 By Mark Gillies
January 27, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON.
Part 1 of a 2 part feature
 Sir Allan Napier MacNab was a wealthy lawyer, a Prime Minister, a co-founder of The Great Western Railway, including business partner and close friend of Peter Carroll. Here’s a question for you. When Hamilton’s Sir Allan Napier MacNab the wealthy Prime Minister of Upper Canada, from 1854 to 1856, went dining at a castle in Aldershot, where did he always go?
If you said, Rock Bay, consider yourself a genius. If you have never heard of Rock Bay, don’t feel bad, you are not alone. This is just one more of Burlington’s greatest treasures, regrettably, forgotten over time.
Rock Bay was the first stone castle-like mansion built in the Aldershot area during the early 1850s, by one of Canada’s wealthiest men, Mr. Peter Carroll. Many at the time referred to his residence as Carroll’s Castle, because it did resemble a castle.
 Dundurn Castle was built for Sir Allan MacNab and completed at a cost of $175,000 in 1835. This artist’s impression shows us what Dundurn Castle looked like in this same year. Dundurn Castle, which we are more aware of, is located at the western end of Burlington Bay on land named Burlington Heights. This beautiful grandiose home built for Sir Allan MacNab, over a 3 year period, was completed in 1835, at a cost of $175,000. We just don’t know about its neighbour, Rock Bay Castle, nor do we know much about Peter Carroll.
What was it that these men had in common? Allan MacNab and Peter Carroll both attained enormous wealth and great power. They were best of friends and business partners. Allan MacNab was a lawyer, but amassed his wealth in land speculation. Peter Carroll was a land surveyor by profession, eventually retiring from this field, in favour of establishing a construction company that built and owned major toll roads across the colonial province. To say the least, this career move was extremely lucrative. Road construction and tolls were the catalysts that launched Peter Carroll into new wealth. Among the many roads in Upper Canada that Peter constructed and owned were these familiar local routes; Waterdown Road, Plains Road (then called the Hamilton and Nelson Gravel Road) and Carlisle Road, plus most roads surrounding Hamilton. Before retiring from land surveying, Peter was responsible for the creation of the grid pattern street layout in Hamilton, a contract offered to him by his good friend, George Hamilton, the founder of Hamilton, Ontario. Peter, under a similar contract, also surveyed the entire Burlington Bay.
Three great minds work together to amass their fortunes
Allan MacNab and George Hamilton were already longtime boyhood friends, both born and raised in Niagara-on-the-Lake. These two men rose to prominence mainly from their efforts in battles during the War of 1812. Helping to defeat the American invasion at Queenston was their crowning achievement in the military. Allan MacNab was knighted by Queen Victoria. Peter Carroll served as a lieutenant-colonel in the militia in these same battles. This is most likely where he first met the other two men, prior to all three setting out seeking fame and fortune after the war ended.
It was basically these three men, after the war, who worked together to shape the future of Hamilton, plus the surrounding areas, including Aldershot. All three men acquired massive tracts of land in this same area, and even abroad. Peter Carroll for one, had extensive land holdings in Iowa and Illinois. All of this land provided the three landowners with unbelievable wealth. These three men influenced the future direction for the Province of Upper Canada, mainly through politics.
Peter Carroll selects a beautiful setting to build his mansion
A spectacular view from Burlington Heights looking east towards Lake Ontario, was the best property for Allan MacNab to build Dundurn Castle. Peter Carroll, not to be outdone, one day, also wanted to have a palatial home with a view overlooking the same Burlington Bay. Unfortunately, the Dundurn Castle site was already taken. As Peter continued to work his way into the power brokers’ circle, with his wealth continuing to dramatically increase, he finally decided it was time to build, and purchased a 40 acre tract of land on the northwest side of Burlington Bay.
 This old land map shows us where Peter Carroll’s property was located in Aldershot. Today, the same property is where Woodland Cemetery, the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Plains Road curve are located. It was not uncommon for men of great wealth to showcase their success with massive homes. Peter was shrewd enough to not upstage his friend and mentor, Sir Allan MacNab, by building a larger mansion, despite possessing enough wealth. Peter’s home would be on a smaller scale, but would resemble a castle in England. Peter hired an English architect who specialized in manor homes. The architect was brought over to design his new home. The land that Peter Carroll purchased is now occupied by Woodland Cemetery, the Royal Botanical Gardens, and the Plains Road curve in front of the RBG headquarters. The massive stone structure began its construction in the late 1840s. Cut stone was shipped in from a quarry located in Queenston. The mansion was finally ready for occupancy in 1855. The beautiful estate featured a port cochere, stables, outbuildings, a mammoth entrance gate, and small guest lodges located just inside the gates.
 The Bayview cottage was put up for sale by auction in 1855 when Rock Bay was ready for occupancy. The advertisement describes the building, and the grounds available for purchase. Part of the estate was set aside for farming. Peter Carroll has been identified as one of 2 people to introduce commercial peach farming into Upper Canada. Oak trees were planted on either side of the long winding drive heading towards the mansion, beginning when you turned off from the Hamilton and Nelson Gravel Road. Many of these same oak trees planted on Peter Carroll’s estate are now over 160 years old, and if you position yourself correctly on the grounds of Woodland Cemetery, it is possible to follow the route of the original laneway right to the front entrance of Rock Bay. Peter’s first home in the area, was an oversized board & batten wooden cottage, called Bayview. This building was located on the same property, and was constructed a few years before the mansion was built. When Peter was ready to move in to the larger premises, Bayview was put up for sale by auction.
 Peter Carroll was on the Board of Directors for several corporations, including the Gore Bank. This drawing is the Gore Bank office in Hamilton. Peter Carroll sits as a Director on two different banks
As Peter became more influential and powerful, he was invited to be on the Boards of several corporations, including the Bank of Brantford and the Gore Bank. In those days banks issued their own currency in the form of bank notes, but they were actually promissory notes.
A Great Western Railway “Founding Father”
While the mansion was still under construction, and even after Peter Carroll moved in, Sir Allan MacNab and Peter Carroll continued to move along fairly quickly in the business world. They believed a railway was needed to help open up southwestern Upper Canada for more European settlers who were arriving in increasing numbers.
 The Great Western Railway built train stations, bridges and track all across southwestern Upper Canada. This is a rare photograph of a very early Great Western Railway locomotive, tender and cars. One of the greatest achievements for these men, was to finally receive a charter from The Parliament of Upper Canada in 1845, to create the Great Western Railway, 7 years before The Grand Trunk Railway was incorporated in 1852. The new railway company began construction of trains stations, rail lines and bridges, mainly in southwestern Upper Canada. Rail service began in 1853. Sir Allan MacNab became President, and a group of men, mainly prominent lawyers, including Peter Carroll formed the first Board of Directors.
 The Great Western Railway was the first in Upper Canada to establish itself as a major player in the market. The drawing of the suspension bridge, a marvel for its time, shows a GTR train crossing. Peter Carroll was on The Board of Directors for the Niagara Suspension Bridge Company and The Great Western Railway Company. The Niagara Suspension Bridge
Even back in the early 1840s, before their railway charter was awarded, these men realized accessing the bigger American market was going to be key for their financial success. The Great Western Railway Board believed the rail line should one day connect to the United States by a bridge. With that decision made, Peter Carroll became a Director of the Niagara Suspension Bridge Company of Canada. The International Bridge Company of New York was the second company involved with the bridge construction. The two companies would have joint ownership. This first railway suspension bridge in North America was built across the Niagara Gorge, an expanse of 800 feet. The suspension bridge when it opened in 1855 was considered to be an engineering marvel, for its time.
In part 2 of this 2 part feature find out what happened over 100 years ago to this beautiful castle-like mansion. over 100 years ago? See 2 very rare old photographs of what Rock Bay Castle looked like. Whatever happened to Peter Carroll? Why is he not in the history books?
 By Pepper Parr
January 26, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON.
There just might be an opportunity for pilot private tree bylaw in the Roseland community.
Last week the Roseland residents met to learn what the city planning department was going to do with the recommendations made by the consultants who conducted the community character study that is now complete.
The character study done in Roseland was one of two the city had done. It wasn’t possible to arrive at any sense of consensus on the Indian Point community character study but there was much to work with in Roseland where residents resent developers buying up properties, clearing the land, demolishing a home and then seeking a variance at the Committee of Adjustment to sever the lot and build homes that many feel do not fit in with the look and feel of the community.
 A tree close to 100 years of, `honoured`by the community was cut down. The property owner has plans to seek a severance of the property. Roseland residents furious that things like this are allowed to happen. One of the issues is the cutting down of trees that are on private property. City council was not able to get a private tree bylaw passed during its last term of office. Mayor Rick Goldring was on for such a bylaw and there were several cogent, persuasive fact filled presentations made at the time but it wasn’t enough to get the four votes needed.
The Roseland residents might have created an opening for the Mayor who sat in on the meeting last week – and got more than an earful.
There was a superb opportunity for the Mayor to put forward his belief in the need for a private tree bylaw. He was given close to the last word during the meeting of residents and he made his typical comments; that he heard what they were saying and more yada, yada, yada. He did say a pilot tree bylaw was an intriguing idea. There was not even polite applause for the Mayor.
Jack Dennison, ward Councillor for the community then stood up and made his comments; thanking the planning staff and adding that it had been a productive meeting.
