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

A ‘No Future’ Budget.

by Peter Lowry

Whatever happened to ‘Building Back Better?’ Conservative Pierre Poilievre could have written that budget speech from finance minister Cynthia Freeland. Just who the hell she was out to impress, nobody seems to know. This was not a budget in which a liberal could take any pride.

Canada can have a prosperous future but it takes leadership and determination to take us there. It requires the attitudes and the expenditures that create the future that Canadians want for their country. It has to start now on the infrastructure. It has to have leadership from someone who can see that future.

Dental care and prescription drugs should have been a part of Medicare years ago. It was a logical progression that was delayed by the lack of effective leadership. Singh and his colleagues are living in the past.

A Toronto Star writer suggested that Freeland was pacifying what she calls ‘blue liberals.’ She is likely referring to the ones who call themselves social liberals and economic conservatives. They have always been an embarrassment to the liberal party. The worst is former prime minister Paul Martin. Paul was the one who advised liberals to campaign from the left and rule from the right.

It was Paul who opened the door to the Harper conservatives a couple decades back. The voters looked at the choice between a conservative liberal and a real conservative and opted for the real thing. The first Paul Martin who died in 1992 was a progressive. His son, Paul, was a regressive.

Back to the budget, I do agree that something has to be done about the high price of homes in Canada. In our climate, shelter cannot be a luxury item. We have to have adequate, safe, warm shelter for all. The proposals in the Freeland budget for home building seem inadequate at best and foolish at the worst. The problem is an industry that is milking the inflation. It needs to be forced to build what people need.   

It is far too early to worry about the pandemic deficit. I know nobody wants to admit that the pandemic is still with us but you can hardly wish it away. The finance department has both carrots and sticks at its disposal. Freeland has to learn how to use them.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

Profiteering in Food.

by Peter Lowry

That young guy who runs Canada’s Weston Empire appears to be getting ahead of the game. He can enthusiastically raise prices in Loblaws, Zehrs, No Frills, Provigo, Superstore or Shoppers Drug Mart and the other chains will follow. The only question is why is he raising them more than necessary? It is when he contributes to the rising cost of living in Canada that the word ‘profit’ becomes ‘profiteering.’

Does the Weston heir think that nobody will notice? There are many people across Canada who know how to compute what something should cost. Grocers might not put their thumb on the meat scale very often but it is easy enough to compute what it costs to bring a product to the grocery shelf.

One of the reasons the wife likes to take me along grocery shopping is that I know meats and can quickly compute if so-called bargains are really a bargain. It comes from my early training in supermarket store management. Yes, I was trained by two different grocery chains in my youth.

Maybe things were a bit simpler then but the basics have changed very little. The highest mark-up in the stores is in the produce department. Controlling waste and keeping product fresh and inviting has changed little over the years.

Meat is a different story. While still a major profit contributor, fewer and fewer butchers are actually on the premise. Precut, prepackaged meats are most often from central cutting and packaging operations. Stores with real butchers are rare but always interesting, if they have time to chat. In store bakeries were rare when I was in the business as are the occasional fish counters today.

But the heavy lifting in the large grocery stores of today is still left to the grocery department with its stocks of canned and bottled goods, paper products and dairy and frozen foods.

What worries me today is the government involvement in developing a code of conduct between the grocers and their suppliers. I think we need to keep the tensions. We need the tensions to eliminate the collusion between suppliers and retailers. We certainly have to have some strong competition to keep the giants of the industry from just getting richer.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Which Ten is that?

by Peter Lowry

Ontario has bought into the federal government’s “Ten Dollars a day” daycare deal. That is what everyone calls it. And most people realize it is not going to happen overnight. What puzzles me though is this payment going to be in 2022- ten dollars or in 2027-ten dollars?

The way inflation is galloping along, it is very hard to say what a Canadian ten-dollar bill will be worth in five years.

It was good to see that finance minister Chystia Freeland knows that we are not going to be able to train a quarter million new daycare workers overnight. And, obviously, there will need to be a lot more daycare centres. These need to be built, staffed and in operation to serve the needs. And feel assured, if we build them, the kids will come.

