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

Free + Dumb.

by Peter Lowry

You want freedom, you’ve got freedom. It is just hardly necessary to be free and dumb at the same time. Canadians will have to stop feeling so superior to those Donald Trump supporters in the U.S. Obviously Canadians can be just as ignorant.

It is hard to accept this so-called ‘freedom’ talk. It is difficult to imagine people swallowing MP Pierre Poilievre’s signature line these days, that he is going to make Canada the freest country in the world. That guy needs to get out more.

Poilievre should take some lessons from the Dutch and the Scandinavian countries. Yes, they are probably freer in some ways than Canada. It might be because those countries have had longer to think about it. They are people who also take their responsibilities more seriously. You cannot have freedom without responsibility.

For someone to say you cannot wear a religious symbol is bigotry from a closed mind. For someone to say you cannot have an abortion is a mind that is closed to reality. And if you think you are taxed too much, you need to study the economies of those freer countries.

Canada is a country of great possibilities. It is a work in progress. It needs to accept that it is multilingual for all, not just some. It needs to accept its secular nature. It needs to relegate anachronisms such as the crown to history. Our politicians need to run the country on behalf of all of us—not just for businesses or the rich. Prostitution should not be run by criminals. Liquor and gambling should not be major tax contributors. Cannabis should not be so controlled that the criminals still own the market.

You go to your church and I might go to mine but we can walk to vote together.

Freedom is choices. Freedom is knowledge. Freedom is education. Freedom is love. Freedom is when everyone is adequately fed and housed. Mr. Poilievre and other politicians should use the word more judiciously.

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Copyright waived by Peter Lowry

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Poilievre’s Polarization.

by Peter Lowry

It is probably wrong to use big words when writing about MP Pierre Poilievre. The type of people who are buying into Poilievre’s campaign for the leadership of the conservative party might not understand big words.

Like former president Donald Trump in the United States, Poilievre is a man who also has trouble with the truth. If a car ran over his cat, he would probably claim it was Justin Trudeau driving the car. Like Trump’s ambition to be president again, it is Poilievre’s ambition to be prime minister of Canada. Nothing less will do.

It is for this reason that he will sign up any extremist crackpot he can find to support him in this year’s conservative leadership. And it is sad to report that he is finding some. Those yahoos who cluttered the Ottawa streets earlier this year, think Poilievre is the cat’s meow. He supported them and they are supporting him.

Poilievre is a person who pushes polarization. He divides people. He plays to people who want to hate instead of care about people. He panders to those who hate people who are not like them.

He befriends those who distrust the Bank of Canada to protect our dollar. He thinks cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are the answer. It is supposed that nobody controls cryptocurrencies. Nobody probably cares enough. If you believe in Bitcoin, you probably also believe in Santa Claus.

Poilievre rails against the government’s mishandling of housing costs across the country. Instead of proposing simple solutions such as capping tax-free housing profits to the cost of living or taxing housing profits for homes not occupied by the owner, he just blames others and ignores the solutions needed.

What has been really annoying about his campaign for the leadership is his constant desire to ignore the truth. This guy is definitely environmentally challenged. He thinks Alberta bitumen is the cleanest energy of all.

Watching those western yahoos in Calgary and Edmonton who are supporting Poilievre makes you wonder. They might follow him today but will they drink his Kool-Aid?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Weaponizing Information.

by Peter Lowry

There is no more powerful weapon than information. It is used by the good people as well as the bad. It can be used by a Donald Trump to spread crass rumours and misinformation. It can also be used by president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to defend Ukraine from the overpowering might of Putin’s Russia.

And if you are in a war with an overpowering force, you need any and all weapons possible. You can imagine Putin railing at his generals for not finding and silencing Zelenskyy. The constant pleas by the Ukrainian president to the world for arms and aid, broadcast from Kyiv, are having effect.

It little matters whether the Russian flag ship on the Black Sea, Muskova, was just damaged or sunk by Ukrainian forces. It gave the Ukraine a victory that they sorely needed.

Call it propaganda, if you wish, but Zelenskyy is winning the information war. His biggest help in this is president Joe Biden of the United States. There is no reason for the U.S. to remain silent about their information gathering capability. Anything that embarrasses the Monster of Moscow is grist for the mill. Whether the information is from spy satellites or human spies that are gathering the information is immaterial. The Americans are delighted to help embarrass Putin.