 Nothing unhealthy looking about this tree. Dianne Bonnell said “the level of residents’ frustration was palpable”, while another resident called the cutting down of trees an “absolute travesty” and left the room minutes later.
The residents at the meeting believed that the cutting down of 100 year old trees devalues the property of all the residents in the community and they are left feeling helpless. Some are beginning to move out of the community – they think the end of the Roseland they had chosen to live in was in sight.
What our Mayor could have done was this – told the community that he understood their frustration and that he was going to put a motion before council asking for a pilot private tree bylaw that would be restricted to the Roseland community and be in place for a number of years – three should do it.
The Mayor could have then turned to Councillor Dennison and asked him publicly if he would support such a motion.
But Rick Goldring doesn’t have that level of political chutzpah and for the next while majestic oak trees will be felled in the Roseland community.
It was a lost political opportunity for a Mayor who appears to have a tin ear when it comes to listening to the residents.
Related articles:
Council votes against a private tree bylaw.
Community survey doesn`t convince city council that private tree bylaw is needed.
 By Pepper Parr
January 26, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON.
Ray Rivers, our political columnist is in New Zealand – spending as much time as he can fishing.
 Gazette political columnist heads for the ocean hoping to catch enough fish for a family dinner. He kind of likes the idea of not having to shovel snow. Through the magic of the internet he is able to keep up with events in Canada and will write next about the difficulties a delay in delivering the budget means to everyday people.
Budgets are complex documents and involve every department of the federal government. The change in world oil prices has created close to total havoc with the budget the federal government was expected to deliver in March.
Rivers was a federal bureaucrat for more than twenty years – he has worked on putting together the operating level of budgets for several departments. Later this week he will talk about just what is probably going on within the federal bureaucracy. His political experience allows him to explain how a government puts a spin on a budget.
The impact of those oil price changes are spinning everything for governments around the world. They just might force Alberta into creating a sales tax – and once that tax is in place it might never get lifted.
Big changes – Rivers will write about them in his next column.
 By Ray Rivers
January 20, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON
For a long while now I have criticized the federal government’s approach to managing the economy – focusing on energy exports to the exclusion of the rest of the economy.
Given the recent collapse in the global petroleum market and the United States move towards energy self-sufficiency, it is now apparent, even to the Prime Minister, that such a narrow-minded economic policy was short-sighted and dangerous.
So a new Stephen Harper is emerging, one desperately interested in doling out economic subsidies to a forgotten domestic manufacturing sector. Incentives to encourage a more diversified economy, which he now appears to appreciate, are crucial, not only for the economic health of Ontario and Quebec, but for the entire nation as a whole. So much manufacturing capacity has been lost over the past decade that today’s manufacturing sector is simply unable to make up the shortfall in national income lost by the oil exporters.
 Massive trucks haul earth that is laden with oil that has to be processed before there is a usable product. Low oil prices make this kind of operation uneconomical. Harper wasn’t the only one sleeping at the switch, thinking he could slip his way to prosperity on the petroleum gravy train. His nemesis, Russian president Putin, used his vast oil money to build his military instead of diversifying the Russian economy and now is in an even worse pickle than Canada. And then there is Mr. Harper’s former environment minister, now Alberta’s premier, who is facing a budget deficit and considering an Alberta first – a sales tax.
Not long ago, Canada had tried to bully the US into building the Keystone XL pipeline, hoping to reach Asian and European markets easier that way. But US :President Obama resisted our PM and it turns out he knew what he was doing. Nobody is going to buy dirty Alberta oil which costs more to produce than the $50 a barrel price today.
The new Republican controlled congress may still force Obama into that pipeline anyway, though I’m betting on Obama.
 Will these pipes every get buried and carry gas or bitumen to Texas or the Gulf of Mexico. The Alberta government certainly hopes they will – the environmentalists hope they get carted off somewhere else. It’s a legacy thing with the US president. Stopping Keystone, and slowing oil sands development, could be one of the few things Obama would have accomplished to help mitigate global climate change, after doing so little on that file during his eight years in office. On the other hand, Stephen Harper has done absolutely nothing about this issue.
Oh sure greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canada dipped thanks to the 2008-2010 economic recession – but, as Bill Clinton would say, that was the economy stupid. The PM likes to claim Ontario’s renewable energy and coal phase-out reductions as his, though they were made without a lick of federal support.
This PM treats anything to do with the environment as anathema. For example, the Canadian government has recently shocked the rest of the world by objecting to the protection of 76 species being added to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
 Doesn’t look like oil – but once filly processed it will fuel your car – the question is at what cost to the environment. The environment should not be an ideological issue. A sustainable global environment is no more right or left than is a healthy growing economy. Yet climate change deniers continue to dominate conservative media and politics, denying what is plainly in their faces; that last year was the warmest on record, that the polar ice caps are melting faster than ever, and that ocean water levels are rising quicker than anyone ever predicted.
It was this PM who shredded the federal Environmental Assessment Act and gutted the time-honoured Fisheries Act in order to expedite more oil-sands development. And having promised to regulate oil-sector GHG emissions, again and again, he has repeatedly refused to do so. In fact, Canada, for the third time in a row, is trying to stop our North American free trade partners (NAFTA) from investigating the environmental effects of the huge tailings ponds created for Alberta’s oil sands.
Canada’s overall contribution to global GHG emissions is relatively modest, given our small population, but those emissions are more than proportionate when compared to many more populated nations. Brian Mulroney, one of Canada’s most environmentally oriented leaders, set this nation on a course to lead the world on the climate change issue back in 1992. Today’s Conservative government has relinquished that leadership and abdicated our responsibility to the planet by pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol and attempting to disrupt other international efforts to cut GHG emissions.
 Manufacturing and product processing can become a solid core for the Ontario economy – if the needed investments in technology are made. It was during Mulroney’s time that Canada embraced the concept of sustainable development, originally defined by the Brundltand Commission in a report to the UN, titled “Our Common Future”. ‘Development that meets our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The rate of development of the oil sands is spectacular and it would be even more so were the Keystone in place and the price of oil higher.
As the PM now realizes, tempering the energy extraction business and promoting a diverse and balanced economic growth and development strategy would have made the nation and his government less vulnerable to the vagaries we are seeing today. It would also have helped in meeting even the modest climate change targets we have set for ourselves.
 Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Background links:
Canada’s Economy Economy Manufacturing Sector
Alberta Recession
Economy and Interest Rates Potential Carbon Pricing Hottest Year
Endangered Species
NAFTA and Oil Sands Rising Oceans Sustainable Development
By Pepper Parr
January 19, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON.
The city did another photo opportunity last week.
 Opened in 1965, expanded later the structure no longer meets the space needs of the city. Are there real plans for a replacement? There is a report being worked on that sets out the needs and the possibilities. The occasion was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of City Hall’s opening as the Civic Administration Building in 1965. A plaque was unveiled telling of the founding of Burlington.
The brief ceremony took place on one of the coldest days of the year when Wayne Kelly, Manager of Public Education and Community Development at the Ontario Heritage Trust delivered some remarks. Residents were invited to attend the event.
It is doubtful if there was any mention of how inefficient the building is or that it can’t hold all the people the city employs.
The Gazette didn’t cover the event – this Council didn’t need another photo opportunity.
 The building was a big deal back in 1965 – today it is too small and inefficient. What we are waiting for is the report that has been moving from desk to desk at city hall on the study of what the city has in the way of space it either owns or rents and what it is going to need in the way of space for the next 20 years.
The city currently rents space in the Sims building on the south side of Elgin where Human Resources, Finance, Purchasing, Legal and Capital Infrastructure beaver away on your behalf.
At one point it looked like the report was going to be made public before the election. Keeping that information away from the public was a smart political move and it maintained the practice of being opaque rather than transparent alive and well.
Former city manager Jeff Fielding had all kinds of ideas about where a city hall should be located and, had he stayed and completed his contract, there would have been all kinds of activity – that was just the way Fielding worked.
The file has been in the hands of the Capital Infrastructure people – once Council decides on who they want as a city manager it might see the light of day. For the time being the best citizens are going to get is some words from Wayne Kelly about how the city hall we have now came to be.
 The Sims building is more efficient than city hall. The city has leased space in the structure for some time; paid enough in rent argues Councillor Jack Dennison to have paid for the thing. The lease on the Sims building is due for renewal this year. There will probably be a short term lease renewal while the city gets its act together. The owner of the Sims building will push for a bit more than a short term renewal; they need the city as a tenant – at least until the Economic Development Corporation brings a company to town that will hire people for those high-tech, high paying jobs the city drools about having.
 The HiVe, one of the smartest ideas to settle in the downtown core has found that its costs are more than its revenue – they plan to move. The support they could have and should have gotten from the city just didn’t appear. Meanwhile The Hive over on Elizabeth Street, one of the smarter ideas to settle in the downtown core, has found that the rent they have to pay is more than the revenue they are bringing in – so they will be leaving the core and looking for digs that are less expensive.
None of this got mentioned during the plaque unveiling or while people were enjoying the refreshments at city hall.
By Ray Rivers
January 12, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON
Stephen Harper has been PM since 2006, almost a decade. Although there have been longer-lived governments, his is looking particularly tired these days. The enthusiastic thrust to re-engineer Canada’s Senate, by a younger-day Stephen, has fallen off the face of the earth.
