Babel-on-the-Bay – Page 58 – Babel-on-the-Bay is the personal website of Peter Lowry. It is a vehicle for political commentaries.

“Another Fine Mess!”

June 19, 2022June 18, 2022 by Peter Lowry

I like to think of the most recent election in Ontario as something like an ancient Laurel and Hardy short movie. It seems that having the liberal party leader leading from outside the legislature for two years before the election did not work out too well. Having him drive around Ontario in a delivery van did not encourage much enthusiasm either. And obviously, nobody was checking what he was saying out there to the media.

I, quite frankly, wondered what Steven Del Duca was doing in the run-up to the election. You would think he would have built up some momentum for him to win his own riding. He didn’t.

I thought the most ridiculous promise he made before the election was that, if elected, he would resign as premier if he did not change the way we voted in Ontario. I did not know that a premier could arbitrarily change how we vote. It did not sound very democratic not to check with the voters by referendum.

Of course, he got shafted by the conservatives. Here he thought he would have a full month of campaigning. What he got was 15 days of campaigning, before the advance polls opened. Here the conservatives had been campaigning hard over the previous three months, running advertising, making announcements, promising money for this and that. They were winding down their campaign before Del Duca got moving.

There was a nice story in the newspaper a while ago about liberals Ted Hsu, who won in Kingston and the Islands, and Mary-Margret McMahon, who won in Toronto’s Beaches-East York. They had been campaigning in their ridings for about a year. I had told friends in the Beach area of Toronto that Mary-Margaret was a good bet for a hard-working MPP.

I am not sure how well we will come out of another four years of Doug Ford’s inept management at Queen’s Park. Hopefully we will have a strong new leader for the Ontario liberals who, if not an MPP, will soon find his or her way to win a by-election. The liberals in the legislature might not be the official opposition, at this time, but they will find their voices. They have a party to rebuild.

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The Poison of Poilievre.

June 18, 2022June 17, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It’s a poisoned chalice. It could tear apart the conservative party of Canada. And it would benefit nobody. It would be Pierre Poilievre winning the leadership of the federal conservative party.

And this is not a partisan concern. Canada needs a healthy conservative party. It does not need one built on disrespect for law and order. It does not need one built on endorsing cryptocurrencies over the concerns of the Bank of Canada. It hardly needs the nastiness and lies that Poilievre so regularly brings to our parliament.

His supporters can call it hyperbole if they like but Poilievre has disgraced his party in parliament. The truth of the matter is that good government requires a strong and reasoned opposition. It doesn’t need the catcalls and insults across the floor. Yet that seems to be what Poilievre encourages and wants to lead.

And if he really has more than 300,000 temporary conservatives signed up to support his candidacy, do conservatives who have supported the party over the years really want these people deciding who should lead the party into the next election?

Was it just to show these temporary supporters that he is willing to pass a law against mandatory vaccination that he recently presented a bill to parliament to that effect? I seriously doubt that such a law would be approved by many of Canada’s conservatives. To deny the success of mass vaccinations—that have virtually eliminated some of the most serious children’s diseases in this country—would be ludicrous. If that private member’s bill comes up for a vote in this current parliament, it is unlikely many conservative MPs would support it.

While Poilievre might represent Carleton electoral district just down highway 417 from Ottawa, he was born, raised and educated in Calgary. He reflects the same environment-be-damned attitudes of most Alberta conservatives. He is a global warming denier. He preaches the usual hard-right conservatism of small (uncaring) government and small taxes. His rigid right-wing approach to economics is more Ebeneezer Scrooge than Milton Friedman.

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On Uniting the Left.

June 17, 2022June 16, 2022 by Peter Lowry

Do you hear it? It is the useless plaint of those who would unite the left-leaning parties to fight the rogues of the right. It is a bit more strident when you play with figures and reveal that only 18 per cent of Ontario voters actually voted in favour of the conservative majority in the Ontario legislature. But it would not help if you could get those left-leaning parties together.

I think it has something to do with dynamics, or physics, or chemistry of the two parties, or maybe just common sense. The objective of the NDP, since being founded as the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in the 1930s, has been to replace the liberals in the hearts and minds of the voters. The liberals have always been the enemy in the ridings. Despite this aggressiveness, they have been known to cooperate in legislatures and in parliament and have made support deals there when they can.

With both liberals and NDP fighting over the same turf in Canada’s cities, it has been noted that NDP voters often tend to switch to the conservatives when they cannot vote for the NDP candidate. And so do many liberals. In fact, if the liberals and NDP ever did connect and become a single liberal democratic party, there would be a serious bleed of so-called blue liberals (the ones who delude themselves that they can be financially conservative) out of the back of the liberal’s big tent. The conservatives would benefit.

