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

‘God Bless America.’

by Peter Lowry

Somebody has to care about our neighbouring republic. It is being torn apart by strife and greed and ignorance. The Americans started 2021 by letting the zoo’s inmates attack the nation’s Capitol. The Trump is working from his lair in Florida plotting his return. And the only person we trust to tell us what is going on there is the Toronto Star’s Edward Keenan. The guy has come into his own as Washington Bureau chief for the Toronto newspaper and has been doing a superb job.

It is not as though we do not have family and friends in many parts of the U.S. We can call anytime and ask how things are going. The answer always seems to start with: ‘Oh God.’ And it is the same whether they are democratic supporters or republican or born-again or never-again or from the boonies of the west or the cities of the east. You do know there are people who believe what Donald Trump is telling them? And what he is saying is more than enough to cause concern.

At the moment the strife can be referred to as the ‘phony war.’ Both sides think they are fighting the pandemic. And they are losing that war as well. With over 50 million recorded incidents of the disease already, the country is closing on a million pandemic deaths. The most serious disappointment is that the anti-vaxxers are not the only ones dying from the disease.

Keenan wrote recently about the past year and says that the outlook is not good. He doesn’t go as far as to discuss the potential for civil war. It just seems unreasonable to have all those goddamn guns everywhere and not use them on your fellow Americans.

Keenan describes 2021 in the U.S.A. as the same as being on a year-long bender. Though it is hard to say how much is alcohol. It is hard to understand why Biden is having the problems with democratic politicians.

In an honest admission, Keenan reports that 2021 has not been a good year for Joe Biden. And he doesn’t think 2022 is going to be any better.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Last Christmas Card.

by Peter Lowry

The wife and I were surprised and pleased by the number of season’s greetings we received this December. This damn Covid-19 is not wiping out our entire generation. What we expect to be the last card for this year arrived while we were having breakfast on December 30. (Yes, we get mail delivery to our door.) As the crow flies, the distance that card travelled would be measured in metres. We live just a couple blocks from Barrie city hall and this card was from the Barrie mayor.

It was appropriate, as at the time, we were discussing the political prospects for Mayor Tory of Toronto. We agreed that John Tory had done a fine job for Toronto and merited a third four-year term. Despite Mayor Tory being a conservative, I think he is the first mayor of the amalgamated city of 6.8 million, who really understands the city and the kind of mayor it needs.

John Tory has been a voice of compassion and reason throughout the last two years. He has been everywhere in the city and has helped it handle the problems of close living during a pandemic.

And I wish I could say that for the mayor of Barrie. It is typical of Mayor Lehman in Barrie (a city of 156,000) that his Christmas card would arrive six days after Christmas. And despite living so close to city hall, the last time I think I talked to the mayor was four years ago when he had no trouble running for a third term. I did hear him on a local radio station recently about some problem with the pandemic but his voice was so muffled, the station should have been embarrassed by the sound quality.

And Jeff Lehman is a liberal. At least, he was when I helped him win the mayoralty 11 years ago. He was the ideal candidate. He drove at door-knocking like an old-time Fuller Brush man. He was tireless.

If only he had brought that same level of energy to the mayor’s job, there is no telling how far this city would have come through his three terms. He can blame it on the majority of conservative party adherents on council if he wishes, but as John Tory has proved in Toronto, leadership matters.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Tzar of the Toll Roads.

by Peter Lowry

It seems the taxpayers in Ontario are paying for the warm-up to next June’s provincial election. Premier Doug Ford is betting that any and all mention of the Bradford Bypass and Highway 413 is another conservative re-elected. Ford is betting that voters in the greater Toronto area (GTA) are tired of the gridlock around Toronto and the hours spent on gridlocked highways.

But what Doug Ford does not seem to realize is that there are many years of planning behind these projects and they also require many years of any construction. And, frankly, the wasted time on the Highway 413—going from nowhere to nowhere—would involve paving over some very fine farmland and critically needed wetlands. The only people pleased with that bad planning are the developers who have been buying up the farmland around where the 413 would intersect with existing major north-south routes.

A government concerned about our environment would have ended the Hwy 413 speculation years ago. What the previous government was working on was the electrification of the GO trains. This is a critical need to speed commuter services. It requires new overpasses and power lines but will add more trains, coming up to speed faster and stopping faster. It will cut commute time. On the Barrie to Toronto run, a half hour can be cut from the time needed from Kempenfelt Bay to Union Station. The less pollution is a bonus.