 Harper can be very combative – he gives as good as he gets. Canadians have a very significant decision to make in October of this year. Likewise, the PM’s zeal to transform Canadian society and re-mould it into the image of the US Tea-Party has mostly run out of steam. And the consequences of ideologically-driven gutting of the Public Service, to make it smaller, are coming home to us in the form of dangerously poor food inspection, back-logged immigration files, failing rail safety and neglected war veterans.
With an economics graduate at the helm, one would expect Canada’s economy to be cruising along closer to an A rather than the middling C we see today, or the D we expect in the future as oil prices continue to tank. Putting so many of our eggs in the petroleum basket has turned out to be a foolish ploy, even for oil-rich Alberta.
And despite all the ballyhooed cost-cutting, this government has run up as much debt as Pierre Trudeau did in all his years in office, though still not as big a hole as the one Brian Mulroney left us. Should the PM manage to balance the 2015 budget he would still have presided over 7 years of deficit budgets. And the Tories’ only two surplus budgets were handed to them on a platter by former Finance Minister, Paul Martin.
 Senator Wallin and Prime Minister Harper during better times. Yes, there was a recession and Mr. Harper reluctantly opened the national purse when our economy hit the skids in 2008, giving Canada its highest deficit ever the following year. Harper became a convert to Keynesian economics as did other nations which came out of the recession relatively quickly. And Canada’s banking system was able to withstand the kinds of shocks that crippled inferior systems in other places, like the Eurozone.
 Stephen Harper in Calgary earlier in his career. But Keynes would never have advised shameless waste, such as Canadians experienced with the $1.2 billion Harper poured into the one- week G20/G8 party for world leaders in 2010. And the money? Well It pretty much went into that artificial lake, built right on the shore of a real Lake Ontario; into lavish pork-barrel construction projects in Huntsville; and into all that shameful repressive policing that stained Canada’s civil rights record so badly even Rob Ford complained.
 It’s called “tanking” – a procedure the police used to restrain people who just happened to be in a part of Toronto during the G20 conference. It is seen as a major stain on Canada’s civil rights record. The policing alone cost one hundred million dollars, and was overseen by OPP commissioner, Julian Fantino. Fantino, for some reason, had become hot political property after being released as Toronto police chief in the mid-2000s. Both major political parties chased after him like foxes after a rabbit, hoping to snare his apparent star quality. But Fantino was destined to end up in Mr. Harper’s camp. After all, he is the Stephen Harper tough-cop.
Perhaps neither Harper, nor McGuinty who appointed him provincial police commissioner, had spent much time reading his full resume, highlights of which include various accusations of illegal wiretaps, corruption, harassing the LBGT community and incurring the wrath of Ontario’s aboriginals.
But Fantino pleased Harper – he was a lone voice among law enforcement professionals as he opposed the long-gun registry. The two had colluded on Harper’s signature ‘retro’ Safe Streets crime bill. And it was Fantino, of course, who oversaw the security debacle for the federal government’s G8 summit.
 Julian Fantino served as a police chief in several major Ontario communities; went on to become the Commissioner of the Provincial Police and then got himself elected to the House of Commons and became a Cabinet Minister. It all looks good on a resume – but there wasn’t much done that should be remembered. So it is little wonder that Harper welcomed Fantino into Cabinet immediately after he won a 2010 by-election for the Tories. And Fantino dutifully served his master in a number of minor portfolios. That is until he was promoted to be the Minister of Veterans Affairs, a natural and deserved placement for such an experienced security professional.
But last week the PM had to fire his appointee and reassign him back to where he could do less harm. Although Fantino had a nasty habit of insulting his clients – our veterans – it took a scandal, where a billion dollars slipped through his hands while veterans were left in need, to get him removed.
Julian Fantino is symptomatic of what is wrong with Mr. Harper’s government and why the Tories are puttering in the polls, except in Alberta, of course. It’s not just the thuggish behaviour or the lack of compassion, which unfortunately characterizes this Conservative government. It’s about the government’s performance.
 Now in a minor Cabinet role, Fantino will have to pull in the Italian vote in the province – can he even be re-elected? Today’s Conservative political platform is really just so yesterday. After nearly a decade with the same old gang in Ottawa, voters are looking for the ‘refresh’ button. Despite all that budget cutting and public service bleeding, voters are asking where the benefits are.
This upcoming election will be about fairness; about reducing the ever-increasing spread between the rich and the poor; and about the place of the middle class. It will be about building much needed infrastructure and restoring economic prosperity across all regions of Canada. And it will be about preparing to meet the demands on our society from an aging population.
Julian Fantino fits that demographic but he still plans to run again in 2015. Should the voters give him another chance and the Tories win again, it is questionable whether he would be given a new Cabinet position. And if he didn’t get re-elected? Well he has had an outstanding career for someone who started out as a mall cop, and someone who had to volunteer before the police would even hire him.
Fantino should know, however, that he may not even get re-nominated. After all his boss has a nasty reputation for cutting his losses, and throwing those who screw up under the bus – just ask Duffy. So I’m guessing we’ll hear a swan song at an upcoming retirement party, sooner than later.
 Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Background links:
Fantino
G20/8 Veterans Affairs Demoting Fantino Top Ontario Cop
G8 Secret Law G8 Civil Liberties More G8 Even More G8
Fantino in Cabinet Latest Polls Alberta Oil
Economy
By Gary Scobie
January 5, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON
A four part feature on the city’s decision to sell small parcels of land that it owns that fronts on to Lake Ontario between Market and St. Paul Street. Part 2: The Scobie delegation.
I come here today with some hope in my heart. We have a new Council in session, and though the names and faces remain the same, we on the Waterfront Committee are hoping that perhaps, in the spirit of renewal of your vows to do what is best for all citizens of Burlington, you rethink this issue of selling public waterfront owned by all of us to a few chosen citizens.
 Gary Scobie delegating on behalf of the Burlington Waterfront Committee to stop the sale of waterfront property owned by the city. We have a grand vision; it’s actually a hundred year vision, not unlike the vision of the Waterfront Trust and their Ontario Waterfront Trail. Their vision is to link the public to their waterfront and to establish a contiguous walking trail along the shores of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario first and next Lake Erie, followed by all the Great Lakes on our border. Theirs is certainly a long term vision.
Our vision in Burlington is to have a contiguous walking trail along our Lake Ontario and Burlington Bay shorelines. Each Window to the Lake is like a pearl; each trail between them is like a strand, so the end result would be like a strand of pearls along our shoreline. It could be magnificent.
This vision may seem unrealistic, yet big visions have been hatched and developed in our area before, with great success over time. My wife and I belong to the Bruce Trail Conservancy. The Conservancy is celebrating its 50th anniversary of inception in 2014. In 1964, a small group of dedicated visionaries imagined a natural walking path along the entire length of the Niagara Escarpment, from Queenston to Tobermory.
An “Optimum Route” was mapped out and volunteers began to work with local governments, landowners, conservation authorities and other naturalist groups to create this path on a protected from development basis. Their vision was certainly long term and audacious. Fifty years on, half of the 880 kilometer trail is secure in Conservancy hands or in the hands of government agencies.
The other 50% is either trail on private lands with landowner permission or routes on public roads where permission or ownership has not yet been attained. Will it take another 50 years to secure the whole trail? Perhaps, and maybe even longer, but the vision is still intact and progress toward the goal continues every single year.
This is what can happen when there is leadership and there is a grand vision. The same thing can happen over the next hundred years if we in Burlington dedicate ourselves to this mission.
 Gary Scobie thought this could become one of the strands in the string of waterfront pearls that would become a complete Burlington Waterfront Trail. We thought last year that we had a chance to put a strand in place between the Market and St. Paul Street Windows to the Lake. It didn’t even seem bold, since the land was already in public hands. A staff recommendation, with advice from the City’s Legal Department, recommended that the lands be retained for a future parkette and Waterfront Trail between the Windows.
This future trail would be similar, yet different to the Waterfront Trail at Sioux Lookout Park between Guelph Line and Walkers Line. It would have a good length, about two-thirds of that at Sioux Lookout, but would be quieter and more natural because it would be away from Lakeshore Road noise and activity, buffered by the houses between the trail and the main road. And instead of having two static “no exit” Windows at St. Paul and Market, the public would get a through trail whether coming from east or west.
An ideal place to walk or cycle through or take a break on a bench beside the trail and the shore while moving along the Waterfront Trail. Again, similar but different than the experience at Sioux Lookout.
But something unexpected happened. For reasons still not adequately explained to the public, the “old” Council discussed the issue in a closed session, then voted to sell the land, against staff and legal recommendations to retain it. Before our first strand had been completed, we saw a knife slice it and dash our hopes for the future.
 Gary Scobie, second from the left, was part of the city’s Waterfront Advisory Committee and went on to be part of the Burlington Waterfront Committee. Councillor Marianne Meed Ward is on the far right. Despite overwhelming numbers of delegates appearing here on October 13, 2013 to ask you to retain this shoreline land versus delegates asking to sell; despite overwhelming emails received urging retention versus sale, the “old” Council reversed the proportions and overwhelmingly voted 6 to 1 to sell the land, without any evidence given whatsoever that the broader public endorsed this view and the denial it imposed, possibly forever, of a public shoreline pathway there.
