Justin Trudeau failed to make ready for the storm

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-justin-trudeau-failed-to-make-ready-for-the-storm/?intcmp=gift_expired

The Editorial Board

Published March 8, 2025Updated March 10, 2025

(Tony Lam's comments. The only thing I disagree with is the child poverty. When children are using food banks greater than ever before @justintrudeau did not help them or made childrens lives better)

Justin Trudeau rode a wave of optimism to office nearly a decade ago, espousing sunny ways, a more democratic approach to governing, a greater international role for Canada, reconciliation with Indigenous communities and a rejuvenated, more equitable economy.

Almost none of that happened, or at least it didn’t stick. For all of those big pledges – and Mr. Trudeau’s promises never lacked for ambition – he ended up not just failing to fulfill them, but heading in the opposite direction. The sad verdict on Mr. Trudeau’s time in office is that he leaves Canada a weaker country than he found it, vulnerable to Donald Trump’s economic coercion.

One of the first big promises to fall by the wayside was Mr. Trudeau’s promise of open government and a move to scrap the first past the post electoral system. Mr. Trudeau walked away from reform. He recently called that his biggest regret, while shifting the blame – a pattern for this Prime Minister.

Mr. Trudeau criticized Stephen Harper’s government as secretive and obsessed but, under his tenure, the Prime Minister’s Office has dominated as never before. Cabinet ministers were largely reduced to sales staff for government policy. And Mr. Trudeau’s promise of sunny ways was eventually supplanted by a divisive style of government that made ruthless, if effective, use of wedge issues for electoral gain.

“Canada is back,” Mr. Trudeau said at the start of the Liberal era in 2015. But it soon became clear that the Liberals’ approach to foreign policy was hollow talk. Defence spending is the most obvious shortcoming. A belated increase to military outlays in the past couple of years cannot make up for years of inaction and backpedalling on key procurement decisions. The slow pace of expansion was even more bewildering once Russia launched its illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Even before the re-election of Donald Trump, the United States was expressing its concerns about Canada’s failure to hit NATO targets for military spending. And even now, Mr. Trudeau has not laid out a plan for hitting those targets, never mind the more ambitious pace needed to safeguard Canadian sovereignty as the U.S. backs away from collective security. Under Mr. Trudeau, Canada wasn’t back; it faded away.

His record on Indigenous relations is more mixed. There is no doubt the Liberals talked about the importance of reconciliation and spent accordingly. But it is equally evident that the Liberal government fell short, time and again, on concrete measures such as eliminating boil-water advisories.

There’s a similar story on climate change. The idea of a national carbon price was good policy; the reality fell short, with the Liberals bringing the full weight of a carbon tax to all of Canada, including the Atlantic Provinces, only in July, 2023. By the fall of that year, they retreated, and now the two top candidates to replace Mr. Trudeau are promising to scrap the federal fuel charge altogether.

Of course, there have been some policy successes, most notably the expansion of monthly cash payments to Canadian families, which the Liberals rebranded as the Canada Child Benefit. That policy reduced child poverty rates sharply. Federal child care subsidies at first held out the promise of a similar historic success, but the Trudeau Liberals have moved far too late to shore up gaps in that program. It will be up to a new government to save (or scrap) that initiative.

The legalization of marijuana was a long overdue move. And the rollout of dental care subsidies to those truly in need could be a model for modern social programs.

On the economy, the Liberal record is one of failure: soaring debt, higher taxes, a bloated bureaucracy, flagging productivity and a declining standard of living, as evidenced by a decreasing real GDP per capita.

The government’s attempt to boost economic growth through permanently higher spending and much increased immigration backfired badly. Inflation and the soaring cost of housing has left younger Canadians staring at the prospect of a life less prosperous than that of their parents.

All of those failings existed before Mr. Trump began his trade jihad against Canada, and would have been daunting challenges in any case for Mr. Trudeau’s successor. Now, those problems will have to be tackled even as Ottawa faces a campaign of economic attrition. No one could have predicted that particular storm, but a tempest of some sort was inevitable.

That is perhaps Mr. Trudeau’s greatest failure as the person responsible for charting Canada’s course over the past decade: when the storm arrived, he had not made ready.