It is hard to judge the differences between the liberals and NDP at election time. That is when the new democrats take everything out of the fridge and spread it like a picnic feast for the voters. It is always too much and it hurts the party’s credibility. All the major parties join in the game of offering the voters their own money for their vote.

But it all, in the end, comes down to leadership. While the Liberals in Saskatchewan can merge with the conservatives there, and disappear, and the liberals in British Columbia are believed to be conservatives, the only real merger has to be at the federal level. That is not in the cards under the current liberal leader. The next federal leader of the liberal party will have a serious challenge in democratizing and rebuilding the abused and dispirited grass roots of the party.

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Trumping North.

June 16, 2022June 15, 2022 by Peter Lowry

We have obviously been underestimating Carleton MP Pierre Poilievre. He has paid attention to the style and successes of former U.S. President Donald Trump. Along with many other political observers, we failed to see the ability of Trump to utilize the ‘deplorables’ as Hilary Clinton described them. Clinton was criticized for calling them deplorable but Trump won the U.S. presidency in 2016 because of them.

Poilievre is the first mainstream politician to recognize we have the same angry, dissident dogs of discontent here in Canada. They are not just Trump’s bikers and right-wing crazies. It took the truck convoy to Ottawa and the border barricades earlier this year for Pierre Poilievre to realize their counterparts in Canada could be used. He welcomed them to Ottawa with open arms. He let them know that he was their leader.

It was the marriage that Poilievre needed and they needed. He needed hard core numbers. He might not swamp the membership of the federal conservative party with these people, but he will be in a damn strong position because of them in September.

And they needed him. They needed a leader who knows how parliament works. They needed direction for their anger. They might not all buy what he says to them but enough could stay long enough to vote for and give him the leadership of the federal conservative party.

But they will hardly play nice with the rank and file of conservatism across Canada. They are anathema to conservatism. They don’t trust any elites. They are jealous of the rich and look down on the poor. Nor do they like people who are different. They disagree with immigration. They distrust people of colour. And do not try to take away their guns. Their rallying cry is “Freedom” and don’t ask them to define it. They wave the Canadian flag but do not respect it. They will support Pierre Poilievre but do not understand him.

But it is mutual. Poilievre has grasped the nettle. He has been on a quest and has found a key. He wants to rule this country that is impossible to rule. It is country that requires endless negotiation. Pierre Poilievre will fail to negotiate, to navigate the waters or to take Canada into a dystopian Poilievre future.

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The Problems of Polls.

June 15, 2022June 14, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It is amazing how easy we could solve all our problems if we just skipped down the street hand-in-hand with the Toronto Star. If the Star’s editors don’t have all the answers, they can buy opinions from a myriad of writers with the appropriate opinion.

The other day, the Star published an opinion from a gentleman who ran for the NDP a few elections back. It seemed the gentleman thinks that our addiction to polls was to blame for the poor turnout for our recent provincial election. He even had a few thousand heavy words in support of the opinion that publishing the polls was the reason for the problem.

If I had my druthers over the years of working with polls, I would have stayed with the opinion that polls should never be published. The only problem is that I also believe in disclosure and if media outlets want to pay for polls, they should report them accurately to their readers, listeners and viewers.

What I really object to is the aggregators who assemble random published polls, take the liberty of adjusting them for bias and then republishing them. It seems to me that they are really hardening the opinions in them as though they constitute a trend line—which they are not.

Of course, the question as to whether polls are self-fulfilling always comes up. In the recent Ontario election, there was an obvious stagnation in the reported polls that would be reflected by voters. We have been seeing a trend to lower voter turnout in Canadian elections for the last 50 years. The media is just as responsible for that ‘what’s the use’ attitude as are the politicians. The political parties can forecast it in the malaise they find among their traditional volunteer base at the riding level.

We have knowingly destroyed the democracy in the parties in this country and our ultimate reward is the lethargy of the voters. When you take away the rights of the people at the party’s grass roots to choose their candidates, why should they want to work to elect the appointed candidates? When the benefactors, with the money, call the shots in politics, they also expect to be the beneficiaries. And if you tell the truth about our political parties, they treat you as toxic.

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Patrick Provokes Pierre.

June 14, 2022June 13, 2022 by Peter Lowry

All is not too friendly in the federal Conservative camp these days. Patrick Brown is bad-mouthing Pierre Poilievre. And this is not friendly banter between two gentlemen who both served their party in Stephen Harper’s conservative government.

