Posts with the premier tag

Barris Beat

Tunnel vision

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Ontario’s premier wants to replicate Boston’s “Big Dig” under Hwy 401

Among our Thanksgiving traditions, particularly when we invite guests to our gatherings over Turkey dinner, our family usually engages in “What if?” talk. Often the Q&As reveal attitudes among family members we didn’t know. Other times, it’s a chance for guests to tell us about themselves and stimulate conversation. Over Monday’s turkey dinner, my granddaughter hit me with this question:

“Twenty years from now, what looming event do you think you’ll have difficulty explaining?”

I thought long and hard about challenges we’re all facing today – democracy threatened by the race for the presidency in the United States, global preparedness for the next pandemic, pushing back xenophobia in Canadian society, ensuring career opportunities are there for our grandchildren and their children.

But I guess, if I’m still around in 2044, I’ll probably find it difficult to rationalize how western civilization, with as much access to information as any society in modern history, didn’t recognize and rise to the challenge of slowing climate change.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to rationalize our incompetency,” I told my granddaughter “for failing to save the planet from greenhouse gases.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Is Ontario premier really listening?

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Like the Ontario school children currently banned from using cellphones in class, Premier Ford can’t put it away.

I think it was during the NHL hockey playoffs last spring that they first appeared. The PC television ads. They start with a peek inside somebody’s house, into his den. Then, we hear the voiceover of Ontario’s premier.

“Well, it’s the people,” Doug Ford says as he buttons his shirt and knots his tie. And he continues chatting on his cellphone, saying “Really busy, busy … for the people.” And he’s on his phone going out the front door, climbing into his car, going into businesses and on and on.

Did you ever stop to ask yourself who those people are he’s talking to? (more…)

Barris Beat

“Like-minded” equals “contempt”

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In Canada’s court system what Trump said would be considered contempt and prosecutable.

Outside his residence in Florida, several weeks ago, a former United States president made sure the cameras were running, raised his fist in the air and then verbally slammed Judge Arthur Engoron. The justice of the Supreme Court of New York had just handed down his ruling in the civil business-fraud trial against Donald Trump. The former president reacted.

“A crooked New York State judge has just ruled that I have to pay a fine of $355 million for having built a perfect company,” Trump said, and he went on to call New York Attorney General Letitia James, who initiated the case, “totally corrupt.”

If any politician, no, make that if any individual had said that in Canada, she or he would have been charged with contempt. (more…)

Barris Beat

Canada’s veterans would not be amused

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Grace MacPherson put her pride of country above all else in the Great War.

Grace MacPherson had all the credentials she needed to become an ambulance driver in the Great War. The first woman in Vancouver to earn a driver’s licence. The first woman to purchase a car in that city. When war broke out in 1914, she even paid her own way to Britain offering her skills as a driver to the Red Cross ambulance corps.

When she gained an audience with Sam Hughes, Canada’s minister of militia and war in 1917, to plead her case, however, he turned her down.

“I’ll stop any woman from going to France,” Hughes blustered.

“With your help, or without it,” Miss MacPherson said, “I will serve.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Speaking first, engaging the brain later

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Premier Ford and Finance Minister Bethlanfalvy ignoring the Greenbelt scandal. YouTube

I thought I was in complete control of the moment. I’d read – both aloud and to myself – all the appropriate practice phrases. I arrived right on time for my first CBC Radio News announcing audition at the main Toronto studios. They gave me the audition scripts – a newscast, a piece of poetry and lists of words in French, Italian, German and English to just read aloud during my audition.

I had time to review the copy, then I entered the studio to record my audition. Everything went swimmingly – including the French, Italian and German. But then I tripped up on an English word. I came across the word “epitome,” paused and said:

“E-pi-tome,” with the emphasis on the first syllable, as if I’d said “epic tome.” And the moment I mispronounced it, I knew I was wrong and I wished I could’ve quickly crammed the word back in my mouth to say it properly the first time. But it was too late. (more…)

Barris Beat

Signs of development = the Greenbelt gravy train

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Signs of the times. Is this creating affordable housing?

They seemed to pop up overnight. One day I was driving through Pickering up Brock Road and there was the Greenbelt land – fields, gullies and natural forest. The next day, following the same route, there were signs as big as all outdoors shouting out to all who passed:

“100-foot by 300-foot lots!” those signs proclaimed.

As I recall, it was just before the recent Greenbelt controversy erupted that I first saw the signs. (more…)

Barris Beat

Bad judgment must be called out

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Playing on a tree on the other side of the fence was so inviting, but, it turned out, against the rules.

It happened when I was about nine. The public-school playground got a little boring, so a bunch of us found a maple tree just across the back fence of the schoolyard to climb, sit in and hang from. Word got around to the principal, Mr. Palmer Kilpatrick. If for no other reason than fear of liability, he announced that the tree was off limits.

That didn’t stop us. Next day, we headed back over the fence and scrambled back up the tree. Suddenly, it got quiet. All my fellow tree-climbers disappeared. I was alone. I looked down and there was Mr. Kilpatrick standing at the foot of the tree.

“Ted, come down,” he said sternly. “You know you’re not supposed to be up there.”

“Yes sir,” and I came down. Everybody else who’d climbed the tree with me that day had taken off. And I could have too. But something inside me said, “Fess up and face the consequences.” (more…)

Barris Beat

What Bethlenfalvy’s 100 don’t see

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Peter Bethlenfalvy speaks to his 100 about building not being accountable. YouTube photo.

He preferred to present the government’s first-quarter fiscal results, focus on Ontario’s deficit projection for 2023-24. But reporters preferred a response from Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy to the Greenbelt controversy in his riding.

“The 100 people I talked to say ‘build,’” he answered. “That’s what I hear and that’s why we’re going to continue on our build.” (more…)

Barris Beat

Sovereignty of conviction or convenience

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René Lévesque – sovereignty of conviction.

He stood at the lectern in front of hundreds of us. A lit cigarette dangled from his left hand (they were allowed indoors back then). He spoke almost entirely without notes, as if his words were a credo he’d crafted over years until the message came out as his own. I’m paraphrasing now, but here’s what this man from Quebec said on stage at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall that day:

“We are heirs to a fantastic adventure – an early America that was almost entirely French,” he said. “We are heirs to an obstinate group which has kept alive that portion of French America we call Quebec…”

The year was 1969. I’d sat mesmerized for the better part of 90 minutes inside Convocation Hall, listening to the man who wanted to lead Quebec out of Canada. (more…)

Barris Beat

Notwithstanding democracy

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Justice Edward Morgan ruled restriction of third-party ads by Ont. Gov’t  unconstitutional.

The session bells were ringing Monday afternoon at Queen’s Park, calling Members of the Provincial Parliament into the chamber. The halls outside buzzed with MPPs and their minions. Suddenly, the Premier emerged. He’d seen reporters with cameras. A reporter asked if Opposition debate would delay passage of Bill 307, the one that used the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to reintroduce parts of a law overruled by a judge last week.

“No,” Doug Ford said defiantly from behind his COVID mask. “We’re fighting for democracy.”

For the record, last Tuesday (June 8) Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Morgan reached the conclusion that it was unconstitutional for the Ontario government to double the restricted pre-election spending period for third-party advertisements to 12 months before an election call. (more…)