But a “new” Council may yet listen to our voices and the voices of neighboring residents and citizens who can see and share this vision of a start to the string of pearls that parkettes between Windows can be. We ask that you do not approve the sale of these lands to private interests and that you dedicate yourselves to preserving, not selling public waterfront. We ask that you look to ways to make use of other Water St. shore lands to form future strands. We ask that you look at ways that new development and re-development along our shores can create Waterfront Trail sections for the public. We ask that you consider what Burlington could be a long way down the road and that you buy into this long term vision, not put a dagger in its heart at its very inception.
Yesterday I received up updated advisory email from Marlaine Koehler, Executive Director of the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, amending her Jan 20, 2014 memo to Council. In it she states their position might not have been clear then, in light of newer information.
The Waterfront Regeneration Trust’s position today is:
1. Public lands on the Great Lakes waterfront should stay in the public realm and accommodate the Waterfront Trail. Burlington was one of the founders of the Trail.
2. If in fact, the land sale can be revisited, The Waterfront Regeneration Trust urges the City to do so, and retain ownership/interest in the lands so that they may eventually be incorporated into Burlington’s Great Lakes waterfront system.
So today you will decide to send a clear message that Burlington either supports the Waterfront Trail or that it doesn’t.
 No city signage on this piece of city owned property. Plans are in place to make a proper Window on the Lake at this location. Burlington – Best Mid-Size City. Burlington – Family Friendly. Burlington – Urban and Rural. Burlington – Lake and Escarpment. In Burlington, we celebrate and boast of our waterfront. A decision now to sell means we will be adding a new moniker – Burlington – Public Waterfront For Sale.
Please stop these sales and approve your original staff recommendation to retain the land.
Gary Scobie has been around election issues for a long time. He was raised in Dundas, stayed there until graduating from McMaster, and considers Dundas his home town. He began working in Burlington in 1979 and has resided here since 1980. He has been involved in waterfront issues for the past six years and is a member of the Burlington Waterfront Committee.
Scobie was the lone delegator on the matter of the recommendation to stop up and close Water St. land parcels and sell the property to the three abutting property owners.
Links:
Part 1 How the decision to sell the waterfront property got made.
 By Staff
January 4, 2015
BURLINGTON, ON.
Ray Rivers will not be with us this week. He is in New Zealand pondering what he wants to do in 2015 and doing some R&R with his wife who is a New Zealander.
 Gazette columnist Ray Rivers checking out local media in New Zealand. Grandchildren, family dinners with copious amount of wine and good conversation will keep him busy until we see him back in Canada at the end of February.
He will write his column from New Zealand and will appear every second week.
Meanwhile he peruses the local media.
 By Staff
December 30, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON
The Globe and Mail editorial of December 27, 2014 sums up the year and the ongoing performance of our Prime Minister. We saw that editorial as significant enough to re-print it.
 Columnist Ray Rivers on sabbatical enjoying a beach in New Zealand – that is really green grass in the background. Our regular political columnist, Ray Rivers, is currently on a short two month sabbatical and will be writing once every two weeks. He wanted to comment on this editorial. His remarks are shown in a different typeface,
From the Globe and Mail: I can’t even get my friends to like me,” Stephen Harper said this year. A joke, obviously, delivered during a moving eulogy for his close friend and political ally Jim Flaherty in April. But more than a joke, too.
The Prime Minister has never been the cuddliest of humans; he was once photographed shaking his young son’s hand as he dropped him off at school.
It is a mistake for us to believe Canadian’s falling support for Mr. Harper is about his personality. He is an introvert, which is not his fault. His trailing Trudeau in the polls has more to do with most Canadians feeling we are going in the wrong direction and could be doing better. It is more about his policies (than his personality) which are divisive – pitting the west against the east, a cynical foreign policy based on ethnocentric values, and stale economic policies which are serving to widen the wealth gap among Canadians.
That formality can be a strength in crises. After the two attacks on Canadian soldiers in October, Mr. Harper’s natural gravitas was reassuring to Canadians. It even gave his party a noticeable bump in the polls in November.
But the ring of truth in Mr. Harper’s quip reverberates less because of his solemn demeanour than it does because of the unyielding way he plays political hardball. The Prime Minister is not someone you want as a friend, politically-speaking, and much less someone you’d want as an enemy.
Not a friend and not an enemy – what does that leave us with? There are times when his demeanour makes us admire him, as in his response post the Parliament Hill fiasco. But then his lack of breadth of vision leaves us to wonder if he gets it at all. Somehow It doesn’t sink into his think skull that the shooting is the kind of thing that should be expected when you abolish the long gun registry, or jump into a war. Oh and Mr. tough guy hid in a closet during the incident, mimicking his own ‘Bush-like’ 911 courage.
He fights ruthlessly and without remorse. He dumps inconvenient allies, sows division with abandon, treats Parliament with contempt and works 24/7 to control what Canadians know and hear about him, usually through the hearty application of muzzles and misdirection.
I’d agree that he governs in an autocratic manner and is control-freak possessed, banning public contact with the public service, for example. Sometimes I wonder if he has not been understudying Mr. Putin. And his lack of loyalty to those who did his dirty work does not wear well on him. I’d add Duffy, Wright, Wallin to that list.
That’s not news, and nor is it all that peculiar to one politician. But, in 2014, the Prime Minister’s bloody-mindedness began to feel like a liability. With him as leader, the party has consistently trailed Justin Trudeau’s kinder, gentler Liberals in the polls in spite of the country’s relatively stable economy. If the Conservatives under Mr. Harper lose the general election next fall, this year may be remembered as the one when Canadians, including members of the Conservative Party, decided their leader’s ruthlessness was no longer worth the cost.
If Harper loses it will be because Canadians want a fresh face and a fresh approach to governing – out with the old divisiveness and back to some core Canadian ‘liberal democratic values’ such as fairness (e.g. how the PM mis-treats Ontario and Quebec).
One of the more telling moments of 2014 came the day after an armed man had stormed Parliament and been killed within metres of a room where Mr. Harper was meeting with his caucus. The morning was marked by sadness and courage as MPs returned to the House of Commons in a display of solidarity; the Prime Minister spoke movingly about the symbolic importance of Parliament, and he even gamely walked across the floor to hug the Leader of the Opposition, Tom Mulcair, and Mr. Trudeau.
And then, several hours later, the Harper government dumped another monstrous omnibus bill onto the Commons, an act knowingly contemptuous of the Parliament the Prime Minister had just praised as the lodestar of Canadian democracy.
Omnibus bills are designed to defeat Parliament’s oversight role. The thick bills allow majority governments to push through major policy changes with little debate by combining multiple unrelated issues into one over-sized turkey. They are an abuse of process; the Conservatives have tabled four since 2010, and the most recent was the second largest.
Mr. Harper was also a repeat offender in 2014 with regard to the dispatching of belligerent junior ministers and hapless parliamentary secretaries to defend problematic legislation in the House or derail Question Period. Pierre Poilievre’s smarmy sales job of the flawed Fair Elections Act and his subsequent climb-down in April were the low points of the year. Or would have been, had not Paul Calandra reduced himself to tears in September after a demeaning display of question-dodging on Mr. Harper’s behalf.
That is a good point, that while previous governments have employed omnibus bills to move milestone, ‘sea change’ policies, Harper appears to use the approach more cynically, to hide stuff. Former justice minister Trudeau used omnibus legislation to make Canada a world leader in social policy under the Pearson government – but it was consistent and transparent.
Both incidents embarrassed some Conservatives as much as they outraged opposition MPs.
This was also the year a former Conservative MP, Dean Del Mastro, was convicted of overspending his campaign limit and trying to cover it up, and a former party staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted in the robo-call scandal. Mr. Harper has distanced himself from both men and their actions, of course, as he did with his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, who somehow believed it was appropriate to pay off the ineligible expenses of a Conservative senator in 2013. No one would dare say that the Prime Minister endorses unethical activities, but there are people in his party who think that anything goes.
And why wouldn’t they? Mr. Harper showed in 2014 that he will play with his elbows out even in the most inappropriate situation. That brings us to Beverly McLachlin, the respected Chief Justice of the Supreme Court whose integrity the Prime Minister deliberately impugned in an absurd and indefensible fashion. He raised a doubt about whether Ms. McLachlin had interfered with the appointment of a new judge, and was then exposed for being completely and knowingly wrong. His grievous misjudgment demonstrated once and for all that there is no Canadian institution he considers sacred if it stands in his way.
There is no excuse for Mr. Harper’s attempt to embarrass the senior justice of the country – in the end he only embarrassed himself. If he so lacks respect for our fundamental institutions – why should anyone respect him or his?
Other consequences of Mr. Harper’s antipathy to Parliament and to Canadian institutions in 2014 included but were not limited to two crime bills that were sent to the Senate containing serious errors, the use of taxpayer dollars on government advertising that happens to align with Conservative election promises, and a new prostitution law that is likely to fail a Charter challenge, and which police forces across the country have little intention of enforcing, thanks to the government’s refusal to listen to contrary opinions while the bill was in that former house of debate we know as Parliament.
It is remarkable that having seen the existing prostitution law thrown out by the courts as dangerous to the security of sex workers, his justice minister brings in a replacement which is even worse. A clear case of ideology trumping competence.
