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

Doug’s Drive to Damnation.

by Peter Lowry

Like highways to hell, they are not roads that Ontario premier Doug Ford should take. Doug Ford lacks the political smarts, the political acceptance or a party eager to take him where he wants to go. And yet, he has the bus in drive and headed for the ditch. He is running an early municipal-type campaign in a province of almost 15 million.

His biggest problem is back-up. Watching deputy premier, Christine Elliott, the other day dealing with the media was an embarrassment. This woman held so much promise for the health ministry three years ago. She looks like she has aged 20 years. Ontario’s hospitals are in desperate need of resuscitation from her and her government’s bad management. They have had three years of wasted promises, tightened purse strings, bad direction and the horrors of the pandemic.

His “wunderkinder” education minister Stephen Lecce from Vaughn is also on the ropes. Despised and ignored by all flavours of teachers, Lecce’s private school, St. Michael’s never prepared him for the treatment he has received from the feet-on-the-ground hardscrabble public and Catholic teachers of Ontario. They know the difference between concern and crap and they hardly took to the BS of this kid.

Doug’s new finance minister is probably irrelevant. The guy took over from Rod Phillips when he was caught vacationing in the Caribbean while the province was on lockdown. I would check the name of the new guy but since his reports seem different from the premier’s directions, it seems pointless.

Meanwhile Phillips is throwing more promises at the long-term care homes in Ontario in hopes that it will bring him to redemption. What Phillips has yet to learn is that promises of better policing of long-term care facilities has to be seen to be believed.

But the one in Doug’s cabinet who still looks like a deer in the headlights is Brian Mulroney’s little girl Caroline. There was no way Doug could leave her as attorney general, but transport was an even worse choice.

Here is Doug out hustling the crowds on the elixir of new highways but who is going to school Caroline on why these new roads to nowhere are going to solve any of Ontario’s real needs?

And besides, the concern for the environment is simmering on the public’s back burners at the moment. By next June’s provincial election, the dams might burst and Doug and his highways will disappear in the maelstrom.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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A Legacy Lost.

by Peter Lowry

It makes you a bit sad. What the genius of Ted Rogers built is being mishandled by his son. From the catbird seat on Toronto’s ancient Jarvis Street, you can see the past and future of the city, from the winding streets of once-exclusive Rosedale, to the modern towers at Yonge and Bloor. It is a view of the rise and fall of the Ted Rogers’ vision.

And yet it is strange that a man of Ted’s vision failed to see the weakness of the corporate governance he left his son. The rules must be very clear in British Columbia where his company was incorporated. The judge’s ruling was clear. The Rogers scion had carte blanche. He had carte blanche to fail. And the rest of the telecom industry will ultimately feast on the carrion.

But what amuses me in all of this carry-on, newspaper revelations and speculation, is that young Mr. Rogers is trying to take the company back to its past. Dumping the company president is not the concern. He has the right to do that. It is dumping the more progressive outside directors and replacing them with what seem to be tried and true yes-men that I do not understand.

I think the key question to Mr. Rogers should have been asked by the B.C. judge. The question is very simple. And I think it is critical. It is what do you think is the purpose of a board of directors?

And before you answer that question, you have to bear in mind that Ted Rogers was entrepreneurial and used his board to reach out into the community. They were not only good sounding boards but they were influencers. For example, most of the board were probably conservative but having lawyer and former premier David Peterson as a board member was not for his legal mind but his direct pipelines into the liberal party in Ontario and Ottawa.

The fact that young Rogers has already given Peterson his walking papers shows that his training at Comcast in the U.S. was not what he needed to come back and take over his father’s company. While there might be four different studies ongoing now by the Canadian government, it will ultimately be a political decision as to whether Rogers will absorb Calgary-based Shaw in a $26 billion deal to become the largest telecom in Canada.

I think the boardroom term for this situation is that young Mr. Rogers has screwed the pooch!

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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No damage to Air Canada.

by Peter Lowry

There was a surprising guest editorial in the Toronto Star the other day. It was an unusual reaction to a speech by Michael Rousseau, chief executive officer of Air Canada. I have no idea what the speech was about nor do I know Mr. Rousseau or the writer of the editorial, an Éric Blais of Toronto. The point is that this is the kind of ignorant action we witness all the time in this country.

Canada is blessed with two official languages. That is a good thing. It enriches us. It is the people who get their ass in a knot over language who are working against harmony and progress in our country. We are constantly being force-fed BS from Quebec’s provincial assembly about protecting French. The simple facts are that the more bilingual that province can become, the better the economic future of those who live there. And the same is true for Ontario. This province has to get to work and also encourage bilingualism.

