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

Legault Betrays Quebecers.

by Peter Lowry

There is no question that Quebec enjoys a special place in the hearts of all Canadians. It is a province rich with our history. Its contribution to the culture and character of our country is enormous.

But what many of the politicians in the provincial assembly in Quebec City fail to recognize is that their view of Quebec’s future is not always in sync with the desires of their constituents. It might be alright, most of the time, to put the squeeze on the anglophones. At the same time, it is well understood by Quebec parents that the economic future of their children will be better if they are able to speak English as well as French.

As an Anglo who has spent a great deal of time in Quebec over the years, I always found that more Quebecers are eager to speak in English than to let me speak in my stumbling French. It is not difficult to also meet the occasional péquiste who resents your presence on his island of French-language purity in a mainly Anglophone North America.

That must be premier Legault’s problem. He thinks he can, with a wave of his regal hand, eliminate the English language in Quebec. I am waiting to see how he intends to close the Ontario-Quebec and the New Brunswick-Quebec borders. And it will be even more interesting to see how he will handle the rioting of the unemployed in Vieux-Québec when there are no more tourists.

Speaking only French comes with a price and it is unlikely that bilingual premier Legault is willing to pay it. The Canadian constitution already preserves the French character of Quebec. To deny the equality of English in Quebec is to deny the constitution.

I hope and believe that premier Legault and his colleagues are mistaken that they have the right to enact unilateral legislation on Quebec languages. They have the right to encourage the use of the French language. They can hardly do that by the mindless act of eliminating the rights of English speakers.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Learning Gerrymander.

by Peter Lowry

It looks like Ontario will have only one new electoral district after the coming ten-year redistribution of ridings, according to the latest census of Canada. It will also be an opportunity to repair some of the gerrymandering in the last ten-year redistribution.

And if you think there is no gerrymandering in Canada, you must have some other jokes to tell. The revisions in Barrie on the last redistribution were probably due to then conservative MP for Barrie, and now the news media’s favourite Brampton mayor, Patrick Brown.

At the time of the last redistribution, Patrick was concerned about Barrie, which, because of the rapid population growth in the city, needed to be changed. At the time, Brown was probably contemplating taking the north side of Barrie with a large chunk of adjacent rural voters added. He was going to give the southern half, with another large chunk of conservative rural voters, to his acolyte on Barrie council. His generosity was because he had turned a potentially bad situation for conservatives into two winnable ridings.

What he knew was that the growth in population of Barrie was from mainly Toronto-based voters moving up to take advantage of the lower cost homes and the convenience of GO Trains to take them back to the city to work. Not many were voters for his brand of politics.

Before the plan was fully implemented, Brown saw another more interesting possibility come up with the Ontario conservatives. With the conservative government in Ottawa likely to fall to the Trudeau liberals and the Ontario Tories needing a new leader, he lined up the support he needed from the immigrants from the Indian sub-continent based in Brampton and Toronto and easily won the Ontario conservative leadership. All those trips the federal conservatives had sent him on to India paid off with an easy win. What happened that made him end up as mayor of Brampton is another story.

What the liberals in Barrie need to do now is make sure there that there is a new electoral district created that is entirely within the boundaries of Barrie and hopefully get rid of at least one of the two do-nothing conservatives representing Barrie today in Ottawa.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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What’s gender got to do with it?

by Peter Lowry

Sometimes, prime minister Justin Trudeau can be a pain in the ass. What the hell has gender got to do with someone’s qualifications for being in the federal cabinet? He can have all women in the cabinet for all most people care. I know he has to have people from each region. That is a given. Would it surprise you to learn that, at least in the past, it was so that there was a minister responsible for political patronage in each region across the country?

But who gives a damn about the gender of a cabinet minister except their now or future significant other? Having a gender balanced cabinet is just simpering silly. In this day and age, women have the right to be respected for their capabilities and not to play second fiddle to the men in the room.

For the prime minister to make a game of it is to take women back to the dark ages when they needed to be so much better than any man available to have a chance at the job.