But no matter the outcome of this conflict, Putin is very limited as to where he can travel afterwards. There are charges of war crimes against him. There are simply too many correspondents feeding information to the world about what they are seeing and recording in Ukraine.

The propaganda from the Kremlin is made much less effective considering the weak attempt his regime is making in trying to keep the Russian people on side. There are just too many losses of Russian soldiers to make a case for the supposed assistance they are providing to the Ukraine. The Russian people are also not entirely convinced that the Ukraine needs that much rescuing.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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It’s Hopeless for Horwath.

by Peter Lowry

It is 13 years now that Andrea Horwath has been leading Ontario’s new democrats. It has been a sad four years of lacklustre leadership that Horwath has provided the official opposition. She only became opposition leader in the Ontario legislature because former premier Kathleen Wynne of the liberals gave up before election day in 2018.

If Andrea Horwath was a real leader, she would never have lost Brampton North MPP Kevin Yarde for the coming election. She needs him in the NDP caucus. She lost him to an ethnic putsch in his electoral district.

And there was nothing new about that. All major parties have suffered from one ethnic group or another ganging up and dictating that it will be one of their own who will represent their riding. If it is not the Italians in one riding, it is the Sikhs in another. And you can hardly complain that the federal government passed an amendment to the election act back in the 1990s that the party leader has to sign off on all candidates for his or her party. (Which only stupid leaders abuse by simply appointing who will represent their party.)

But the entire provincial electoral district of Brampton North should be embarrassed by the loss of Kevin Yarde. He was one of the effective people in the legislature. He was a strong advocate for his riding. The Sikh community, that obviously ganged up on him, should be embarrassed by the foolishness. The Sikh community in Ontario does not lack representation in the legislature.

And it was hardly as though Kevin Yarde just represented the black community. It was unfortunate that Howarth told the black NDP members that they could have their own caucus. Five members who happened to be black made a good number for an interesting lunch but they hardly need their own caucus. The NDP caucus was not so large that their opinions could not be heard. Next thing we will hear is that the NDP has a women’s caucus.

It reminded me of years ago, I decided to drop in on my local riding annual meeting. I had been traveling frequently and was not as active in the association. What struck me when I got there was that we seemed to have a large number of new members. I was moving about saying ‘hello’ to people when I bumped into a young chap whom I knew because my son had invited him to our back yard swimming pool.

I welcomed him to the liberal party and asked him what encouraged him to take an interest in politics. His answer was most upsetting. He smilingly told me that he had been recruited to help it to be what he called “Our turn.”

I just stood there and looked at his dusky brown face and realized that the riding association had been taken over. How was I going to explain to this young man that liberals do not take turns? We pick the best person to represent all of us. We do not pick by skin color or religion or country of birth.

And maybe, I’m just an idealist.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Troubling Thinking.

by Peter Lowry

You should never ignore a political party’s pamphlets. They tell you so much about how they think—or, in some cases, do not think. In this phony war before the real provincial campaign commences in Ontario, the sneakiness of the pamphlets dropped at your door can tell you much.

All of this came to me looking at a conservative pamphlet delivered by Canada Post the other day. Basically, if they can afford to send such tripe by Canada Post, they have entirely too much money. It was one of those gems that was not only specious but reminded me of a wedding. It was something borrowed and something blue.

The pamphlet was headed “New Ontario Tax Credits 2021.” It was nothing new. It listed five Ontario tax credits past during the four years of the Doug Ford conservatives. If our local conservative carpet bagger thought they were important, he was wasting his money on promoting them.

“Tax credits” are just what the words imply. If you spend some money in the previous year, the provincial government will give you a part of that money back this year. That is if you actually spent the money and kept all the receipts and documentation.

But this is how the conservative government thinks. They want to give money to people who can afford to pay out the funds. If you cannot afford it: tough luck. This government isn’t interested in people who cannot afford to pay $500 per week to have their children looked after. It ignores the person who needs skills training and does not have the money. It tells people who don’t have the money that it is not interested in them.

The only exception was the straight-out bribe to vote conservative in giving back the money for your car licence renewal.  Mind you, if you owned two or three vehicles that required licencing, you made out like a bandit.

