Political polling has never been an exact science. It has always required an overview of common sense, mathematical probability, historical data, statistical smoothing and wishful thinking. Then, and only then, could you report the result you wanted in the first place. In the past 50 years, little has changed. Looking
Continue readingAuthor: Peter Lowry
Babel-on-the-Bay: Parsing Noblesse Oblige.
Travelling around the world building linkages and creating cooperation in the world-wide research effort to cure multiple sclerosis was an eye-opener in terms of understanding charity. In North America, we have built our own model of noblesse oblige. It is quite different from the European version. Europe built from antiquity.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: When economic action plan advertising fails.
Somebody should get a bill for this. Babel-on-the-Bay has been telling people for free that the Conservative government’s well advertised economic action plan is a crock. Do they listen to us? No. They have to do studies to prove it. Now that it has been proved, where does that leave
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Long to reign over us?
You have to admit, there is always that stoic admiration for the old Queen. Nobody wants to say anything nasty about her. And then there are those God-awful hats. You would swear the old dear brings along a porta-potty in them so she never gets caught short. But there is
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Heaven knows: the NEB doesn’t.
When a friend called from Calgary earlier this year to tell us she had been evacuated from her beautiful home on the Bow River, she complained about the water covering her front lawn. Torontonians could understand how she felt when they saw the Don River cover the southern reaches of
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Political donations do ads for Whigs.
An e-mail came from the Ontario Liberal Party the other day. It was from Deb Matthews and Tim Murphy, campaign co-chairs for Wynne’s Whigs. This e-mail explained that since becoming Premier “Kathleen Wynne has worked hard to create jobs—jobs for youth just entering the workforce, career-building jobs for families trying
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Has Enbridge every lied to you before?
There is no stopping the pipeline people from Enbridge. The Enbridge motto should be “What TransCanada can’t do, Enbridge can do!” With President Obama making the noises that he will kill the Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge has made its end run to loop its existing pipelines back to connect its
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Which train goes to Scarborough?
The subway versus Light Rail Transit (LRT) to the far reaches of Scarborough is an argument at Toronto City Hall with little common sense to it. What we are hearing is not a cogent conversation as to the pros and cons of one system over the other. One side of
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Trading staterooms on HMCS Harper.
Prime Minister Harper’s cabinet shuffle is not just new lifeboat assignments. The changes on Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship Harper are to decide who is to go first class on their voyage to defeat. And if you think there is anything significant about this new cabinet, even the Prime Minister would
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Mr. Harper bends a knee.
Prime Minister Harper bent extra low in bowing to the Queen when last in London. He had good news for her. He was sure she would be pleased to know that he is going to switch Canada back to God Save the Queen as the country’s national anthem. This would
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Throw the engineer from the train.
With the blame game in high gear over the disaster at Lac-Mégantic, it seems everyone is sympathetic but the person to blame is the train engineer. The best way to explain this kind of blame is the inverted pyramid method. Everyone climbs into the wide open top of the inverted
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Our oaths and other oddities.
A news story the other day was about three potential Canadian citizens who could not understand why they should swear allegiance to the Queen. They want to become citizens but do not understand why a democratic country would even have royalty. They were appalled that Canada would continue such a
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Harper heeds Harris heritage.
The one problem we have to be realistic about is that ideologues are willing to kill people to support their political beliefs. The disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec is the latest case in point. When you gut a department’s budget, you can hardly be surprised when it can no longer do
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Political peccadilloes please public.
A news story the other day said that researchers were surprised to learn that voters are not turned off by the more personal and seamier side of political news. It is too bad they never asked any politicos about it. Not that political apparatchiks are gossips, mind you, but they
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Giambrone rises for Scarborough by-election.
It was good for a bit of a belly laugh the other day watching the television news. It was about one of the upcoming provincial by-elections in Toronto. Lo and behold but there was former Toronto Councillor Adam Giambrone rising Lazarus-like from the political graveyard. He took the New Democrat
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The lies that bind.
One of the most serious problems faced by first responders in the Lac-Mégantic disaster was the inability to determine what type of oil was supposedly in the 72 railway tanker cars that rolled unattended into town. And you can imagine why the signs required by the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Bitumen in Toronto: Scenario #1
Toronto’s Yonge Street Subway bisects Toronto from Union Station at Front Street to 15.7 kilometres north at Bishop Avenue, just above Finch Avenue. It is at this northern terminus that the Enbridge Line 9B crosses Yonge Street. This is the 30-inch crude oil pipeline that used to carry crude oil
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The silence of Stephen Harper.
You do not necessarily think of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a quiet person. When you see television news clips of him in the House of Commons or addressing a Conservative crowd, he is talking. That is your image of him. But that public image is wrong. We were presented
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Standing by in Britain and South Africa.
Watching a network promotion on Global Television the other day, we learned the details of the network’s royal baby watch in England. The watch is orchestrated under the aegis of the network’s Entertainment Tonight program. This is the program that is constantly promoted on the network’s newscasts for those concerned
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Wynne’s Whigs deny democracy.
It is probably the most anti-democratic news out of Queen’s Park since Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty quit and prorogued the Legislature last year. It was bad enough that Premier Kathleen Wynne chose the Thursday before a long weekend for the vote in five by-elections. The two-week period before and after
Continue reading