Ask Mr. Harper how it’s going after almost nine years in office and he – along with every single member of his party – will robotically respond that his government is continuing to fight for hard-working Canadian families and lowering their taxes. It’s a spiel that talks past his government’s many flaws. Mr. Harper is responsible for those flaws, which are mirror images of his own, and gets the credit for his party’s successes. Those include an economy that is not great but better than most, shrinking deficits, a real attempt to reform immigration and native education, tax cuts targeted at core constituencies and the effort to help defeat Islamic State in Iraq.
Not a bad record. The question in 2015 will be, Is it worth it? Or could someone else, inside or outside the party, achieve results on the same scale while respecting Parliament and setting a higher ethical standard?
No its not a bad record, except for all the deficiencies the G&M notes. Mr. Harper set out as PM to transform Canada, to make it a nation that more closely reflects his own values, some of which we agree with. And to some extent he has been successful in shaping attitudes and developing a following. How many followers we will only know after the next election, when we put to the real test whether his lagging poll numbers mean anything at all.
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
By Ray Rivers
December 26, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
Canada faces an important federal election this year. There will be clear choices for the voters because the philosophies of the Liberals and Conservatives are so different. The NDP has been an effective opposition, but few Canadians are convinced that the party has much to offer, and expect the NDP to almost certainly fall back to its traditional third place standing.
The Harper government introduced a fixed-date election law back in 2007, which ordinarily would mean an election be held on the 3rd Monday of October this coming year. But a debate is emerging  about whether the PM will go to the voters earlier, arguably breaking his own law in the interests of political expediency.
Driving that speculation is consideration of Canada’s external rather than internal environment. I’’m not talking about ISIS, Iran and North Korea. These are merely distractions from the important global geo-political conflict – the one looming in eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin’s latest aggressions have plunged the world back into cold war mode with a potential for much more significant consequences.
Mr. Harper was foremost among world leaders in condemning Putin’s actions. And he will find enhanced electoral support among Ukrainian Canadians for his strong stand, much as he has found among some Jewish voters, who support his one-sided pro-Israeli policies. But it is the economic consequences of this conflict which will determine his timing on the election.
 Pipes waiting for US government approval before they can be buried and used to carry oil from the Alberta tar sands. It’s mostly all about oil prices. The Saudis and Americans are flooding the market with cheap oil, Russia’s main export and the basis of that nation’s economic strength. Since the price of oil has fallen to less than $50 per barrel, the Ruble has been cut in half and the country is now facing a major recession. In this way, oil pricing has turned out to be even more effective than sanctions at hurting Putin’s Russia, though neither appear to be able to curb his aggressive tendencies
 Harper government waits patiently for some movement on the Keystone pipeline that is supposed to carry oil from Alberta to US markets. Canada’s economy is also dependent on oil prices, though to a lesser extent than Russia. Since becoming PM, Harper has made the export of oil the central pillar of his economic policy, while jeopardizing our agriculture sector through new trade initiatives, and virtually ignoring Canada’s industrial base. Labelled the ‘Dutch Disease’, we have watched manufacturing and other industries in Ontario and Quebec die-off as oil exports lifted our loonie, thereby making Canadian goods and services less competitive globally.
Having cut corporate and other taxes, the federal budget has become more reliant on oil patch revenues than ever. And it was income from oil that was going to take Canada into the ‘black’ just in time for the PM’s 2015 budget. But, now, that is unlikely to happen, and the longer oil prices stay depressed, the bigger the deficit we can expect in 2015.
Harper has put a lot of his eggs into demonstrating his prowess at managing the economy, so showing up at election time with a big deficit in the basket is not what he wants. The betting is that he’ll call a spring election rather than risk facing the public come October when he is deeper in the red.
A spring election would also keep him ahead of the investigations into Senate-gate (Duffy, Wallin). And the Tory election machine is reportedly better funded, staffed and organized than either of the opposition parties. So why not?
Lower oil prices are good for consumers, the folks voting, balanced budget or not. It’s no secret that contented voters often share their good will by voting for the status quo. After-all, when you can put the savings from that last fill-up towards your child’s new I-Pad life looks more pleasant.
Harper’s throw-back social policies (mandatory jail, drugs, prostitution) or his assault on the environment (environmental assessment, Fisheries Act, Climate Change) may seem more academic than material when gas prices are lower and the man in charge seems to look like he knows what he is doing.
The situation in Europe seems relatively stable, if uncertain, but it could change rapidly as these things do sometimes. Recall how nobody expected the first world war to last very long – but it did. And Mr. Harper has cultivated a ‘tough guy’ image which would benefit him were we suddenly thrust into some kind of serious conflict over there.
The truth is that Canada has been criticized by NATO for underspending on its military and has cut defence spending even more – in order to achieve what now appears to an elusive balanced budget. And perhaps, in a time of war, people might reflect on just how poorly this government treats our veterans in need.
So it sure looks like a spring election is in the cards this New Year. Have a happy New Year however you decide to cast your ballot.
Background links:
Fixed Elections Law Russia Conflcit Dutch Disease
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Ray will be having his Christmas Dinner in an airport somewhere as he wings his way to New Zealand where he will vacation, ponder and continue working on his second book, His regular column will appear every second week; in between will be a short photo essay on life on the other side of the world.
 By Ray Rivers
December 20, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
The federal government spends $43 billion (2011/12), which is about half of all direct program spending, on human resources. That averages out to an annual $115,000 salary for each of the 375,000 full time employees who make up your federal government.
Those salaries, according to the Parliamentary budget officer, have been growing at a faster rate than either the private or the provincial public sector, notwithstanding the federal government’s promised austerity program.
 Workers in the Ontario Public Sector also do well, receiving higher pay and bigger raises than their private sector counterparts. This can be a bit of an unfair comparison, given the extensive breadth of private employment.
Still the difference is striking, with an average hourly pay rate of $34 for the public servant as opposed to $25 across the private sector. And, this gap has been widening over the years.
Nobody objects to value for money and most of us believe that a better educated employee should generate improved productivity. So part of the reason for the gap may be that Ontario public servants, on the whole, are much better educated than their private sector counterparts, with relatively twice as many holding university degrees (41% to 20%).
The Harris government introduced the ‘Sunshine List’ which identified those public servants earning over $100,000. Today that list includes almost 90.000 employees, having grown by 39% since 2009. While public sector incomes were once said to be pulled-up by the private sector it is evident that the reverse is true today. Generally one can assume that the public employee is as well or better paid than most equivalent jobs in the private sector, including many non-government senior executives.
So what about all those outrageous and improper executive expense claims? The 2015 Pan-Am games are an important economic event for this province and for Canada. There is a 17 member organizing committee, which will have been paid about $21 million of your hard-earned dollars by the time the games are on. The CEO, alone, pulls in over half a million a year.
 In spite of what most people would consider generous compensation these characters have been submitting their personal expense claims as if they were understudying Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin. Hundreds of airline flights over were made the last four years, including one to watch a wake-boarding championship in the Caymans . Three thousand dollars was paid for fourteen limo rides from the airport ($238 per trip)?
And why do we have to send this ‘high-priced help’ back to school to take courses in strategic planning and writing – at public expense? What were they thinking when they purchased over a thousand dollars worth of Harry Rosen dress shirts, ostensibly for team uniforms? There was a wine tasting, loads of lunches with alcoholic beverages, and don’t forget the overpriced orange juice. Though, caught squirming in the cookie jar, they eventually paid-back some of the claims, again taking a page out of the Duffy/Wallin playbook.
This expense claim business is not limited to the Pan-Am crowd. The Hamilton Spectator uncovered that our Hamilton-centered health executives (including Burlington) had racked up over $2 million dollars in expenses over the past seven years. Fully a quarter of these expenses were claimed by the top executives, including the CEO of Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) who earns close to $700,000.
Corruption might be too strong a word but greed pretty well sums it up. We have been taught that money is the major motivator for an individual to perform; and that high salaries are the price we have to pay for good executive decision-making. Yet, we paid over a million dollars to the CEO of Hydro One whose organization was brutally criticized for incompetence by the provincial Auditor General in her latest report. So much for that theory!
So if paying big bucks to a CEO doesn’t guarantee a well run organization, what does it promote? Entitlement? I’d be very surprised if HHS couldn’t find someone else who could run that organization at least as well, for half the salary they’re now paying – much as Burlington’s Joseph Brant does.
Lofty titles, fat salary packages and lavish expense accounts might be very comforting to the recipients of these perks, but personal achievement, peer competition and helping the public likely play a much more important role in motivating public leaders and getting results. Mike Harris was on to a good thing in creating the ‘Sunshine List’ and it is unfortunate he didn’t go the extra step of capping all public service executive salaries, as the Province is rumoured to be considering today.
Yet, the truth is that Ontario’s public sector is already leaner than every other province in Canada. And the government actually has fewer public sector workers and spends less on them per capita than any other province. After all, being the most populous province in the union gives us the advantage of economies of scale.
 But Ontario is in the process of fighting a massive deficit and combating an overbearing public debt. So while reducing senior executive salaries will not solve that problem on its own, it would be a good start. And better expenses management should be a no-brainer.
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Background links:
Federal Employment Provincial Employment
Pan-Am Games Pan-Am Expenses
Pan-Am Expenses More Pan-Am Expenses Still More Pan-Am Even More Pan-Am –
Sunshine List Average Earning by Province
Capping Exec Salaries Motivating Employees Capping Exec Salaries
 By Pepper Parr
December 17, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
What’s the rush?
