GOLDSTEIN: Justin Trudeau just wasn’t ready
Re-printed without permission.
So, as it turns out, the Conservative campaign ad in the 2015 federal election was correct. Justin Trudeau wasn’t ready.
And now, we’re reaping the whirlwind.
We’re learning that electing a prime minister who would not have become prime minister, given the thinness of his resume, were his last name not “Trudeau,” has real-world consequences.
This as we listen to his implausible explanations for removing Jody Wilson-Raybould as Canada’s attorney general change by the hour, exposing the real reason — that she has political ethics and gravitas that he does not.
The Liberal party that considers itself Canada’s natural governing party is in disarray under his leadership, its cabinet ministers and MPs reduced to uttering gibberish as they try to defend Trudeau’s indefensible actions in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
Because there’s no defence for a prime minister who — as Raybould’s calmly delivered but devastating four hours of testimony at the Commons justice committee revealed last week — puts his own partisan political interests and those of his party, above the national interest.
Above the interests of all Canadians in having a prime minister and a government that understands the importance of such basic concepts as prosecutorial independence and the rule of law.
Thus “things fall apart (and) the centre cannot hold,” as the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote a century ago, while “the best lack all conviction” and “the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Because beyond the narrow confines of the Ottawa political-media bubble, the corrosive effect of more than three years of Trudeau’s policies continues to undermine the body politic.
For example, the real-world consequences of having our national energy policy influenced by Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s recently resigned principal secretary, close friend and most powerful aide, who idiotically campaigned for a carbon free energy industry by 2050 in his last job as head of the World Wildlife Fund Canada..
A poll released Friday by Angus Reid Institute shows the new hotbed of popular support for separation in Canada is Alberta, not Quebec.
It found 50% of Albertans would support secession from Canada compared to an October 2016 poll showing 82% of Quebecers had no desire to revisit the issue of sovereignty any time soon.
“In many ways, Quebec is getting a good deal in Canada,” pollster Angus Reid told the National Post.
“It’s getting all kinds of special treatment (see SNC-Lavalin) and so it’s not surprising Quebecers have largely abandoned the idea of separation for now Quebec is the favoured child of the nation while Alberta is the step-child who gets ignored.”
While support for separation in Alberta is not yet as great a threat to Canadian unity as the Quebec separatist movement in its heyday, according to Reid, it’s hardly surprising separatist sentiment is growing in a province where Trudeau’s promise that carbon taxes would give Alberta the “social licence” to build pipelines, has been an abject failure.
On a related front, Statistics Canada reported Friday that an unexpectedly severe slowdown in Canada’s economic growth in the final quarter of 2018 will likely continue and spread this year.
To be fair, federal policies are only one factor that impacts our economy. There are many others the government can’t control.
That said, and contrary to the world according to Justin Trudeau, we now know that deficits don’t balance themselves and growing the economy “from the heart outwards” is election rhetoric, not an economic plan.
Nice hair, though.
lgoldstein@postmedia.com