In fact, if the conservatives manage to arrange another leadership debate, they might have to keep those two from getting physical about it. Brown has already said that if Poilievre wins the leadership, Brown will not return to parliament in the next election. Mind you, Poilievre might not sign his acceptance of Brown as a conservative candidate, in any event.

Despite both being career politicians and knowing little of real life, the two men have never been that friendly, Brown must have been very surprised when Poilievre claimed to have beaten him at Brown’s specialty of signing up temporary conservatives. With Poilievre’s team claiming more than 300,000 new sign-ups to Brown’s 150,000, Poilievre could have a chance at a first-round win.

There is no way of knowing where the candidates really stand until they can see what electoral districts the new sign-ups are from. There is also the opportunity to challenge sign-ups that might not have paid their own membership or are known members of another political party. And postal codes should not be for a cemetery.

Patrick Brown has stated flat out that he won’t run for the federal conservatives if Poilievre is leader of the party. He made it clear though that he would be on board if Jean Charest or Leslyn Lewis were leader. Since it highly unlikely that Lewis could win, that shout-out to her was in aid of getting second vote consideration from her social conservative supporters.

If Poilievre does not win on the first complex ballot count, it will quickly come down to second vote considerations. Even if Poilievre leads but does not get a majority in the first three counts, it is hard to say where he would get any second vote support.

As it stands today, the Brown-Charest alliance is the only possible combination that might beat Poilievre. Brown is probably right that Poilievre would never be the darling of the Greater Toronto Area. Nor would Brown, despite his being popular with the South Asian diaspora community in Brampton.

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“What Fools These Mortals Be!”

June 13, 2022June 12, 2022 by Peter Lowry

The hue and cry might now be more complete. The Toronto Star has discovered that only about 18 per cent of our Ontario electorate voted for the Ford government’s majority. And would not Shakespeare’s Puck agree? We did it to ourselves.

Not voting is also a political decision, of sorts. Does it really need a proposition on the ballot for “none of the above”?

And despite the clear proof that the majority of the electors said “a pox on all your houses,” the Toronto Star tells us we merely err in how we select our politicians. They blame first-past-the-post voting for the low turnout. And, just how, first-past-the-post voting is to blame for this low turn-out is never really explained.

The Toronto Star wants proportional representation. The greens and NDP have wanted it for years. Some liberals might agree. Let’s hear it, yay, yay for proportional.

Then it is settled. We will henceforth get people to pick a party instead of a candidate. Party leaders have been choosing candidates for some time anyway. So, why not?

But just a minute. If only 43.5 per cent of Ontario voters went to the readily available polling places in 2022, why would more go, just to vote for a party, in 2026? How would we be solving the problem?

Maybe we should be proud of the 2022 Ontario election. Once again, we have proved that any doofus can be premier of Ontario.

And we do not need the insult from the Toronto Star that discussions about changes in how we vote being dominated by political hobbyists. First of all, it is not true. The last full-blown discussion of voting systems was under the quite incompetent management of Justin Trudeau’s government in 2016. Those committee hearings were dominated by political scientists with rare rays of enlightenment to contribute.

Before that, in Ontario, we had a 2007 referendum on a proposal made by lottery winners that was soundly rejected by the voters. British Columbia tried twice to get a rather confused proposal through its voters and it failed both times.

I could also draw the Star’s attention to the ridiculous proposal of liberal leader Steven Del Duca that he would change the way Ontario votes after the recent election. Luckily, he is not in a position to do that.

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In the Mix of Metaphors.

June 12, 2022June 11, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It started out with a title drawn from the Uncle Remus tale of the Tar-Baby from the late 1800s. I had not got past the title and the wife was accusing me of a racial slur. It’s not,” I replied. “The tale is a metaphor for entrapment by what you are fighting.”

And this is my stock in trade. I love the English language and I often come at my readers with metaphors that, hopefully, help in the understanding of a point of view. I do not ask you to always agree with me. I have fascinating correspondence with those who threaten to never read my diatribes again. They come back.

But back to the Tar-Baby. I have now forgotten what I was going to write about. It was something political of course. So instead, I will refer to the situation in Ukraine. Foolish, mean and autocratic dictator Vladimir Putin of Russia is displaying the metaphor in the Ukraine. The harder he pushes his army in the Ukraine, the less progress he is seeing. He is fighting with a Tar-Baby.

What frustrates Putin is that he is fighting with Ukraine as a proxy for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He dares not fight NATO itself as that would lead to a self-destructive nuclear holocaust. In effect, he is actually strengthening NATO. NATO’s commitment to supporting Ukraine grows stronger every day. New countries such as Finland and Sweden are getting in line to join NATO. Those artillery shells landing among Soviet forces are courtesy of NATO.