And while the idea of having these new highways as toll roads must leave conservatives with goosebumps, Mr. Ford is denying it. He is at least smart enough to know that Ontario voters are annoyed with the tolls on the 407, 412 and 418. Not only are they priced too high for the benefits they offer but the money from them does not go to building new roads. After the election, the conservatives might get greedy and start selling toll roads again.

And the least likely to ever be a toll road—or anything else—is the 413. That particular plan parallels the 407 electronic toll route, only a short distance south. Having those two highways feeding west bound traffic onto the 401 near Georgetown is quite ridiculous. The Bradford bypass was never supposed to be a toll road as it is designed to move traffic from highway 404 over to highway 400 to take it around Lake Simcoe.

It should be mentioned that when the conservative government of Mike Harris leased Hwy 407 for 99 years, they got $3.1 billion for it. Today the highway is estimated to be worth ten times as much to the investor group.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The ‘champion of change’?

by Peter Lowry

This writer has never been a fan of former new democratic politician Ed Broadbent nor of the institute that he has named for him. There is no reason for him to be concerned about this as I also hold no briefs for the Fraser Institute, which likely supports the antithesis of the objectives of the Broadbent Institute. I have always been suspicious of think tanks with a built-in bias. Which I suspect is most of them.

Of the 100 or so think tanks in Canada, I tend to pay attention to the Samara Centre for Democracy that describes itself as a non-partisan charity. I expect that we are not the only country wherein our democracy needs charity.

But the bone I wanted to pick with Ed Broadbent today is in regard to his grandiose Canadian Democracy and Corporate Accountability Commission that he created and chaired with publisher Avie Bennett back in 2000. Their purpose was to encourage Canadian businesses to be socially responsible.

This is not to say how long I can hold a grudge. This was not a royal commission nor in any way supported by government. I debated and finally decided to provide them with some of my expertise on the subject. It was some 20 years before that I had spend time giving guest lectures at Ontario universities to business students. I had written quite few articles at that time on the social responsibility of business.

When I appeared before them to support a paper I had sent, I found that Ed Broadbent was rude and Avie Bennett appeared bored. I wrote off the experience as a waste of time and forgot about it.

But the other day, I came across some references to the report that the Broadbent-Bennett effort issued. The gist of it was that business needed to be coerced to be concerned about the environment, human rights and local communities, as well as the countries in which they choose to operate.

What annoyed me about this was that if Broadbent and his buddy had listened for a bit, they would have had an entirely new perspective. What I was saying 20 years before was that business can only benefit from being socially responsible. It is demonstrable that the socially responsible business has lower costs for staff turnover, better recognition in the news media and easier access to politicians. The company can attract desirable board members and can be much more profitable.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

No, He’s Not His Father.

by Peter Lowry

Prime minister Justin Trudeau recently told Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star that he was not his father. I knew that. I respected his father. His father respected the liberal party.

It was 50 years ago that Justin was born. Early that year the party held a large fund-raising dinner featuring Pierre Trudeau in the Canadian room of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) staff had kept those of us working on the dinner from knowing that Pierre was on his way to Vancouver to marry Margaret Sinclair. I should have seen it when the news media kept asking me about the syrupy speech he was giving on women’s rights. There were a lot of jokes afterwards that it was Pierre’s bachelor dinner.

The only times that the party connected with Pierre’s family life were in his Christmas cards. My wife still has her collection of Pierre Trudeau family Christmas cards and when she mentioned it to Justin, before he became party leader, she was immediately on the list for Justin and Sophie’s cards. And that is about the only way Justin is like his father.

One of the remarks in Susan Delacourt’s article was that “No one knows what would have happened to the liberal party if Trudeau had kept to (his) decision 10 years ago to sit out the leadership. And since he ran for the leadership, that decision was obviously bogus.

The one thing I believe is that the liberal party would have been better off without Justin. He acts as an elitist and he thinks he knows better than a party with the accumulated knowledge of this country since Confederation. He wasted much of that knowledge by barring the party senators from the liberal caucus. He cancelled the party’s minimal membership fee and opened the party to anyone who wanted to be on the party list. He left the party no role other than that as a quasi-automated banking machine where his office could go to ask for money.