But this silliness about gender parity is what caused Trudeau some problems in his first cabinet. A good example was Miriam Monsef former MP for the riding of Peterborough-Kawartha. Heralded as one of the youngest in the cabinet, she also lacked any political experience. Yet Trudeau gave her the politically sensitive job of minister for democratic institutions. She was in trouble from day one. Here she was to pilot the prime minister’s foolish promise that 2015 would be the last time Canadians would use first-past-the-post voting.

Trudeau went down with that ship along with his gauche minister. And yet he kept her in cabinet, though switching her to first to international affairs and then to rural economic development. Her star did not shine in either of those jobs and the voters finally send her to defeat in the 2021 election.

What probably puzzled many Canadians was that Justin Trudeau, a professed feminist, did not have a very good record in dealing with women who worked with him. One need only read parts of former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes’ book about her experiences as Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary to wonder why he handled her as he did. And the awkward relationship with former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould was front and centre in the news for much too long.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Del Duca Dumbing Down.

by Peter Lowry

When will politicians learn not to leap into voting reform without at least checking? At a sort-of liberal party meeting today, Ontario liberal party leader Steven Del Duca intends to promise Ontario voting reform—a subject he does not seem to understand.

Like prime minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario’s liberal leader (without a seat in the legislature) is promoting that, if he is elected premier, to use ranked ballots for future Ontario elections. Neither leader has thought much about the subject. This form of voting has been used in municipal elections in cities such as London Ontario and also by the federal conservative party.

What people need to know is that ranked balloting is not the same as an instant run-off election. Nor is it a fairer form of voting. There are lots of variables in ranked balloting. Much depends on the number of candidates, the closeness of the race and the mind-set of the voters.

The best result is when there are few candidates and one of the candidates gets more than 50 per cent of the first votes cast. It is exactly the same as first-past-the-post, you have a winner on the first ballot.

The worst result is when there are many candidates and none of them is a shining star. The worst of the ranking happens when voters think they have to fill in some second, third and fourth, etc., choices. They might not have thought this process through before the balloting. They sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time doodling on their ballot.

Frankly, you should never trust voters to have a fifth, sixth or seventh choice in mind. This is the situation where the series of vote counts are actually dumbing down to the least offensive of the candidates.

All the liberals need to do is look at the end result of the balloting in the last two leadership contests for the federal conservative party. Those were the contests that chose first Andrew Scheer and then Erin O’Toole as leaders of that party.

Would you want results such as those from voting in Ontario?

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Does Doug Do Privacy?

by Peter Lowry

Bet you are all set to go with your smart phone and Ontario premier Doug Ford’s vaccine passport. You do realize, I hope, that this passport with its QR code can contain much more than just your COVID-19 vaccine status?  With capacity for 4000 characters, it is not as simple as a tweet on Twitter. The ministry of health includes recent lab tests and other information in its QR code. It is hard to get in touch with anybody in the know about this question at Queen’s Park. No doubt, you would agree to sharing some of the details with your doctor. You might want to draw the line though with the guy on the door at your local gym.

Would you really want to share your recent test results for gonorrhea? Or your prescription to help you get erections? Maybe you scoff at this, but a rushed QR code app might just be making a mockery of your supposed right to privacy.

Maybe they are lazy? Because they were in a hurry? Because they did not want to excise your recent lab results, doctor to doctor information or your refills at your pharmacy?

Nobody is arguing that the ministry of health vaccine certificates we used for the past month are easy to fake but this QR code might be a major trade-off.

And maybe all that extraneous info has been deleted. Mind you, I worry more about the people without smart phones. And it is not just seniors. Some people simply do not want or cannot afford a smart phone. I have never seen a deal for a smart phone that did not start at less than $50 per month. And that is before all the charges for extra usage.

I, for one, am quite happy with my $10 per month cell phone (a cheap flip phone). It serves nicely as an emergency phone in the car and to check with the wife when buying her something at the grocery store. The home phones are the same $10 per month deal.

And I really wish that restaurants would go back to the colorful printed menus, that made them think twice about the printing costs, before raising prices.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Face of COVID.

by Peter Lowry

Don’t you hate those obituaries that read: ‘Died peacefully with family in attendance.’ And you know it is B.S. written by an unimaginative and unctuous undertaker. The person probably passed away kicking and screaming and fighting, while the family was in the waiting room arguing over the estate.