As much as the Russian leader might complain that his generals are incompetent and his soldiers unmotivated, he is looking for a way out and there really is no redemption for him. He started the war—thinking it might mean a few weeks of cleaning up. Here it is months later and he has killed thousands of civilians and soldiers, earned the country’s long-term enmity and only blocked its grain shipments and is having a see-saw battle in the eastern region of Donetsk.

You would expect by now that there is intense pressure on Putin within Russia to settle for keeping the Donetsk and bring what is left of his army home. The only problem is that Ukraine is going to want billions in reparations. When you mess with a Tar-Baby you are marked for years to come.

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You Jest Sir!

June 11, 2022June 10, 2022 by Peter Lowry

A long-time NDP apparatchik, Robin Sears, writes his opinion in the Toronto Star. And no, I am not jealous. I had my fill of writing for Toronto papers years ago. It is more fun questioning the wisdom of those who do it today.

And, it is certainly questionable when Mr. Sears tells us how premier Doug Ford can build a legacy similar to that of the late Bill Davis. Surely, he is trying to be funny!

Sears seems to believe that Ford has matured during his first four years in office. I will go along that he got fatter and older—maturing is a different subject.

It is as though Sears had never seen a salesman lay on the B.S. before. When I heard Ford saying how much he admired and trusted liberal finance minister Chrystia Freeland, it almost cost me my lunch. Luckily, I had heard that song before and took it for what it was worth—nothing. Hell, I’m a liberal and I am still not sure she knows what she is doing in that portfolio.

And what is this bunkum about a friendship with prime minister Trudeau? Queen’s Park gets a lot of funds from the Ottawa government. Doug Ford would kiss Trudeau’s bare behind on the front steps of Queen’s Park if it would get Ontario more money. The delayed negotiations with the Trudeau liberals over child care was arranged by someone much smarter than Ford. That was carefully staged and planned to gain maximum impact on the provincial election.

I only wish I could ask Doug Ford to parse the comment Sears made about “Ford’s new understanding of the value of greater nuance in perspective—and the limits of a world of only predictable partisan certitude—was double edged.”

I could just see Ford blurting out “What the hell does that mean?”

But what Sears appeared to be attempting in that syntactic labyrinth was to apologize for many of Ford’s stupider decisions related to the pandemic. The premier was just as confused coming out of the worst of the pandemic, as he was going in.

And anyone who thinks Christine Elliott and Rod Phillips were the shining lights of Ford’s last cabinet, hasn’t looked at the current conditions of Ontario healthcare and long-term care. Those ministers had no successes in any portfolio. And, if you see Phillips, ask him how things are in Saint Barthélemy.

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Bitumen Bust.

June 10, 2022June 9, 2022 by Peter Lowry

It seems the Oil Gods have looked down on Alberta’s tar sands bitumen and damned it to further discounting. It would seem that at a time when the world needs cheaper oil, Alberta just cannot catch a break.

And, for once, we cannot blame the problem on hard-luck, departing premier Jason Kenney. He brought Alberta bad luck. And that cloud continues over his head.

And if the province did not need those farm silos for increased grain production, because of the conflict in Ukraine, they might be converting silos to hold bitumen.

The American refineries that can handle the highly polluting Alberta product have found lately that they can get lots of easier-to-process ‘heavy oil’ from Mexican and off-shore sources. The Alberta gunk ends up low-man on the totem pole.

And to make a sour outlook bleaker for Alberta, is the news from Washington. It seems President Joe Biden plans to undercut the profiteering by the American oil companies. In the peak holiday time of this July, he is releasing 40 million barrels of reserve crude oil into the American market. This reserve is intended for emergencies and I guess a cost of over US$4 per U.S. gallon of regular gasoline, across the United States, would be considered an emergency.

With that much crude flooding the American market, Alberta would have to start giving away bitumen to stay in full production. With only limited capacity for bitumen in the present Trans Mountain pipeline, only a trickle of bitumen can be shipped to the Far East markets or south to California.

To add insult to the costs of the Trans Mountain, it has now been confirmed that total costs for the planned dual pipeline now exceed $21 billion. With the federal government unable to remain credible in funding the project, the pipeline managers are out beating the bushes for private capital to continue the expansion.

The only problem is that the Canadian taxpayers will no longer be first in line to recover the billions already wasted on this project. It would probably take another fifty years to be paid back.

But with another fifty years of bitumen processing and pollution, there would not likely be much of our population left to spend the profits.

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