have seen the vindictive, the incompetent, the shrill, the self serving, the stupid, the egotistical, the dishonest and the overly partisan.  They can be of any party.  Nobody’s perfect.  A friend once gave a speech defending the ignorant people who are elected to Parliament.  He insisted that ignorant Canadians deserve representation in the House along with the intelligent.

But there is no question that the average I.Q. in the House of Commons could improve when Brown is gone.  And despite the humour of what our friend espoused, the voters of Babel do not deserve Brown.  Nobody deserves that.

In clinical terms, Brown might be a case of arrested development.  All a layman can do is note the symptoms and hope he gets professional help.

At 32, he certainly does not act his age.  Maybe one of the reasons that he comes across as so juvenile is that he has never held a job.  He lacks life experience.  Women in his age group do not appear to like him.  Men his age often seem uncomfortable with him.

One of the better aspects of Brown’s door-knocking during the election campaign is that more voters are meeting him.  It does not improve his vote.

His campaign is very shallow.  In a four-page letter he had ready to mail to Babel voters at the beginning of the campaign, it was amazing how little he had to say about his time in the House of Commons or on House committees.  He seems to have never had an idea, a suggestion or a strong belief other than to be at his party’s beck and call.  He certainly does not represent his electoral district.

As would any callow youth, he tends to fabricate his stories for the voters.  As he is a heavy advertiser and water boy for the local media, they are hardly critical of his fabrications.  Their preferences are all too obvious.

As a member of the House of Commons Heritage Committee, that is responsible for the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, we watched him appear before the Commission earlier this year.  He gave them a silly story about his grandmother watching him on city council and he lauded CTV’s /A Channel for providing the coverage of city council for the people of Babel.

The only problem with his story—as we pointed out to the Commission after he left—any Babel resident knows that it is the Rogers Cable channel that has always provided regular coverage of city hall.

What is worse, Brown thinks he is still on city council.  That is another story.

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

Bob Rae got up at 5 to have breakfast in Babel,

He gave us a talk here, he was more than able.

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Time to make election forecasts.

by Peter Lowry

Here comes the promised forecast.  It is more difficult than expected.  We are guessing that the Harper Conservatives will keep the minoritymobile running on empty for at least another two years.

But we expect the results of this campaign will cost Mr. Harper his job.  In two years, we are likely to have new leaders of all four major parties.  The Conservative and Liberal parties will change for the obvious reasons while Layton could be out because of his health and Gilles Duceppe because he has run his course. Canadian politics will be a very different ballgame at that time.

The key in this election is Ontario.  Without the breakthrough he needs in the Greater Toronto Area, Harper cannot pull it off.  In communicating with people in all parts of the province, we learn that there are not likely to be any dramatic changes.  Sure the Conservatives might win a seat in Brampton but they can just as easily lose the seat they were confident of in Babel (Barrie).  Nothing looks remotely like changing in Eastern Ontario.  The South West seems locked in a death grip.

The only thing fluid in the North is the beer in which the Conservatives will be crying after the election.  Best guess is that the Conservatives will come out of Ontario with a net loss of about four seats.  The Liberals will not be happy to only have some 43 seats in Ontario after the election but that is more than they had when they started.

The major shift of the election could be in Quebec.  Gilles Duceppe is tiring and there is little likelihood that his Bloc can hold more than 42 seats in the next house.  The Liberals could surprise everyone and come back with a total of 20 seats there.  It just means another small loss there for Mr. Harper.

The rest of the country has incremental wins and losses but the outcome will still be minor losses for Harper and minor gains for Michael Ignatieff.  Neither is a winner.  At the end of the game, Harper wins 130 to 135 seats and holds on to the government.  Liberals in the high 80s will not save Michael’s job.   And Jack Layton will not win enough seats to be able to support the Liberals taking over.  It leaves the Bloc in the catbird seat.

The one hope we have in this election is the younger voters.  They are annoyed.  They dislike Stephen Harper and they distrust him.  Ridings in major college areas could have some scares if not some outright upsets.  Combined with the women’s vote in those ridings, change can happen.  More women need to look harder at Mr. Harper and wonder why any woman would vote for as cold a fish as that.

On a more personal note, we feel sorry for Michael Ignatieff.  He disappointed many of us in the debates.  If only more people had seen his ‘Rise Up’ speech, we could have a revolution.  We need it!

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

Ask Harper, the misogynist, to end primogeniture?

He will give the Brits the ‘No-way’ answer for sure.

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Babel: Canada in microcosm.

by Peter Lowry

Just a few metres from where we were seated at the Babel all-candidates’ debate there was a city councillor.  This woman is a Conservative who takes no prisoners.  She has a loud voice and uses it.  There was no mistaking what side she was on.

What she was loudest about was when the Liberal candidate corrected her Conservative candidate and the Liberal supporters were applauding and loudly razzing the Conservative.  You need more incidents such as that to stimulate debate but the candidates went back to being polite Canadians.

But politeness did not win the prize for the greatest gaffe of the evening.  That was left to the chairman who asked a question of the candidates to give their views on accessibility.  He gave them 30 seconds each to answer and said the Liberal candidate was first.  The Liberal threw up his hands.

The question was not only unexpected but colossal in its ignorance.  The chair asked a man who has been in a wheelchair for 25 years to tell them in 30 seconds what barriers he faced.  The Liberal should have asked the questioner if he could describe hell in 30 seconds because that is where he should go.  Readers should be aware that the man never gives in to his disabilities.  He has to overcome barriers everyday and rarely thinks about them.  It has been good that he was recently appointed to the city’s citizen accessibility committee and finds that he can be of help to others.

It is supposedly undemocratic to object to the fringe candidates attending a debate but  rules need to be adopted that keep these people under control.  The Canadian Action Party candidate never really explained what he was running for.  The Libertarian was beyond deciphering but we did clue in that his web site still needed some work.  The problem was the Marxist-Leninist who would continue to take the full five minutes of open debate if you let her.  Nobody had properly briefed the candidates and they sat like stumps waiting for the motor-mouth to finish.

It was a good thing that the Green and NDP candidates wanted to castigate the Conservative because the Liberal was far too polite to go after him as was needed.  The only concern is that if there is any increase in vote for the Green or NDP, those votes will be possible Liberal votes not going where they need to go to beat the Conservative.

In the two weeks that are left, voters of all orange and green stripes need to realize that the only way to stop Harper and his toadies from winning the election is to get behind their local Liberal candidate.

In Babel, we have a situation where a strong finish by the Liberals can take the riding.  The voters are expressing the animosity the Conservative has earned himself through his constant junk mail campaign.  His campaign people have obviously done some polling or they would not be trying so hard to smooth his rough edges.  It gives us hope.

We told the powers that be in Ottawa a few months ago that the Babel Liberal is a likely winner.  We are not running the campaign so that we cannot make a promise.

But then we are not influencing what is happening in Ottawa either.  All we know is that the best debater the Liberal party has had as a leader since Pierre Trudeau was blown off in a debate he should have won in a walk.  Go figure?

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

Comment for today.

by Peter Lowry

To understand elections, ask people an easy question,

Do you know anyone who’s changed voting direction?

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