Has your city Council let the holiday schedule deprive you of an opportunity to review what they have done at their Standing Committees before they rubber stamp their deliberations at Council where bylaws get passed?
The Standing Committee of Development and Infrastructure met on Monday and got a solid briefing on what the Economic Development Corporation has planned. There was a public meeting on a sub-division application for Twelve Mile Trail.
 Route 6 and 52 will stay as the are for now. Took close to an hour to make that decision. There was a review of transit service for the Headon Road part of town – routes 6 and 52 during which Councillor Dennison managed to use more than half an hour trying to work out all the twists and turns the buses on that route should take.
There was a lot of huffing and puffing over what a municipal council can and can’t do with development applications.
The following day, Tuesday, the Corporate and Community Services committee met and accepted the staff recommendation to sell the lands along the edge of the lake between Market and St. Paul Street.
 Mayor Golding mastered the art of the photo op during his first term of office. He is photogenic and that is apparently enough to get elected. We heard, for the first time, what the Mayor’s thinking was on that momentous decision. It was kind of wishy washy.
The Standing Committee approved 56 pages of changes in rates and fees – those are dollars that you will pay for the use of facilities that your tax dollars paid to have built.
The chair of each standing Committee diligently explains that the Committee does not make final decisions – they make recommendations that go to Council where final decisions are made and by laws are passed.
The practice in Burlington has been for there to be a full week, usually more, for the public to make themselves aware of what has been recommended before it goes to Council.
The public then has some time to think about was has been recommended and appear at Council if they want to offer a different opinion.
In a democracy the elected would welcome – maybe even encourage the public to appear and make their views known so that the elected could make decisions informed by the public.
Some might suggest that the media is in place to inform the public. And it is – but there has been a strange twist. The Burlington Post usually has a reporter at the media table covering meetings.
Tina Depko –Denver covers city hall for the Post – she is a good reporter – she frequently does a better job as a reporter than I do.
She wasn’t at the media table on Tuesday. Why?
We learned at the end of the Standing Committee meeting that Ms Depko –Denver has been hired by the Mayor as his Manager of Communications.
We congratulate Ms Depko-Denver and hope she serves the Mayor well and that she chooses to take direction from the Junius quote atop the Globe and Mail editorial page: “The subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures”.
Junius, a pseudonym, wrote letters between 1769 and 1762 to inform the public of their historical and constitutional rights and liberties as Englishmen.
The Depko-Denver appointment probably means that the Post will not carry much in the way of news coverage unless they pick up the meeting from the webcast.
The Gazette will publish several pieces on the two Standing Committee meetings and go into some depth on the atrocious decision to sell waterfront property.
City Hall will close down at the end of the day on Tuesday, the 23rd and we won’t see anyone other than the people who keep the building secure until after the New Year. The holiday schedule for city hall is CLOSED between Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2014, reopening on Monday, Jan. 5, 2015. Sweet!
 Is there a good reason for not deferring the Council meeting until after the New Year? Well one reason is that would be a lot of time for people to become informed and perhaps “mad as hell” and decide they don’t want to be treated this way anymore.
We did get the municipal government we apparently wanted less than 60 days ago.
What have we done to ourselves?
By Pepper Parr
December 11, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
One of the things the internet does is give those with something they want to say a much bigger megaphone.
Hydro costs have been a bugbear for Ontarians for some time – one of the Harris government’s gifts to us.
The natives are still biting back – another petition. The organizers of this one ask:
 Hydro in Ontario has been broken for some time. It is essential that it be fixed – the solution is not yet clear, “If you have a billing complaint with hydro one, please make sure you file a complaint with the Ombudsman as he begins his investigation into Hydro One. Click here to file your complaint.
“And if you haven’t yet, please make sure you share your concerns about Ontario’s broken hydro system directly with the Premier, the Minister of Energy, the Ontario Energy Board and Hydro One.
The problem with the petition is its source. Randy Hillier was part of the government that created the problem we have today. Is the petition part of his drive to at some point lead the Progressive Conservative party in Ontario? His views and solutions to some of the provinces problems would take Ontario back to where Mike Harris put us and to where Tim Hudak wanted to keep us.
The province is going through a profound change; the core of its economic engine is threatened and in some cases fractured. General Motors is moving its assembly lines to Mexico.
The province faces a huge demographic shift; we are now a much more demographically diversified people and we have a growing seniors’ population that we have to care for at considerable cost.
Adjusting to these changes is going to take political leadership that looks forward and not backwards. Randy Hillier is as backward looking as you can get.
The petition has merit – the guy behind it; questionable.
A Petition to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario
To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:
Whereas, the cost of electricity in Ontario continues to escalate;
And Whereas, other charges associated with electricity, such as delivery, regulatory, global adjustment and debt retirement charges make electricity increasingly unaffordable;
And Whereas, these costs have imposed a significant hardship on ratepayers and driven industry and jobs out of Ontario;
We, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario as follows:
That the Premier and the Minister of Energy reduce the waste and duplication in Ontario’s electricity sector and other necessary steps to lower the cost of electricity so that Ontario’s electricity prices are competitive with other jurisdictions.
Sign here:
Ray Rivers
December 11, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
The provincial Auditor General (AG) is an essential part of a system of good government. Being independent and reporting directly to the Legislative Assembly, the auditor “conducts value-for-money and financial audits of the provincial government”. The 2014 report targeted a number of areas including infrastructure, child care and energy (smart meters).
 The office of the AG is not inexpensive, chewing up over $15 million dollars annually and employing about a dozen people each year. This year’s report weighed in at 600 pages, more than twice the size of the New Testament. And though the language is simpler than what we find in the Bible, there is so much redundancy and superfluous description interspersed among all the pretty graphics, that it is might also be as good a remedy for insomnia as some find in the pews of their church.
I have been involved in audit processes at both federal and provincial levels over the years. For the most part the auditors work closely with government officials, and in many cases simply regurgitate what they were told by officials – making for few surprises for the officials. That seems to be the case when this year’s report examined the processes for building infrastructure; 74 building projects were considered.
The AG noted that the “tangible costs (such as construction, financing, legal services, engineering services and project management services) were estimated to be nearly $8 billion higher than… if the projects were contracted out and managed by the public sector.” That waste of money seems logical given the complications and extra rewards required for private sector involvement.
But Infrastructure Ontario officials justified this additional expense arguing that “the risks of having the projects not being delivered on time and on budget were about five times higher if the public sector directly managed these projects.” They estimated this risk at $18.6 billion making the, so-called, alternate financing partnership a no-brainer for them. But are they really serious – five times?
Me thinks that something is rotten in the state of the Ontario public service. Not much wonder the recent billion-dollar gas plant relocation fiasco was handled so casually. Why isn’t the management at Infrastructure Ontario saying WTF, or better still doing something to change that statistic (five times the risk)?
 The technology was going to let the consumer make choices. Following the Harris/Eves government screw-up of the energy file (de-regulation and privatization), politicians jumped onto the smart meter bandwagon as a panacea for spiraling electricity costs. The AG attacks the decision-making process and much of her criticism centres on a cost-benefit feasibility study performed, after-the-fact. Imaginary numbers (guesstimates) lie at the heart of her criticism.
 They were going to change the way we used electricity. In addition, she fairly critiques the lack of oversight on implementation, accountability and general management, particularly for the Hydro One empire. That smart meters may be an essential piece of infrastructure in a transition towards more efficient energy delivery and providing greater control of one’s hydro bill to the consumer is not really something the AG considers, nor perhaps should.
And sometimes the AG isn’t very insightful or even helpful, as when she concluded that there was a “need to provide ministry and agency staff with training to help them do their work more consistently and effectively” for the Child Care, Parole Board, Nominee, and Residential Services for People with Development Disabilities programs. Isn’t that just good counsel for all employees, regardless of program?
 The provincial government used some very creative accounting to approve a loan to complete a building in downtown Toronto that was far from fully rented. The AG also followed up on whether the government had paid attention to previous recommendations and whether the culprits had cleaned up their acts as a result. Of the 77 recommendations, requiring 170 actions, from the 2012 report, she noted that 81% of had been “either fully implemented or are in the process.”
Impressed with this statistic, one might question whether the AG shouldn’t be brought in earlier – to help program managers’ better design and implement their responsibilities. But that would, of course, shift her role to being both the prosecution and the defence, and immerse her office in a huge conflict of interest.
As the report notes, the mandate for the AG is fairly broad but it is limited to the activities within government ministries and agencies. So it is at some risk to her office that the AG ventures into criticizing general public policy, as she does when slamming provincial deficit and debt levels. “Ultimately, the question of how much debt the province should carry and the strategies the government could use to pay it down is one of government policy,” she notes.
So why does she even mention it? It is not like this provincial government is unaware that we have an emerging debt problem in Ontario. Since her interference is not for informative purposes, what is she doing? The good office of the AG compromises its credibility and authority once it decides to shed its independence and go political, as she has clearly done.
If Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk wants to attack public policies instead of doing what she is being paid for – to evaluate programs – she should join a political party. In fact there is an opening right now for leader of the Progressive Conservatives.
 Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Background links:
AG on Debt AG on Private Partnerships
AG on Smart Meters AG Report
By Ray Rivers
December 5, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON
The good old Soviet Union used to control its media for the good of the Fatherland, strengthening national spirt and resolve, and helping its people feel good about their otherwise miserable lives. After all, the Soviet empire was the inspiration for George Orwell’s classic epic ‘1984’.