It is good that the federal government is making good on its promise of lowering daycare costs across Canada. Yet it was the Ontario Tories who dragged out the negotiation with the feds to try to make sure it looked like the province got more—and closer to the election.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Finding Freedom.

by Peter Lowry

If anything could have annoyed us more, it was those damn demonstrators in Ottawa and at border crossings, waving the Canadian flag. These people were not respecting the flag nor the country it represents. It made the wife and I angry to see it.

At the same time, we tried to respect their rights. It is hardly difficult to suggest that they were absolutely wrong in why they objected to being vaccinated. We did not care if they got vaccinated to protect themselves. We wanted them to get vaccinated to protect the rest of us. We wanted them to wear a mask properly to protect the rest of us. Our country’s freedom does not give them the right to spread disease.

Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms starts out by saying that it is reasonable rights that are guaranteed. If we go to war against an armed enemy or an enemy such as a highly contagious disease, we may have to restrict some individual rights. If you want to be friendly with a country in armed conflict with us, you can be locked away from society for the duration of the conflict. Be thankful though. In some countries you could be shot. People who refuse to be vaccinated or to wear a mask can only be shunned or forbidden entry to places that observe a mask or vaccine mandate.

In this durance vile of an ongoing, seemingly endless, pandemic, I hate wearing a mask. They drive me crazy and I wear them anyway. It is like the courtesy of making sure your fly is zipped. As much as you might like the cooling breeze, you are considerate of others.

And that is what freedom really means. We are not alone on our island. We extend the olive branch of freedom to others. We expect the same olive branch in return.

Freedom is certainly not the right to block others from their free movement. It is not the right to have some foolish notion that you can dictate your concept of freedom without recognizing that others share their freedoms with you. All you have to do is respect the rights of others and they will respect yours.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Quebec’s fight on the right.

by Peter Lowry

It looks like Jean Charest has overestimated his conservative party credentials in Quebec. He hardly has the time to sign up CPC members one at a time. He needs to have large blocks of memberships handed to him. Ideally, he needs the 50,000 provincial conservatives of Éric Duhaime—which does not seem likely—to add the federal party to their memberships. Otherwise, he needs Quebec premier François Legault to take his provincial Coalition Avenir Québec members into the federal fold—which is even less likely.

But one thing for sure, there seems to be a plethora of conservative parties in Quebec these days. In addition to Duhaime’s provincial conservatives and Legault’s right-of-centre CAQ, there are Maxime Bernier’s libertarians in the Peoples’ Party and the right of centre Quebec liberals. And the pollsters put the two remaining viable parties, the initially left-of-centre Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire, as drifting in the doldrums.

Talking to people in the Atlantic provinces the other day, I got the impression that Jean Charest was doing better in in the Atlantic than in his home province. I also suspect, Charest will have strong first and second votes in Ontario.

Charest is no darling of the west. If he gets more than a few second or third choice votes west of the Ontario border, he’ll be lucky.

Our myopic media in Canada seem to be driving MP Pierre Poilievre into the lead in the conservative race. Mind you, he would have to be running well ahead of the pack in the first count. I suspect that, as it appears now, if Poilievre can hit 35 per cent or more of the first votes, he could go on to win. Anything less than that and he could fall by the wayside. Poilievre is not an unknown. He is a weasel but some people like weasels. It is just hard to dope out which conservatives would consider him as second choice.

Of course, the real problem is the way conservatives structure their frequent leadership contests. They do not seem to understand the cliché that if you keep doing things the same way, you are never going to like the results.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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The Keening of Kenney.

by Peter Lowry

It seems Alberta’s premier has decided to play out the tragedy of his time in Alberta politics. He was so eager and ready seven years ago when he bought a pick-up, a ten-gallon hat and fat-boy jeans and headed home for Alberta. It was Ottawa’s loss and the Alberta legislature’s gain. It was when many conservatives thought he should have followed Stephen Harper as leader and help rebuild the federal Tories.

But Jason Kenney knew well what he was doing. His path and strategy were carefully considered and planned. He easily took over the dispirited Alberta provincial conservative party. He was eager to accommodate when he united the right. He knew the key was in shutting down the Wildrose party. The distraction that worked for him was the success of the Alberta new democrats. Few made note early enough of Kenney’s rampant misogyny and his take-no-prisoners approach to politics.

But it was classic Kenney delivering his speech to the United Conservative Party faithful last Saturday in Red Deer. Most of the 45 minutes of customary conservative rhetoric was grinding at the inbred fear of a return to the ‘socialist’ new democrats and their leader Rachel Notley. He admitted that he might not be perfect but hopefully the listeners would forgive and forget about the billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on pipelines that could not be built.