Maybe the question of value will be solved if Pierre Poilievre wins the lottery being run by the conservatives to choose a new leader. As conservative leader, he seems to want to campaign on making Bitcoin the Canadian currency. We would probably need to keep our phone batteries charged, in that event. I checked and saw that a bitcoin was being quoted at over C$54,000. You would never want to make a decimal point error in Mr. Poilievre’s world.

What worries me though is that there are obviously going to be many daycare spaces in different daycares. They are not all going to be cookie-cutter daycares. Will not some of these daycares be more desirable than others? Will there not be extras? Is there a surcharge for chocolate milk instead of two-percent?  Is having junior in this daycare over that daycare going to be more prestigious? Will there be some where the drop-off and pick-up is more convenient? You never really know what junior or his parents will prefer.

I do not want to be a skeptic but there will be many cookie-cutter daycares and there will also be the innovators. And that is life. And if you don’t think lots of operators will find ways to get around the limit of ten bucks, you do not know human nature.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Dumbing Down with Doug.

by Peter Lowry

If there is one thing Ontario voters can agree on is that Ontario premier Doug Ford is not the brightest star in the sky over Queen’s Park. When he thinks he has an idea that might appeal to voters, he will ride the idea into the ground.

Take his recent sticker idea. He knows that the actual sticker that shows you have paid for your vehicle license this year is worth a fraction of a cent.  He is going to give back the money you paid. It should come with a note reminding you to vote conservative in the coming election.

All it did was remind people of the stickers he had made to add confusion on the province’s gas pumps. It was finally a judge who got rid of that nonsense.

But how about his latest promise. If you vote conservative on June 2, he will roll back five cents of the Ontario gasoline tax—just for the rest of the year. You have got to figure that this guy doesn’t often get to fill up his limousine.

How did you like his preening for the television cameras at General Motors the other day? Here is the guy who killed the provincial grants for people buying electric cars four years ago taking the credit for General Motors being bribed to built pickups in Oshawa, Ontario and—eventually—some electric vehicles in Ingersoll, Ontario. What do you want to bet that the deal was engineered by the federal people in Ottawa?

Doug thinks he should get the credit. What he fails to understand is that with accepting the credit for something, you also have to take responsibility for the down sides. It is like the current situation with COVID-19. If the conservatives want the credit for declaring that the pandemic is over in Ontario, then we should not be hearing about more people in hospital and in the ICUs and dying. Which is what we are hearing.

On the positive side, it time for the Ontario government to proceed with the Bradford Bypass. There is no reason though to proceed with Highway 413. It is not needed by anyone other than Doug Ford’s developer friends.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

What the Weasel Wants.

by Peter Lowry

It might seem disorganized to some politicos but the meanness of MP Pierre Poilievre’s campaign for the conservative leadership is coming into focus. He is befriending the conservative party’s extremists.

Poilievre is appealing to the hardened right wing of conservatism. Yet, he is not really a doctrinaire conservative. He is like a weasel appealing selectively to groups such as the Bitcoin proponents, the Freedom Convoy and the libertarians still within the conservative party, as well as the callow youth in a hurry and Canadian admirers of America’s Donald Trump.

But within this vale of lost souls, he promotes his eventual failure.

He is going against conservative tradition in attacking the Bank of Canada. For someone who can so maliciously malign the financial planning of other parties, he is promoting the fiction of cryptocurrency. Nobody wants others to control the currency—until you need someone to protect your savings.

The weasel is the pal of the people who came to party on Ottawa streets through February of this year. Maybe he would like to help pay the bill for cleaning up their mess.  

But in his successes, he is building his failure. What we are seeing in this contest is three or four of the leaders in the race dividing up maybe 70 per cent of the party to their cause. You have to look at their second or third choice selection before you can figure out who can win the brass ring. This is the dangerous consequence of preferential voting. What you want to know at this stage is who would be so foolish as to make Poilievre their second, third or even fourth choice?

Not Jean Charest’s supporters. His base is Quebec. He can expect little of the west. He might honour the deal with Patrick Brown who would be strong in Ontario. My guess would be that Brown could make it to the at least the fourth count of the ballots. It makes sense that his voters in Ontario would have Charest as their second choice. If I were a betting person, I would be inclined to make a trifecta bet on Charest in first place, Poilievre in second and Brown in third.

