It might have been the beginning of the end we saw the other day. Donald Trump’s words on the tragedy in Pittsburgh were the final bullets in a fool’s arsenal that ricocheted around the world. He complained that there would not have been the deaths involved if the synagogue had
Continue readingAuthor: Peter Lowry
Babel-on-the-Bay: Exxonneration?
Help is on the way. It was wonderful to read that ExxonMobil is being sued by the New York Attorney General’s office in the United States for the lies to investors about the pollution caused by producing oil from Alberta tar sands. After three years of investigating, it is claimed
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Ford fights his false phantoms.
Premier Ford of Ontario must think business people in the province are generally stupid. At an Ontario Chamber of Commerce sponsored luncheon, he told the business people there that the Ontario economy has been stagnant, businesses are closing, freezing people out of better jobs and that powerful forces are trying
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Let’s have ‘Whack-a-Mole’ voting.
Blame Chantal Hébert. The other day she described the voting reform question as a whack-a-mole game. It just keeps popping up and needs to get a whack. The only reason Chantal noted it was because neophyte premier François Legault of the CAQ in Quebec made the same rash promise to
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: A government built on falsehoods.
Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star described the Ontario conservatives as ageist the other day. He believes that Doug Ford’s Tories are the party of only the old people. He comes to this conclusion apparently because the inordinate number of dumb moves the Ford government is making that are
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Kudos to Vancouver’s Kennedy Stewart.
It took guts. That was no walk in the park for a new democrat to give up his seat in parliament and challenge for the Vancouver mayoralty, as an independent. It was a tough fight with no guarantees. And the remaining problem is that there is now a progressive in
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Pushing mediocrity to prove what?
If I learned one thing as a political organizer of many years, it is that you never leave the smallest detail to chance. The same rule applied in business when I had computer programmers reporting to me. I never let a program be released until it had been given a
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Follow the money to Brampton Brown.
He used to be Barrie Brown. His best friend, Toronto lawyer Walied Soliman describes him in the Toronto Star as the “hardest working person, I have ever met.” Those of us who have watched Brown manipulate his way through politics over the years are less complimentary. This is not the
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Brown’s boy continues to disappoint.
It was always amusing to see how aspiring politician Alex Nuttall fawned on Patrick Brown as heir apparent to Patrick’s seat in parliament. It did not seem to be a sure thing with their respective ages being so close. All became clear though when Patrick jumped on the provincial leadership
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Dougie did it!
There is an explanation for this. I have a younger brother whose name happens to be Douglas. When we were young, the standard answer to a bloody nose or a broken lamp was always “Dougie did it.” I can admit now that if the fresh blood was mine, I could
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: A relentless push for change.
As best as I can follow the Google Analytics information about readership, there is a consistent and steady stream of world wide web users visiting the Democracy Papers. I wrote these papers in 2007 for the provincial referendum on voting in Ontario. It looks like more than 30,000 individual readers
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Voting for the future?
It has always been my observation that there are fewer ‘Come line’ bettors in municipal voting than ‘No line’ bettors. If you are not a craps player, I should explain that there are fewer civic voters voting positively for the future than there are people expressing themselves with a negative
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Cost of challenging climate change.
The bills keep rolling in. Dougie and the Deplorables should take their show on tour and give things a rest at Queen’s Park. This provincial government, that ran on promises of saving us taxpayers money, ran up bills over the summer that make the previous liberal regime look like pikers.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Thumper: 1932 to 2018
The Hon. Donald S. Macdonald has died. We were never friends. He might have served in Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet and we were both Torontonians but we never exchanged much more than the odd slight. I found him very elitist, right-wing and the kind of Rosedale warrior that was a pain
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: This honour might not be justified.
There was an e-mail the other day informing me that Babel-on-the-Bay is being honoured for its support of U.S. Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Good God! Did I? When? Why? And why do I not remember committing such a heinous crime? The e-mail is detailed and serious. It is from
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Bloomberg boo-boos big.
How do you get to be the 11th richest man in the world and have employees who make ridiculous mistakes? I hate to embarrass a guy such as Michael Bloomberg but he put his name on Bloomberg News to try to give it some credibility. Of its current 20,000-plus employees,
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: A federal green machine?
We got a push from the left of the political spectrum the other day for a proposal unveiled in 2016 to transform and green Canada’s dying postal service. It was new to me and I like it. For too long, we have been watching the post office clutch at straws
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Jean Chrétien tells it like it is.
One of the advantages of being a former prime minister, Jean Chrétien can now tell people how he sees things. Or, in the case of former prime minister Stephen Harper, he can tell it as he would like to see it. Both former prime ministers have new books out to
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Holding Honderich’s Hypocrisy.
It is this writer’s observation that John Honderich of the Toronto Star can be among the most puffed up of self-important Canadians. In an opinion piece on page two of his own publication the other day, Honderich bemoaned the lack of financial support for journalism by the federal government. He
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Dumb ideas for publicity.
The toughest challenge for municipal candidates is the problem of getting some decent publicity during the campaign. You sometimes get the feeling that all reporters hate you and you are just wasting your time. It always seemed that it was only the really dumb ideas that can break down barriers.
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