When the “minister of everything” Clarence Decatur Howe launched Trans Canada Airlines, in 1936, it was providing service in both English and French. When he left politics in 1957, he admonished the MPs to look after his airline. TCA, and later Air Canada, has dominated Canadian skies and traversed the world ever since.

I would assume that Michael Rousseau was chosen for his job by a search committee with bilingualism as a nice to have. The truth is that the qualifications to manage a world class airline do not include being facile in French. This is unlike the requirement today for air traffic controllers in Quebec to be fluently bilingual. This is a matter of safety in the air and makes it a job requirement.

But nobody cares if the Air Canada CEO can speak French except those petty péquistes in Quebec City. The facts are that it would look better if the airline’s CEO could speak in French occasionally for the sake of good public relations.

But decisions based entirely on the perceived public relations value, are not good decisions. If it sells more for the company, that is good. If it creates a bond with a large block of employees, that is also good.

It is just, by itself, speaking a local language is not in the first ten requirements for an airline’s chief executive.

He or she does not fix the planes. The job is not fly the planes. This person is busy looking ahead. The job is looking at next year and the years after. The job is to face the world. We pay him or her the big bucks for the ability to make decisions in a very volatile industry.

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By way of an apology: I have missed a few days of this blog. It was hardly the illness that kept me from writing, it was the damn pills.  

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Can Kenney Keep His Cool?

by Peter Lowry

It appears that in the hiatus, waiting for parliament to convene later in the month, the news media have been having some fun. They are doing their best to start a feud between Alberta premier Jason Kenney and the Bloc Québécois’ leader in the House of Commons Yves-François Blanchet. Since they both like referenda, the media figure these guys have something in common.

The media guys, with little to do, were making fun of the Alberta referendum on equalization payments. This is a federal fund that is distributed to provinces in need. Alberta had its municipal elections last month and ran two province-wide referenda at the same time. One referendum was to stop adjusting clocks twice a year and stay on daylight time. The other was to get the federal government to cooperate in changing the constitution to stop Alberta taxes going into the equalization fund.

Typical of municipal elections, when the local mayoralty is a hot subject, as many as 50 per cent of the locals get out to vote. And when it is a ‘ho-hum’ matter, about 35 per cent might carry out their civic duty. And while there, some voted on the referendums and some did not. It did not help that many constitutional experts and quite a few non-experts had spread the word that the constitutional question was a silly waste of time.

But, silly or not, Municipal voters hate paying for things they do not understand. There were lots of blank ballots but some 61 per cent of those who voted said ‘Yes.’ They decided, at the same time, to sticking with correcting their clocks twice each year.    

The news media had checked with senior liberal party people to find out when they would sit down and negotiate with Jason Kenney and his united conservatives. The answer they got was “Why?”

The reality is that it would take a vote in every province and a majority of Canadians agreeing to even open the constitution to discuss the question.

Since M. Blanchet has participated in referenda in his home province of Quebec, the news media thought he might have a few tips for Mr. Kenney. Since M. Blanchet has never won a referendum, that was when the name-calling got started.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

It’s Too Late for Ford.

by Peter Lowry

The Ford government in Ontario is desperately seeking voter approval for next June. The election is seven months away, but to win, the conservatives figured they better start early. The other day, they announced that their recent ten-cent per hour increase in the minimum wage was not enough. They announced that as of January 1, the minimum wage in Ontario would be $15 per hour. That was the minimum wage increase that the liberals planned to implement if they won the 2018 provincial election.

And that was before the pandemic and before the rapidly rising prices for groceries. At a time when the estimated living wage in Toronto has reached $22 per hour, the Ford conservatives are coming from behind. The only good news in the announcement was that servers in bars and restaurants were to be included in the new minimum.

There were, of course, the complaints by restaurant owners that they could not afford that kind of a hit so soon after the lockdowns of the pandemic. And there were no kudos from the union leaders Ford invited to join him in making the announcement. It was interesting seeing the Unifor president and the Ontario Pubic Services Employees at a Ford function.. You don’t have to think about it for long to realize that none of those union people represent anybody who only works for minimum wage.

(Mind you, the Toronto Star ran the picture under the headline: Union leaders back Premier’s wage increase. If the headline writer had read the reporter’s story, he or she would have known that the union leaders were there out of curiosity, not approval.)

