Conservative MP John Brassard from Barrie-Innisfil has a problem. He thinks it is alright to teach our youth to hate and to work against our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The people in his electoral district might like to ask him about this before mistakenly re-electing him next year. John
Continue readingAuthor: Peter Lowry
Babel-on-the-Bay: To be murdered in Mali.
Our government wants us to send some Canadians in harms way in Mali in West Africa. As the country with the highest mortality rate for peace keepers, we are not going to enjoy Mali. “Don’t worry” our defence minister tells us, “We are only going to send a few helicopters,
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Can you put it on a hat?
We used to use bumper stickers but cars do not have bumpers any more. Now we are running campaigns that you can put on a hat. We are producing hats that say “Ontario drives with Ford” or “Win with Wynne” or “Horwath or horror.” That is the general view of
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Trudeau has to dump Morneau.
We have been waiting. We have been patient but it has not happened. Prime minister Justin Trudeau still has that millstone Bill Morneau dragging him down to the depths of neoliberalism. It is not 2018 for this government until finance minister Bill Morneau is gone. It is the story of
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The conflicts of Jagmeet Singh.
New Democratic leader Jagmeet Singh has a problem. He appears to want to be a separatist in India but a nationalist in Canada. Perhaps it is his devout Sikhism and his seeming lack of understanding of what ties Canada together. It is hardly an enviable position for a national party
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Ageism and Justin Trudeau.
There was an opinion piece in the paper the other day by a favourite commentator. She was writing about the Liberal government not trusting anyone older than the prime minister. That leaves a very large number of Canadians to be disposed of on the ice floes by this uncaring government.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The redemption of Patrick Brown?
How do you like those phone calls you get from automated polling systems? The worst of them are the ones that want you to press one if you intend to vote conservative and two if liberal. I always have lots of fun with them by pressing numbers at random. But
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Keep to the left Ms. Wynne.
Not that she would necessarily listen to this writer but Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne needs advice on dealing with Doug Ford. There is always the hope that someone who reads Babel-on-the-Bay will mention it to her. We, of course, are expecting her and her Liberal government to continue to discuss
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: In defence of populism.
From the first time I met John George Diefenbaker, I have admired populist politicians. For the benefit of our younger folk, John Diefenbaker was a Prairie populist politician who served as prime minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963. As a young liberal, I did not agree with much of
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Doug Ford is just Trump Lite.
It was made clear when we announced the winner that the new Conservative leader in Ontario was just Trump Lite. There are some interesting similarities between the two men and their many failings but there the similarity ends. To start with both men came into their wealth the old-fashioned way:
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The last adult has left the White House.
President Donald Trump has fired secretary of state Rex Tillerson. He fired him on that children’s program Twitter. And, in case Tillerson might not have checked Twitter, Trump phoned him from Airforce One and made sure he knew he was fired. Tillerson will, regrettably, go down in history as the
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: There are some real royals.
It is too bad that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was too busy to meet with the King and Queen of Belgium when they were in Ottawa the other day. These are a somewhat different type of royal. They are useful. They are not just figureheads and dilettantes. The Belgian royals
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: See what preferential voting gets you?
Will they ever learn? The Ontario conservatives used preferential voting in their recent leadership race. Yes, they were rushed and used the same foolish system that gave them Patrick Brown as leader two years before. They used a system that fails to produce a leader. They end up with the
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: “What the world needs now…”
Got an interesting e-mail the other day from a fellow commentator on Canada’s left coast. He had an excellent suggestion on what Canada should do about the currently growing estrangement from a badly run United States of America. He sees it as an opportunity for an independent Canada to become
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Donald Trump Lite and the Ontario PCs.
After spending Saturday afternoon watching Rosemary Barton and CBC News struggling with the Ontario Conservative fiasco, I was not sure whether the party or the news media did the worst job. It was embarrassing. I actually paid the CBC $6.85 plus GST for the right to watch that screw-up on
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: ‘Chuckles’ Scheer, meet Donald Trump.
Did you hear that Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa, wants to move the Canadian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem? He must have heard that is what U.S. President Trump intends to do. That is a very bad move by Chuckles. The problem is that
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The Ontario PCs in Wonderland.
Vic Fedeli is hardly the Alice in Wonderland who foolishly headed down the rabbit hole. Yet it was Interim conservative leader Fedeli who first let on that Patrick Brown might not have been telling the whole truth about party memberships. And with three of the four candidates still in the
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: “We stand on guard for thee.”
The last time our parliamentarians screwed around with Canada’s national anthem, they were trying to make it gender neutral. What they accomplished was to have some of us singing different words, others of us confused and all of us stuck with awkward phrasing. And it is tough to fake that
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The troubled travels of Trudeau.
Good advice is a treasured commodity in government. Bad advice is plentiful. It seems that our current prime minister has plenty of the latter and not enough of the former. It could also be that Justin Trudeau has lots of good advice but chooses to ignore it. That was how
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The Bully Pulpit of Donald Trump.
President Theodore Roosevelt said, more than 100 years ago, that the White House is a bully pulpit. It means something very different to the bully in today’s White House. Roosevelt saw the bully pulpit as a position for good. Trump sees it as a position to abuse the less powerful.
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