The moderately free Russian press in the post-Soviet years has virtually now disappeared, after a decade or so of Mr. Putin leading the nation. And last year, after Ukraine’s corrupt Russian-puppet president fled to Moscow, Putin’s propaganda machine went into action, especially in Crimea and the Dunbas, areas where significant numbers of Russian speaking Ukrainians live.
Those folks were warned about Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi’s taking over Kiev’s streets, banning the Russian tongue and committing unspeakable crimes. The bigger the lie, the more likely it will be believed. They say ‘communication is the answer’ but in Ukraine’s case, without a trusted national and bilingual (Russian and Ukrainian) broadcaster, there was no way to counter the lies and to communicate the truth.
 CBC – the public broadcaster that covers the country in two languages. Canada, the UK and the USA all have public broadcast networks funded in part by combinations of advertising, donations or license fees, and public funding. In Canada’s case the CBC gets about a billion dollars a year, about two-thirds of its revenue, from the federal government. For that the corporation operates a network covering the entire country in our two official languages, as well as in a number of aboriginal tongues where needed, to make sure we all get the news.
Our Harper government has been slashing the CBC’s funding but that is not enough for the critics of the CBC, who voice that the service should be spun off, privatized or sold. They would like nothing better than to see such drastic budget cuts until a poverty-stricken and handicapped broadcaster fails, opening more air space for others, like the mega-sized and horizontally-integrated Bell media giant. The recent Ghomeshi mess has played into their hands, casting doubts on the capabilities of senior management, and further disillusioning an already skeptical public.
 A graphic that will be remembered by many in Burlington. Objectivity and fairness used to be the two pillars of broadcasting. The US first passed the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, requiring balanced reporting in all national media. This centrepiece of US broadcast policy was upheld by the courts until 1987, when President Reagan killed the doctrine in the name of free speech. So today the majority of Americans listen to the Australian-owned (Rupert Murdock) extremely right-wing FOX news. ‘Fair and balanced’ is the ironic logo of FOX, which is anything but.
It is arguable whether public attitudes in the US have been influenced by FOX or its philosophically opposed competitor, MSNBC. But why would anyone be surprised that we are undergoing an evolution in our thinking? I mean, most Russians believe that current Ukrainian leaders, including their Jewish prime minster, are Neo-Nazi’s – say a lie enough times and anyone will believe it.
The mandate of the CBC, here in Canada, does not specifically require fairness but the assumption of objectivity is inherent, since primary funding comes from Parliament. It is common place for conservative-minded critics to accuse the media of holding a ‘liberal’ bias – an accusation that flies in the face of the abundance of right-wing media (Sun, National Post, CTV) and so many of the various CBC news folk themselves (e.g. Senator Pamela Wallen or Peter Kent). And no objective review of CBC programs or personalities has ever shown significant bias, liberal or otherwise.
 Did Canadians get the information they needed during the Quebec referendum debates? If they did – they got it from the CBC. Compared to the BBC, with federal subsidy (collected through mandatory household licence fees) of over six billion dollars, the billion federal dollars to maintain the CBC doesn’t seem outrageous. Our Prime Minister spent more than that just to host the week-long G-20/G-8 summit back in 2010.
And for that money the CBC is the largest broadcaster in Canada and the only one with a specific mandate to promote Canadian culture. Its reach extends internationally as well as across Canada – making the broadcaster Canada’s best global ambassador. The CBC production “Little Mosque on the Prairie”, for example, has been syndicated world-wide including in Israel, The West Bank and Gaza.
When in the grip of either of our own sovereignty crises, the two Quebec referenda, every Canadian knew, at least, that they were getting the straight and honest goods – consistently and accurately. The decisions they ultimately made at the ballot box were based on all of the information, not just some separatist propaganda. Worth a billion dollars? Well why not just ask the Ukrainians what they think?
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Background links:
CBC Factum US Fairness Dotrine US Freedom of Expression CBC Broadcasting
CBC Comment CBC Public Opinion CBC Information Ghomeshi and CBC BBC
By James Smith
December 3, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON
All the other kids wore the Rouge, Bleu, Blanc with nombre neuf. We were Anglos but like Roch Carrier’s book, all wanted to be The Rocket. That is all except me, I wanted to be like my dad’s friend, number four, Jean Beliveau. So on the outdoor rink I was number four.
My dad was a DJ in Montreal, and also did the colour commentary for, I think it was radio station CJAD, hockey, football, and the races at Blue Bonnets race track. Dad was always having us meet stars of one kind or another, and as a kid this really didn’t register.
 Always at the front of the game; always playing the puck; Jean Beliveau at his best. That is except for hockey players. Hockey was different, hockey for me, like from most boys at the time, was what we lived for and I was so very lucky to meet most of the greats of the Hab’s dynasty of the late 50’s & early 60’s. The Rocket, the Pocket Rocket, Claud Prenevost, Boom-Boom Geoffrion, but Mr Beliveau was different, he and my dad were friends.
Several Sunday afternoons I got to go with my dad to the Forum, walk to the rafters into the gondola to watch a game. As a kid this was both terrifying and exciting being so high, watching the game, seeing my dad work on the radio and feeling part of the big people’s world. At the end of the game we’d go to the dressing room, my dad would do an interview or two,
 He would come out of the curve in the rink with more than enough speed to overtake almost every hockey player in the league. I’d get to meet my idols, shake their hands, and learn a new word or two in French. Not sure why but “peut-etre” seems to be the one I remember my dad using a lot. We would never leave without my dad and Mr Beliveau having a conversation, they always had a schtick they would do; he was Jean my day was Gene. Mr Beliveau would greet dad with a smile and “Hello Jean!” and my dad would reply “Bonjour Gene!”. They were both big men, and would shake hands an exchange a laugh, and as a little kid, I would look up in awe. My dad was friends with Jean Beliveau!
I do remember an exchange happing one time shopping in downtown Montreal with my parents. We ran into Mr Beliveau and people paused to look as the two men exchanged a few words. I shook Mr Beliveau’s hand while enquiring “comment allez vous?” Mr Beliveau then remarked about my red white and blue toque.
With my tiny bit of childhood French I informed the captain of the Montreal Canadiens it was a REAL Canadiens “chapeau rouge avec pom-pom bleu”. A little taken back he got a big grin and started to laugh and patted me on the shoulder, said a few more words to my parents, then bid us good-bye.
 Jean Beliveau at 80 – still the captain Today with Mr Beliveau’s passing, I will remember Mr Beliveau a giant of a man, who had time for a little kid, and as a friend of my late father who towered over me on the streets of downtown Montreal, laughing.
 By Pepper Parr
November 28, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON
Many a political career has been started with a citizen serving on a city board or committee.
There are hundreds of people as well who have served on a board and found immense satisfaction in being able to make a difference.
Burlington citizen advisory committees provide Council and staff with input about a wide variety of subjects through discussions, presentations and recommendations. Some committees also organize and participate in community events.
Burlington welcomes citizens who represent the diverse backgrounds of the community to participate on these committees. Becoming a member offers residents a unique chance to volunteer their highly valued skills and to strengthen our shared sense of community.
One of the key groups is the Burlington’s BEST Awards Committee. It is made up of 10 voting members, including: six citizens from the community, and four representatives from media and information agencies.
 The committee was established in and is seen as a Planning Committee reporting to City Council through the Community Services Committee.
Their mandate is to recognize citizens of Burlington who have brought favourable publicity and honour to the City of Burlington, to increase awareness of the committee so all citizens of Burlington have the chance to be recognized for their achievements.
The recognition is provided through Burlington’s Best Awards an annual event at which Burlington recognizes the Citizen of the Year; a Junior Citizen of the Year; an Arts Person of the Year, and a Seniors Person of the Year;. The city also gives a Community Service Award, an Environmental Award and a Heritage Award.
These awards are important – but there is a problem. In 2014 the nominations or recommendations did not come from the Planning committee – their task was to vote on the nominations they had before them.
Those nominations came from anyone who wanted to send in a nomination. The result was we had wives nominating husbands, Mothers nominating their children and girlfriends nominating their boyfriends, which, while admirable, is surely not Burlington’s definition of the BEST we have?
In the next few weeks the Clerks department will go through the applications for people who would like to be on the Planning Committee. Let us hope that the committee that chooses the people who will vote for the BEST that Burlington has are people who get to vote on merit.
There are some people in this city who have in the past year served us exceptionally well. They deserve to be recognized for what they have done – not for who they are or what their Mother, Father, husband, wife or girlfriend thinks of them.
Friends and family should be applauding the choice the committee makes – they shouldn’t be sending in nominations – nor should the committee be accepting them.
By Ray Rivers
November 27, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON
Before the British North American colonies converged into a new nation, Ontario and Quebec shared history as the united ‘Province of Canada’. The Act of Union in 1840 brought together the former Upper and Lower Canadian colonies into a union which lasted until confederation in 1867. This union gave birth to the responsible government in the colonies, involving both English and French Canadians despite occasional disagreements, as in 1849, when rebelling Tories burned the provincial capital buildings in Montreal.
 The hanging of Louis Riel created a major rift between Quebec, the aboriginal community and the federal government that to some degree still exists today Ontario and Quebec have had their disagreements; Louis Riel, conscription, liquor marketing restrictions and cross border labour disputes – but there has always been a fraternal amity, not unlike that between the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Premiers Robarts, Davis, Peterson, McGuinty and Wynne were always strong promoters of Quebecers’ interests in Canada including through those troubling periods when Quebec was threatening to leave the federation.