But the way this vote is manipulated with the preferential vote and all electoral districts being treated as equal, it’s anyone’s guess.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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A Dying Breed.

by Peter Lowry

It was a picture of Canada’s first nations’ representatives with the Bishop of Rome that got me thinking. Where are the anachronisms in this picture? And who are the people of faith?

It was the central figure in the white smock that got me thinking. He is the head of a dying religion. The opulent churches around the world have fewer parishioners these days and fewer funds to support the hierarchy in Rome. The funds they probably have set aside for a rainy day might be coming in to play. Even an audience chamber such as where the photograph was taken is expensive to keep in good repair.

But the Pope and his handlers made good use of the occasion. They welcomed the first nations, Metis and others who share ancestors that came to North America thousands of years ago. They came to Rome in the headdresses and fashions of their peoples. I guess Phil Fontaine, who normally wears a fedora, came in his plains Indian war bonnet—earned, I expect, for his hard work as elected chief of the assembly of first nations. He had been to Rome before on this quest. He saw Pope Benedict in 2009. Benedict brushed off the delegation.

But did they come to Rome to air their grievances or to make peace with their church? The Pope’s apology was no redress for the church’s failure to protect the children put in its care. If the church’s original intent was to proselytize, it did a poor job of it.

Canada has paid the price many times over for the failure of the residential schools. It is easy to understand the lack of trust for the society that takes your children and fails to return them all to you. Unmarked graves do not paint a picture of a responsible guardianship.

What I fail to understand is the competitive attitude of the various communities in inviting the Pope to visit some of our first nations. Why? Is he really interested in the oral histories he will hear? It seems to me that it would make more sense to ban any unmarried Catholic priest from coming onto first nations lands.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Time to Try the Trump Card?

by Peter Lowry

Are we so desperate to help Ukraine that we have to ask Donald Trump for help? It seems obvious that the Russian generals have been lying to Vladimir Putin. The only person Putin still trusts is probably his friend Trump. He is the friend of despots around the world.

If Putin figures it out for himself, he is just going to strike out wildly. There is no telling what he might do. The Ukrainians were supposed to welcome the Russian soldiers with flowers for helping to save their country from the dangers of democracy. He might command his army to invade Moldova or even start nuking the Ukrainians. That will teach them to shoot his soldiers. Not that Putin would give much of a damn about the lost soldiers. There are lots more Russians that can be conscripted.

Poor Putin thought his army could conquer Ukraine in about a week. A month later, he is starting to wonder. The difference is that the Ukrainians are fighting to keep their country. The Russian conscripts who do not know why they are invading Ukraine are just so much cannon fodder. And Russian tanks were supposed to be invincible. Russian tanks and trucks run on fuel and as the supply lines lengthen, the lines become easier to cut.

Anyway, with Donald Trump being declared as a special ambassador, extraordinary and plenipotentiary, of course, we can maybe resolve matters. The simplest way is to be sure Trump is in the Kremlin presenting his ambassadorial credentials to Putin—and then nuke the Kremlin.

It is not that we are particularly blood thirsty today but it is not often that you have an opportunity to rid the world of two of its least desirable citizens.

And it would obviously be an excellent present for the Russian people. They hardly deserve the economic sanctions against Putin and his oligarchs but they are the ones suffering. After all, if you cannot buy a Big Mac or a Tim’s coffee in Moscow, what is this world coming to?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Emissions and Other Lies.

by Peter Lowry

There is a huge hole in the emissions target released by the Trudeau government the other day. Canada cannot continue to ship tar sands bitumen off shore and not take responsibility for added emissions of greenhouse gasses to convert it to ersatz crude oil and then the ultimate emissions of the refined carbon-based products. Once again, these geniuses promise paths to emissions reductions in ten or 20 years.

The Trudeau government needs to admit that the billions being spent on doubling the Trans Mountain pipeline are all in aid of making the lie of this fiction. It makes prime minister Justin Trudeau and his environment minister Steven Guilbeault look like foolish liars. And Alberta’s greed seems shared with the rest of the country.