COVID-19 needs a new face. The next time someone dies of COVID in your local hospital, their agony needs to lead the six o’clock TV news, be spread across the front pages of the newspapers and replace the placebos of FaceBook. This is a wrongful death. It is no less than a murder. It is death by COVID, spread by the uncaring of the unvaccinated.

And that does not let the idiot politicians off the hook. If we had smart politicians, vaccination would have been mandatory from day-one of vaccines becoming available. It never was intended as an option.

Nobody has the right to spread death. The unvaccinated have become modern-day lepers. We need to put them in cages, send them to die among colonies of the unvaccinated, not beg them or pay them to join the human race.

We don’t want the unvaccinated in our homes, in our stores, in our workplaces, in our parks or places of amusement. If they don’t want to join us, then make them go away.

Did we really want to spend the past year and more looking at statistics, watching politicians reading scripts on the advice of administration doctors, who might not have diagnosed a patient in the past 20 years? This was not reality. This was a farce written by incompetents and screened by political speech writers. They never bothered to show the horror,

We would have been smarter to get some of our western friends off the range and let them rope and hogtie the unvaccinated—so we can brand them with vaccine where it hurts.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Doing a Dance with Doug.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario premier Doug Ford isn’t much of a politician but whomever is advising him on the day care file isn’t either. The feds are offering Ontario $10 billion to get on board the federal day care deal and the Ontario conservatives are hemming and hawing! They have to be clueless to not understand what this deal will add to the economy of Ontario. This is a dance Ontario doesn’t need.

Would you believe that the conservatives are suggesting that Ontario deserves more than $10 billion? Ontario and Quebec are the only two provinces that could do this on their own. They don’t really need the federal largess.

Maybe Doug Ford is waiting for Premier Kenney in Alberta to make the decision first. He would hardly be waiting for the other holdout, New Brunswick. Isn’t it amazing that three conservative premiers waited until after the election to even talk about the proposal?

But you hardly want to annoy a large number of women voters by dragging your feet on this issue.

Typical of conservatives, the Ontario dim-wits are questioning if the province can afford to subsidize day care to get it down to $10 per day. The truth be told, Ontario cannot afford not to. Every new day care space created, adds to the Ontario economy, helps create jobs and frees another person to get a job.

And that is the challenge. The $10 billion offered Ontario is to kick-start the creation of day care spaces, the training of child care workers and a chance to be creative. Private companies can create many of those spaces as the major users are their own employees. The same goes for government offices, schools, hospitals and churches. There is space to be converted to safe, comfortable, controlled and inexpensive day care. New building is another opportunity with condos, rentals, offices, shopping centres and services to include properly planned day care space.

And, one other point. Is that $10 per day in 2019 dollars or in 2026 dollars? There has to be some flexibility for cost of living here. We hardly want another fiasco such as Doug Ford’s famous ‘Buck a Beer.’

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

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Lessons for the NDP No. 2.

by Peter Lowry

The impression on the ground in the last election was that the new democrats were drinking their own Kool-Aid. Where did the B.S. about the boost in votes come from? No party stood to gain in that election. Least of all, the NDP.

I will try to keep this further update simple for the slow thinkers in that party.

The best illustration of the problem I can think of was a news clip on the television news the other day about a young Sikh in Nova Scotia who was beaten to death in what appeared to be a racially motivated attack. It was a shocking and awful incident made even more horrifying by the TV people being unable to pronounce ‘Sikh.’ They made the word sound like ‘sick’ instead of ‘seek.’ We used to have properly trained news personnel at one time.

But that ignorance explains the problem. What I carefully explained before is that Jagmeet Singh, with his colourful turbans and customs, is an observant Sikh. With a half million Sikhs in Canada, Sikhism is little understood by the majority of Canadians. Jagmeet is easy to like. He is personable. He is smart. Those are givens. He even amuses children on Tik Tok. He is just quite unlikely to ever be prime minister of Canada and the NDP need to face that reality.