So it is gratifying that Premiers Wynne and Couillard are taking steps to bump up their cooperation on language policy, climate change, electrical energy and strengthening the central Canadian economy. This sounds like a no-brainer though and provincial residents should thank the Prime Minister, if only because the federal government’s neglect is the spark that has driven this initiative. After all, Mr. Harper has spent virtually no political capital on central Canada’s economy, rather focusing his energy on the further development of the Alberta tar sands
Ontario and Quebec make up about 60% of the country’s population and its gross domestic product (GDP). So expanding trade between them should help expand their economies and allow them to pay down their debts. New approaches to sharing electrical grids will help keep electricity rates in check, which is good for the economies as well as the rate payers. But what would really help is a much needed boost to infrastructure, transportation infrastructure in particular, to keep their major cities from choking on their own success.
Throughout history the federal government has always been the driving force in the economic development of this country. It was the feds who gave us our national railways (and have since sold them off) that brought B.C. into the federation and bound us all together. The TransCanada highway is the centre piece of Canada’s national road transportation system. Environmental management across the country was only made possible with federal resources to build water and waste water facilities. The federal government (Trudeau) even salvaged the oil sands when Alberta was ready to throw in the towel, in its earlier days.
So, in keeping with that tradition the Harper government, a few years ago, announced a program to help the provinces fund their growing infrastructure needs. But Ontario’s share is less than three billion dollars while the provincial government needs to spend about $130 billion dollars over the next decade.
 The “Ring of Fire”; the name given to a part of the province that is believed to be rich in natural resources but cannot be reached because there are no roads into that part of the province. Ontario wants federal government help to build those roads. The federal government wants pipe lines to move tar sands bitumen from Alberta to the east coast. Then there is the ‘Ring of Fire’.
The so-called ‘Ring of Fire’, site of potentially billions of dollars worth of valuable minerals, lies about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay, but is currently inaccessible except by helicopter or canoe and portage. Both Ottawa and Toronto agree on the need to develop this resource and the Province estimates about a billion dollars is needed for a transportation system. The federal government has decided that this should come out of Ontario’s piddly $3 billion in that infrastructure fund – and therein lies just another disagreement between Canada and its largest province.
Premier Wynne has requested a meeting with the PM to talk about this matter among others. But Harper is refusing to meet her because he can see no benefit in helping a provincial Liberal government improve its economy. So he’s got nothing to say and no more money to offer. That is, no more money for Ontario if he is going to balance his budget; give another $2 billion in tax cuts to reasonably well-off Canadian families; and keep his fighter jets running missions in Iraq.
Then there is that Ontario pension program which Wynne has decided to undertake, all on her own, since the feds refuse to undertake much needed upgrades to the existing Canada Pension Plan.
And there is Premier Wynne’s demand for a more equitable share of the federal equalization program, now, when the province needs the money most. But then Ontario just voted Liberal in the last election – so who can blame the Conservative PM for not wanting to help her out.
Canada’s record on climate change is abysmal. We had once gained considerable reputation as a front-seat participant in different forums dealing with the the global issue. But Canada has surrendered its commitment to the Kyoto protocol and is unlikely to meet even the softer targets the Harper government recently set. Still, the PM likes to take credit for the recent modest improvement in emissions statistics, notwithstanding his ‘full-speed-ahead’ on oil sands development and the pipelines he envisions to move all that oil.
And any reductions of greenhouse gas (GHG) carbon emissions which Canada can boast about are almost entirely due to Ontario’s green energy program and the shut down of coal-fired electricity – an initiative which Ottawa refused to help finance. In fact Ontario and Quebec are the only two jurisdictions in Canada which have significantly reduced their GHG emissions over the years, again without help from the current federal government.
 Premiers Wynne of Ontario and Couillard of Quebec have begun to work together to protect the economic interests of Central Canada Mr. Harper’s party managed to pull a couple of wins in the recent by-elections, one of them in Ontario. The general election this coming year will be a greater test for his government. It will be an opportunity to discuss climate change, energy policy and infrastructure in a way that they were not debated in the by-elections.
It is unlikely that Mr. Harper will lose much political support in his western home base over his almost antagonistic approach to the rest of Canada, However voters in central and coastal portions of the country will need to ask themselves what they have been getting out of this confederation. And do we need to rethink the make-up of the political union we call Canada – as Quebec and Ontario seem to be doing. Or do we just change the channel at the polling booth.
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
Background links:
Infrastructure Quebec-Ontario Partnership Canadian Federalism
Respect Ontario History Federal Infrastructure Program
More Infrastructure Even More Infra Ring of Fire
By Staff
November 20, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
Steven Levy is a CBS News presenter. Last Sunday he did a commentary on CBS Sunday Morning.
What led to the Commentary was the news that the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year.
 Steven Levy objects to the White House Christmas Tree being called a Holiday Tree. “I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat”
“Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren’t allowed to worship God as we understand Him? I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.
“In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.
“In light of recent events… Terrorists attack, school shootings, etc.. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school… The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.
“Then Dr. Steven Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about.. And we said okay..
 The White House has decided to call this a Holiday Tree. “Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.
“Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with ‘We reaphat we sow”.
“Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.
“Are you laughing yet?
“Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it.
“Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.”
By Ray Rivers
November 18, 2014
BURLINGTON, ON.
He is consistently below Trudeau and Mulcair in national opinion polls and his party is currently lagging that of Trudeau by double digits, yet the voters in the two federal by-elections yesterday chose Harper. Of course the Alberta riding of Yellowhead was never in doubt, and the new Tory there won by a resounding 60% of the vote. But that is Alberta, where the point of having an election is, arguably, a waste of money. Why not just have the Conservative Party appoint the MPs?
 Whitby-Oshawa was a closer race between the Libs and Cons. Nevertheless, the popular former Whitby mayor, Pat Perkins, who only recently jumped in for the Conservatives, won the support of a clear majority of the voters, receiving almost 50 per cent of the votes cast. The Liberal, Celina Caesar-Chavannes, came in second with a respectable 40% of the vote in this one-time Liberal riding. The NDP, which had replaced the Liberals as the second choice of voters in the last general election fell back to their more traditional spot.
Of course this is the constituency of former finance minister Flaherty, whom Canadians generally respected, once he came to federal politics. And it didn’t hurt that Flaherty’s widow, Christine Elliott, is the sitting provincial MPP there, and also a front runner in the contest to lead the provincial Tories. So the newly-cast conservative candidate had a lot of things going for her.
Oh, and did I mention that the PM announced his so-called ‘family income splitting’ promise mid-campaign – a $2 billion tax giveaway for the wealthiest tax payers, a program Flaherty had justifiably disparaged? But the ‘tax-cut’ spin still works. And it didn’t hurt when tough guy Harper ordered tough guy Putin to “get out of Ukraine” last week – newsworthy, but an empty threat given what little we had and would do for that embattled nation.
By-elections generally tend to have lower turnout and these two contests were no strangers to that phenomena. Only a third of Whitby-Oshawans could be bothered to vote and over 80% of eligible Yellowhead voters must have slept-in all day. I guess they  knew the result would be a foregone conclusion in a province where some voters act as if Canada’s borders start at the Rockies and end somewhere in the prairies. And Mr. Harper is local, despite his accidental birth in Ontario.
Americans just finished voting in their mid-term congressional elections and the President, whose party got slaughtered, grumped that only a third of eligible voters showed up – implying he might have won had turnout been higher. He may be right, but the point is why don’t we have higher voting numbers? Australia has had compulsory voting for eons, with real penalties for those too lazy to get their butts into the ballot both. As a result, over 90 percent of the electorate consistently make the effort to vote, that number hitting 95% in some years.
Were we to adopt a similar law, Albertans would still probably continue to vote Tory, or for the Attila the Hun party if they could – and that is their choice, of course. But at least more people would be engaged in the process of holding our politicians to account. And that should mean better governance.
Of course if you were an NDP supporter in either of these by-elections you might ask yourself why bother? And that is where preferential balloting for multi-party politics makes a lot of sense. Voters select their first choice as they do today in our first-past-the-post system. But if no candidate wins 50% of all the votes cast, second (and third) choices are counted until a winner is announced. Governing parties would always be elected by at least a simple majority of the people, instead of the thirty-plus percentages we’ve seen over the last few elections. However, a preferential ballot wouldn’t have changed the result of these by-elections.
 And maybe we need to make voting easier. Why not hold elections on a weekend when most people have real spare time? And what about on-line voting for a nation that has proven how securely we can even do banking that way? What about better election coverage? I mean how many people were even aware that these by-elections were taking place? And what about more time teaching political choice and process at schools, so our youth can develop an interest in how their governments can work for them?
By-elections are usually a good time for the public to register its displeasure with the government in power. If that is true we should take it that the voters are pretty happy with the government we have. But that flies in the face of the national polls – so what is really going on?
Are we a nation of people wanting change, but too complacent to be bothered to do anything about it? Or maybe we truly have become the ‘small c’ conservative society that Stephen Harper had set out to create – too conservative to try change?
By-Elections Yellowhead Whitby-Oshawa
Polling More Polling
Analysis Election Canada Results
Australian Voting Harper’s Income Splitting
Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province.
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