Justin told Delacourt that he and his team in Ottawa made a decision to connect with the liberal grassroots. That, of course, is BS. Justin appears to be doing his utmost to destroy the party. He looks down on the grassroots and thinks all a party needs are selfies. He promised not to interfere in riding nominations and immediately, he became leader, forced out a candidate because he might not have liked her husband. He put elitists in charge of elections and loses ridings, that the liberals could have won.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Well-Worn Warrior.

by Peter Lowry

I certainly hope conservative leader Erin O’Toole is enjoying this holiday break from parliament. He deserves some rest. He needs to sit back in a warm easy chair, his feet up, his mind at ease and a thirst-quenching beverage of choice in easy reach. He needs the break to think about his future. What he really needs to think about, despite the amenities of Stornoway, the opposition leader’s residence, is his future.

This is Erin’s third career. When he was young, he went into a RCAF recruiting depot in 1991, with dreams of becoming a top-gun pilot. Like many of us, who have done that, you end up somewhere the air force thinks it needs you.

Erin did well by the air force. We are told he got a BA in history and political science at Royal Military College in Kingston. In exchange, he became a navigator. They even let him navigate in antiquated helicopters.

After the military, he stayed in the reserve while studying law at Dalhousie University. This led to his second career in in 2003, as a lawyer in Toronto. His talent seemed to be in commercial and regulatory law.

The legal community lost him though in 2012 when he saw the opportunity to go for the federal by-election in Durham to replace the former MP, Bev Oda, who had resigned. Prime minister Harper must have liked him because it was only after a few months of indoctrination as a new MP, that Harper invited him to sit at the cabinet table.

O’Toole liked that so much that when the conservatives lost in 2015, the member for Durham ran to replace Harper as leader of the conservatives. He lost to ‘Chuckles’ Scheer. When Scheer resigned in 2019, O’Toole was ready. No more Mr. Nice Guy seemed to be his motto. He wooed all conservatives, social conservatives and all the rest. He ran as a true-blue conservative. He won the brass ring.

But Canadians did not know him. In the 2021 general election, he ran a campaign trying to meet their expectations. What he did was confuse them. He came out of the campaign with no gains and an angry, disappointed caucus. He awaits the verdict of the party. He can always go back to law.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Friendly Warrior.

by Peter Lowry

The wife said it. I told her that I wanted to write something positive about federal new democratic leader Jagmeet Singh. I happened to have a newspaper page open in front of me when I asked and she pointed to a picture of Singh on the page and said: “He has the kindest face.”

She is right. Despite the kind face, Sikhs have a tradition of being warriors and as a follower of the Tenth Guru of Sikhism, Jagmeet carries the symbolic knives (Kirpan) which are one of what the Sikhs call ‘The Five Ks.’ The Kirpan shows he is always prepared to fight battles for the oppressed and downtrodden.

But there is a certain incongruity in wearing a bespoke suit from the Harry Rosen tailors and a smile and trying to look like a hardened warrior. And nobody seems to be taking Jagmeet seriously. When you fight an election earlier this year and come out of it with an increase of just one seat in the House of Commons, you have to wonder what is wrong.

From a political point of view, I am not inclined to blame Jagmeet. The guy is really trying. What he lacks is a strategic plan. He needs a cohesive party behind him. And, I think, he knows that the socialism of the party’s past is a dead issue.

This is the obvious time for the new democrats to prove that they have something to offer Canadians. They would probably be wise to re-open the Leap Manifesto to being revised and invite the support of the green party and left-wing liberals in the task. We probably have at least two years before anyone starts thinking of having an election. That time could be put to good use.

But as for Jagmeet’s position, I really do not think he is a leader. Sorry, guy. You are a married man with a little one on the way. Nobody thinks about leadership as they are changing a diaper.

I think Jagmeet made a mistake to encourage the Sikh diaspora in Canada to support him for the leadership of the NDP. He needed to build support among all Canadians and we are not seeing that happen.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

There’s got to be a pony.

by Peter Lowry

Here it is Christmas Day and I am still looking for a pony in all the piles of political poop we have endured in 2021. Maybe it has been a year when people who insist on writing about things political need to get a life.

I would be smart to use the wife’s approach to news. We always watch the evening TV news together. The wife starts out by commenting on the fashion sense of the newscasters. Before we have heard the latest Covid statistics, she is criticizing the men’s ties or the suit jackets they might have slept in. And the blouses and dresses on the women can be criticized or complimented, depending on her mood.