What is most curious about the announcement is that there is no increase in the works for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) this is the program that supposedly works alongside Ontario Works for the close to a million Ontario adults who require support for disability or reason to be unable to work. In all the variable rates explained in the government web site, there is no mention of any increase because of the escalating cost of living. And there is no way under today’s cost of living in Ontario that those people are anywhere near what they need to have adequate, safe housing or food to eat. Mr. Ford’s government would make Ebenezer Scrooge (before meeting some ghosts) look like a spendthrift.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Liar, Liar, Pants on fire!

by Peter Lowry

Can you imagine prime minister Justin Trudeau telling the G20 country leaders that they have not done enough to save our planet? He told the G20 meeting in Rome last week that Canada “wanted a stronger and more ambitious agreement on climate change to emerge from the summit.” You have to admit that our prime minister is carrying hypocrisy to greater heights every time he opens his mouth on this subject. He is spending taxpayers’ money to twin the Trans Mountain pipeline to enable three times as much of the highly polluting Alberta tar sands bitumen to be shipped around the world.

Does Canada take less blame for the pollution when other countries process the bitumen into ersatz crude oil to continue the pollution chain?

And how is this for more hypocrisy? Trudeau’s office issued a tweet on Sunday (as he was leaving for the COP26 Conference in Glasgow). The twit’s tweet read: “Climate change cannot be denied. And climate action cannot be delayed. Working together with our partners, we need to tackle this global crisis with urgency and ambition.”

And when he got to Glasgow, Trudeau takes the microphone and repeats his promise to world leaders that he will (sometime in the future?) set a hard cap on emissions for the oil and gas industry in Canada.

Sounds good. Obviously, it means nothing to him. He tells us he wants to set targets on reducing global warming while his pipeline is accepting contracts for shipping Alberta tar sands output for the next 20 years. And the Kenney government in Alberta hopes it will never end.

But what is the Trudeau government really doing today to cut greenhouse gas emissions? Not many of us today are worried about his commitments for 2050. It is today that the seas are warming, the ice caps are melting, that coal is still be used in vast amounts to generate electricity, that we are generating more and more greenhouse gases. Commitments for the future will not cut it.

There are many ways Canada can speed the saving of our planet. We can adopt high-speed electric trains that can compete with the excessively polluting regional air lines. Canada needs high-speed electric trains from Halifax to Vancouver. We need more low-cost ‘green’ electricity to heat our more energy-efficient homes and work places. And we need carbon pricing that cannot just be passed on to the consumer.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

In for a tonne, in for a megatonne!

by Peter Lowry

And here we always thought that world meetings were fun? Here was prime minister Justin Trudeau and his minister of global warming, Steven Guilbeault, at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow fending off the sceptics and the other world leaders. “Why cannot Canada do more” they were constantly being asked.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) whines that Canada counts on the oil and gas industry as the country’s largest volume of export products, supporting as many as 500,000 jobs and representing about $30 billion in annual economic investment. They point out that the most greenhouse gas emissions are the fault of coal. They seem to think we are going to blame coal and let the oil and gas industry have a pass.

It seems to this writer that CAPP, the Alberta government and the federal government have to start finding new jobs for those oil and gas workers over the next ten years. And we certainly need to find a better long-term investment for that $30 billion.

CAPP’s answer to this is that the world needs access to lower emission natural gas and oil and given a friendly federal government footing the bill, Canada’s oil and natural gas industry would figure out how to do that.

So far, CAPP companies have figured out how to stuff some of the carbon, from upgrading bitumen to synthetic crude oil, back into the earth where the removal of tar sands bitumen has left the space underground. Whether that is a long-term solution remains to be seen? It hardly answers the question of what happens to the additional carbon from the use of that ersatz crude oil?

But in the meantime, the Trudeau government intends to place a hard cap on industries that are emitting greenhouse gasses. The only problem is that Trudeau’s minister of global warming and natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson have absolutely no idea how to do that and what the cap might be. They are asking for advice.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Ford’s Snakes and Ladders.

by Peter Lowry

The Ford government in Ontario is desperately trying to find a rationale for voter approval. It wants to be seen to be doing something that will earn it a chance at re-election next June. It has chosen the Bradford Bypass as the main player. And the politicians are now playing a childish game of snakes and ladders over some of the most vulnerable land in the province.

Bradford, Ontario is the centre for the area known as the Holland Marsh, some of the richest, most fertile land in the province. It is a major source of garden vegetables for Ontario’s 14.5 million citizens. The Bradford Bypass, also known as Highway 404, is designed today to skirt around most of the Holland Marsh to join Highway 400 just north of Highway 88. What this will do is create a greatly increased flow of traffic going north around Barrie.

While the Highway 400 bridges around Barrie are currently being rebuilt to accommodate up to eight lanes of traffic, all we know in Barrie is that the summer-weekend traffic jams on Highway 400 from the added Highway 404 traffic are not something to which we will look forward.