He glibly asked for forgiveness while clutching at the one last arrow in his quiver. He knew it was the bitter and those wanting blood who came to Red Deer for the party conclave. He was talking to about 16,000 live bodies and more at home watching his speech streamed to them.

But it will be the party’s 60,000 some members who are invited to vote on his future. He is betting on those stay-at-home voters to keep him employed as leader of the united conservatives and premier of Alberta.

It takes time for those ballots to be delivered to 60,000 voters. You have to give them time to consider it and then Canada Post time to return the ballots. And, since it takes time to carefully count those ballots, the results will not be announced until May 18. And that is plenty of time for Kenney to find a way to cheat his defeat by a really angry party.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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The Fool and His Bitcoin.

by Peter Lowry

You asked “Who will protect your money?” It won’t be the Bitcoin miners. It won’t be MP Pierre Poilievre. In fact, Poilievre is using the Bitcoin confusion to try to add to his votes in the conservative leadership race. He might add some miss-led support to his campaign but in the long-run, the Bitcoin believers are the ones who will lose.

The simple reason to be a skeptic of Poilievre’s Bitcoin BS is that no responsible conservative MP would support Bitcoin over the Bank of Canada. The Bank of Canada controls the Canadian dollar. Nobody other than the collectors control Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

And, critically important, is the simple question, “How does Bitcoin protect anyone from inflation?” The answer that Bitcoin is finite is capricious. Why should this supposed limitation on Bitcoin prevent it from inflationary influences? Inflation can impact Bitcoin in exactly the same way as a Loonie that sits in your dresser drawer. It is as simple as the price of a loaf of bread.

A loaf of bread starts on a potentially inflationary spiral when the farmer procures his seed and operates his cultivator. The cost of the seed is followed by the price of fuel for the cultivator and the other farm equipment. The price of the wheat is determined by the size of the year’s crop, along with world prices, storage costs and shipping costs. Then there are milling costs, bakery equipment, shipping to stores and employee wages. And finally, a loaf of bread appears on the grocery shelf and you wonder why the grocer has to charge so much for one lonely loaf.

It is not the Bank of Canada’s fault that the price of that loaf of bread went up, again. Bitcoin could hardly have any influence. The difference is that the Bank of Canada has oversight on the world economy. It can influence our domestic economy through the manipulation of bank interest rates, and yes, by the judicious borrowing and printing of money.

Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Bank of Canada has worked to assist Canadians in alleviating pressures on our Canadian money. Bitcoin is not included. As noted above, the fool and his Bitcoin are soon parted.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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The Timorous Legacy.

by Peter Lowry

Former premier Kathleen Wynne stood in the Ontario legislature last week for her farewell speech to that house. It was not an inspiring moment but her speech was gracious. And if she is not worried about her legacy, she should be.

Wynne was premier of Canada’s most populous province for five years. She was not only the first woman premier but the first openly gay woman premier. Yet, her rule was timorous. If she felt something was worth doing, she would do it in small increments.

Would you believe that her legacy is beer and wine in the large grocery stores? Watching her government roll out beer in grocery stores was an exercise similar to watching paint dry. On her schedule, it would be 2050 before beer is available in a convenience store.

Compared to Wynne, Doug Ford is on the lunatic fringe of the “let’s do it” types. He let restaurants get into the off-premises sale of beer and wine with little or no fanfare. He is an excellent example of the business chief executive officer who is hired for the ability to make decisions. You expect this person to be wrong at least 50 per cent of the time.

Wynne spoke in measured terms while Ford is brash. Wynne shared credit with others in her government while Ford hogs much of the publicity.

Wynne wanted a $15 minimum wage four years ago. Ford canceled it and reinstated it this year.

Wynne wanted, once again, to try a guaranteed annual income, Ford canceled the trial.

Where Wynne would vacillate, Ford plows straight ahead.

Ford is a blowhard where Wynne is a bit of a prune.

Wynne kept Ontario Lottery and Gaming under constraint while Doug Ford is blowing the lid off their operations.

Wynne had some heart and treated the poor and impoverished with concern. Ford takes money away from the desperate and hopes to find more.

Ford says how hard the nurses have worked through the pandemic and puts the screws on their salaries. Wynne spoke the teachers’ language and got their cooperation.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]