And if you think she is a distraction from the TV, you should see what happens when she gets the newspaper ahead of me. What I get, along with my morning coffee, is an annotated newspaper with penned question marks and underlining of editing errors or things confusing.

But we are having a slight disagreement on what to do about the Toronto Star. The Star is, once again, raising the price for home delivery out here in the boonies, and delivering less. The new publishers are getting fewer writers to pump out more words but I have seen small town weeklies that give you more news. We are thinking that we could get a larger breakfast table and each have our own i-pad with the Internet newspaper of our choice. I cannot decide between the Economist and the New York Times. The wife is threatening to switch to the electronic version of the Toronto Sun. We might have to compromise.

She is probably expecting something exciting for a major anniversary next year. When that event arrives, we will be in the thick of a provincial election. That is something to look forward to.

My main hope for next year is that this pandemic will be over and we can start to live a normal life again. And that would certainly contribute much to a Happy New Year.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Marley’s ghost visits Doug Ford.

by Peter Lowry

It seems that Jacob Marley’s ghost got short shrift in Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Think of how busy the guy would be in this Christmas of 2021. There are far more people today needing a visit from the ghosts of Christmas’s Past, Present and Yet to Come. We could start with Ontario’s premier Doug Ford.

It is hard to believe Doug Ford could inspire anyone. This is a guy who has never done anything right. He has never made the ‘nice’ list with Santa Claus. He’s a salesman who thinks bombast works. The ghost of Christmas Past took him to a Christmas party for the class he started with at Humber College. Someone mentioned that loser who started with the class and only stayed with it for two months. She added that he thought he was a big shot, peddling labels for his father’s printing company.

The ghost of Christmas Present had a more difficult task. She took Ford to an Ontario hospital where the intensive care unit was overloaded with Covid-19 patients. An exhausted staff of nurses had a minute to grab a quick cup of coffee during a rare, few minutes of quiet. As a joke some started raising their cups to toast people not there. “And here’s to premier Ford,” one of them said, “he’s squeezed our hospital for funds. He’s refused our ask for raises. And he doesn’t listen to the medical experts.”

But he never heard what the group thought about that toast as some heart monitors started beeping. And the staff rushed off to see if they could do anything to save the patients.

But the most dismal of the ghosts was the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. This ghost took him directly to a small group of funeral attendees in a windy corner of a Toronto cemetery. It was a glum crowd. Even the widow was stoic. “He should have known better.” Was her stock phrase to most of the questions directed to her. Even when it shook the premier awake beside her, he quietly got dressed and headed for the office to see if any more conservative developers wanted to build along Highway 413. Doug doesn’t believe in ghosts.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

A lump of coal for Legault.

by Peter Lowry

It was suggested recently that Canadians were helping François Legault and his Coalition Avenir Quebec by voicing their dismay about the passing of what is commonly referred to as Bill 21 in their provincial assembly. I disagree. I believe we give courage and determination to those millions of Quebeckers who decry the bigotry and parochialism of their pretentious politicians.

Recently, we have seen municipal politicians from both inside and outside Quebec, add their voices and their financial support to those in Quebec who are fighting this battle against bigotry. And we shame prime minister Trudeau and the leader of the opposition, Mr. O’Toole, as they do battle with their own caucuses. They want to stay out of the fight. Neither politician wants to lose support in Quebec. They might be surprised to learn that they never had the votes of the bigots in the first place.

This is not to say that there is no bigotry in Quebec. It is important though to recognize that there is much less than there used to be. Even before Wolfe’s soldiers climbed the cliff to the Plains of Abraham in 1759 there was distain in Quebec for the British. The overwhelming control by the Catholic Church in those early days also gave rise to antisemitism, the paternalism with the aboriginal population and the tribal attitude toward the English.

But there is also a pride in Quebec today. It is a pride in maintaining the French language. It is a pride in their province. And there is also the pride in being Canadian.

Quebec has become a more secular society as has the rest of the country. It is not so much the rejection of religion but the recognition within an educated population of the slowness of religious orders to adapt and serve their needs.

Premier Legault can call it Quebec values if he wishes but when those so-called values try to interfere with freedom of religion, he is going to get push-back. All Canadians can recognize bigotry, that is that brazen.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]