In the children’s game of snakes and ladders, it is the ladders you have to climb but the snakes slide you back down again. It seems the Ford conservatives are working with the snakes to slide us back down. The conservatives seem to have a penchant for aiding their friends the developers who have fortuitously bought parcels of land just where the new highway will have access for buyers of their developments. And yet moving the new highway 10 to 20 kilometers north would lower land costs and completely bypass the Holland Marsh.

Ideally, of course, an arm of Highway 404 was to connect with the proposed Highway 412, east of Lake Simcoe, to accommodate traffic going north of Orillia. Can we assume that is still the intent?

And the biggest snake for us to slide down was the by-the-way from the Ford conservatives that they are thinking of making this new section of Highway 404 a toll road. The bastards will probably sell our highway to a Russian consortium, and we will pay, and pay, and pay.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

A Former Radical?

by Peter Lowry

Canada’s new environmental watch dog and global warming minister, Steven Guilbeault is described by Wikipedia as a former radical. There will be many Canadians anxiously waiting to see what he has become. If Canada ever needed a radical approach to the environment, it needs it now.

With Trudeau posing as the Savior of all things environmental at the meeting in Glasgow this week, you wonder how Guilbeault is going to handle the hypocrisy. After all, our prime minister cannot complete twinning of the Trans Mountain pipeline on our west coast and save the world at the same time.

Trudeau’s pipeline is designed to more than double the amount of Alberta tar sands pollution to be piped from Edmonton, over the Rockies, beside rivers and over aquifers that provide water to British Columbia, to the Burrard Inlet at Vancouver, loaded onto ocean tankers in the Burrard Inlet and to sail them out through the Salish Sea and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to spread the blame for the most polluting form of ersatz oil around the world.

At a time when the world is trying to reduce its use of carbon producing products, Canada wants to export more of the worst.

This writer would prefer not to attack Guilbeault at this time considering that the conservatives in Ottawa are doing as much of that as they can. Calgary MP Michelle Rempel Garner was the latest critic when she said to the media the other day that the country needs policies that help spur economic growth and lowers greenhouse gas emissions in a way that “leaves no one behind.” Ms. Rempel Garner does not tell us what those policies are.

Truthfully, it is very hard not to want to leave the greedy and those who do not believe in global warming behind. It would be a shame to leave the folks at the Calgary Petroleum Club behind but they are already very much out of date. More than a decade ago, former prime minister Harper was promising us that the oil industry would find ways to curtail the excessive amount of environmental damage done in just bringing Alberta’s tar sands products to market. This was not even considering the pollution caused by the end use of the petroleum-based products produced from the tar sands synthetic oil.

I guess we will have to wait for Mr. Guilbeault to get back from Glasgow to see if he is still a radical and still smiling.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

A Blogger’s Ego.

by Peter Lowry

You need a certain amount of chutzpah to undertake the production of a regular blog on today’s Internet. You have to believe you have something to say. And it takes time to realize what you are really doing. You are pitting your ego against those of super egos. I often take a quick run through the liberal-oriented accumulator progressivebloggers.ca to a) make sure my daily blog is there and b) see what the super egos are talking about. It hardly keeps me modest when I realize maybe three of us are the only real progressives.

But it also teaches me to stick to my knitting. With more than 60 years of politics behind me, that’s my milieu. Not that people from all parties do not, sometimes, react aggressively to what I write. Particularly when I have trampled on one of their shibboleths. It doesn’t matter whether I have trashed O’Toole, Singh or Trudeau, I will get some scathing e-mails promising to never read Babel-on-the-Bay again. I never know how to reply. They’ll be back.

It really impresses me how Google Analytics can show me new heights of readership during elections. It is also nice to see that I can still outguess most of the pollsters. They are stuck trying to understand their raw data where I am analysing how Canadians are reacting on a real-time basis.

One of the things I marvel over is the readers of Babel-on the-Bay around the world. I think I might be helping keep more than a few consular people up to date, though I know one regular reader in Germany is an old friend. I was surprised by the number of daily readers in China until a friend pointed out that the particular city had large numbers of classes in English and they might be using blogs, such as mine, as a daily exercise.

The one thing I have found is that I enjoy writing these commentaries on a daily basis but I resist the urge to do more than one in a day. And despite the advice people give neophyte bloggers, a blog of more than 400 words had better be damn interesting or you are just wasting your time. Some blogs remind me of the remark by an ancient writer who apologized for writing a long letter because he did not have the time to write a short one.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]