But the other reason the NDP have nowhere to go is the constant blurring of their direction. Why do they think that a party that is going nowhere has anything to offer Canadians?

As a young Canadian, I admired the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). When David Lewis and Tommy Douglas bought into the linking of the party to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and becoming the new democratic party, it was a new game. They bought into the muscle but not the brains. The CLC was on the decline. It is why the NDP has continued to lose the support of the more progressive unions.

The NDP have to face the reality that the party has the same problems as the conservatives and the liberals. All three parties have the next two to three years to get their acts together, choose more effective leaders and do some serious thinking about the future of our wonderful country.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

How Liberals Won?

by Peter Lowry

It was a lengthy read. If you would even bother to count the number of words in four pages of a broad-sheet newspaper, you would come up with about six thousand words. They were written by Althia Raj. This is the smart lady who ran the editor’s desk for Huffpost in Ottawa and Quebec City and does such a good job on the CBC National’s At Issue panel. She recently started working for the Toronto Star.

Raj claims to have interviewed 57 liberal party insiders with puffed-up egos to provide an insiders’ somewhat glossy version of the recent liberal campaign. And they were not just making ketchup. They spent a lot of their credibility with their supporters, to, in the end of it all, find themselves standing in place.

The liberal braggards could only call it a win if you measure from midway through the campaign. That was when the notoriously inaccurate pollsters told them the conservatives had moved into the popularity lead. The liberal arrogance was taking its toll.

As much as I admire the work national party director Azam Ishmael has done for liberal party organizations, both provincial and federal over the years, I would argue that the recent federal campaign failed us. It was an over-managed, elitist and self-destructive campaign. The call of the election was of no surprise to anybody. The outcome should not have surprised them either.

If anything, the campaign proved that the Ottawa management of the liberal party was completely out of touch with what was left of the party across the country. There was minimal effort wasted on ridings that the Ottawa elite did not see as winnable. They had little understanding of the local organizations and relied instead on polls that could be wide of the mark, when they were trying to dig into how people were going to vote in specific electoral districts.

In orphaned ridings, there was little consideration given to candidate selection and the subsequent campaign. The ground game came second to the supposedly scientific use of digital ads and there was little effort at ‘get out the vote’ where the liberal management did not think it mattered.

I’ll share a lesson learned the hard way, many years ago. You will never convince anybody of anything, if you do not start by listening.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Trudeau Defines Hubris.

by Peter Lowry

Marching across the sands of a wind-swept beach in B.C., an angry Justin Trudeau walked away. He carried his hubris—his arrogance and haughtiness, in the stiffness of his back. His conceit carrying him away. Once again, his actions, ill-planned, ill-advised needed to be supported, not confused, by a bumbling office staff back in Ottawa.

Even an actor needs down time. The prime minister had just gone through a grueling, unrelenting election campaign, noted for its reversals and pressures. The intrusion on the beach could be called unfair. It could be, where it not a product of his own cynicism. Did Canada really need another bank holiday between Labour Day and Thanksgiving? It was proposed and implemented on his watch. It was his day. Who told Trudeau that he did not have to be there for Canada’s first day of honouring ‘Truth and Reconciliation’? All he was guilty of was bad timing. And, he has been there before.

There does seem to be a disconnect between the prime minister’s office and his family holidays. He needs a resident seer in his office to tell him when to avoid the Ides of March, the Agha Khan, trips to India, the angst of angry attorney generals and visits to the governor general.

He lucked into those pop-up appearances at Rideau Cottage throughout the worst of the pandemic. It might have reminded us of a cuckoo clock but it was a note of government stability through the months of Covid-19. It gave hope.

And yet, Justin is his own worst enemy. The cronyism, the elitism of the present prime minister’s office (PMO) defies what his father learned—as should his son—that the political balance is also a critical issue at all times in the PMO. In his father’s time, the political worker bees where also welcome at the Langevin Block.

Looking ahead, our prime minister needs to look to his legacy. If we could have our druthers, we would have him go to Glasgow and show the world what he has done to save our planet—not what he plans to do.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]