And, one thing for sure, Steven Guilbeault has failed to live up to his advance billing. Is he really supposed to be some kind of environmentalist?

Canada has done nothing to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. You cannot achieve anything by continuing to push the targets further out. That is leaving the problems to someone else. And Canada’s carbon tax has been just another way to shift money around in the economy.

And there is no point in asking the oil industry. These people have no idea how the targeted reduction in emissions can be achieved. It really is not in their DNA. Carbon storage is the much-touted solution but the industry realizes how limited that solution will be. Carbon capture is creating a few time bombs beneath the surface of our earth.

Centuries from now, those caverns full of carbon could briefly fuel the light in a darkening universe from a long-dead planet.

And our saddest note of all is that these same liars of today have been tasked to help find solutions to the need for oil and natural gas in Europe to replace the Russian sourcing.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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The ‘F’ Word for the F-35.

by Peter Lowry

Here we thought that former prime minister Stephen Harper’s dream of the F-35 procurement had been put to bed. Nobody in Canada needs or wants the American F-35 aircraft. It is a bad idea promoted by the Americans to soothe their egos. It is a ground support aircraft that Canada does not need.

The only country close enough to attack us with F-35s would be the Americans. Since they would have our F-35s outnumbered by about ten to one, it would hardly be a fair fight.

It’s not that I was rooting for the Saab Gripen but there is no question that the Swedish fighter is designed for what Canada really needs. We need a reconnaissance fighter for our Arctic. We need its patrol characteristics.

And why would we want a stealth aircraft that needs air-to-air refueling before it is halfway across the north. The very essence of patrolling is letting people know you are doing it.

If we wanted to buy F-35s for the Ukrainians, I would agree, but we are probably a few years too late. With training and maintenance requirements for the F-35, it is also far too expensive for a country that is watching its cities and economy being destroyed. Mind you, Canada could arm some of our DeHavilland Beavers for Ukrainian ground support needs and that could be a winner.

Think of it. The MiG that attacks a Beaver flying nap-of-the-earth will end up either crashing or watching its rockets wander off looking for a larger target. And I would pity the poor helicopter pilot who thinks he can win a dog-fight with a Beaver.

The good news in all of this is that the U.S. has already had 20 years of the planning and design wasted on Lockheed Martin’s fifth generation fighter. Canada paid for some of that development to ensure that we get a share of the production. The government is now launching negotiations on the price (as yet unknown). Let’s hope those negotiations take another 20 years. By then there might be foreseeable peace and we won’t need the American planes.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Out of the Warm.

by Peter Lowry

There were royals in the Caribbean last month. Future King William of England and his consort Catherine visited Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas as a sort of farewell tour. All three independent countries are considering cutting ties with the English monarchy.

Unlike Canada, that ties its constitution in knots to try to stick with the fiction of the crown, these countries do not like looking like vassals.

The young royals were also roundly criticized in Jamaica for not apologizing for slavery. Why they should apologize was not particularly clear. Slavery ended in the British Empire two centuries ago. In fact, as I read it, the Brits bought off the slave owners in 1833 for the loss of their “property.” If that is true, the Brits should be thanked for their thoughtfulness, not criticized.

Instead of criticizing the young royals for slavery, there might be more justification for complaining about the Brits’ encouragement of piracy in the Caribbean and for the world-wide spread of sexually transmitted diseases by Brit sailors.

But overall, Bill and Kate had a lovely trip. The warmth and sunshine of the Caribbean can hardly be preserved and shipped to the dreary British Isles to ward off the doldrums of late winter.

In fact, I have always wondered why Canada did not adopt a few of the Caribbean islands. The island people would be delighted to share in Canada’s Medicare, assistance for families and all those Canadian tourists to keep their economy pumping. The islands could be considered as another province and they would soon be the envy of the rest of the Caribbean.

There was a feeble attempt at the idea a few years back when the Turks and Caicos Islands suggested some sort of deal. The only problem was that while some Canadians took the adoption idea seriously, the Turks and Caicos, with only about 38,000 population, would have been much too small to offer winter holidays to the many Canadians needing a break from our winter.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]