Justin Trudeau Archives - Page 13 of 39

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau surprised the House of Commons on Monday when he announced that senior diplomats in Canada and India had been expelled. The reason behind their expulsions was stunning and potentially explosive – both for the country, and his political future.

Trudeau told parliamentarians that “over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.” He confirmed that the Liberal government would take all necessary steps to “hold perpetrators of this murder to account.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly also confirmed to reporters that Indian diplomat Pavan Kumar Rai had been expelled. “The allegations that a representative of a foreign government may have been involved in the killing of a Canadian here in Canada, on Canadian soil, is not only troubling but it is completely unacceptable. If proven true this would be a great violation of our sovereignty and of the most basic rule of how countries deal with each other.”

Joly noted that Trudeau had raised this matter with US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. While various western democracies expressed concern about these accusations, they went no further than this. The Washington Post noted that Canada’s overtures “were rebuffed, underscoring the diplomatic balancing act facing the Biden administration and its allies as they work to court an Asian power seen as a crucial counterweight to China.”

Who was Nijjar?

He was a plumber, Sikh leader and temple president based in Surrey, B.C. He was gunned down outside the gurdwara on June 18. According to the National Post, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team said “two heavy-set suspects” shot him and fled in a getaway vehicle “driven by a third suspect.” He reportedly died on the scene.

Nijjar was also a wanted man in India. A Global News story included a screen grab of the Nov. 14, 2014 warrant for his arrest through Interpol’s National Central Bureau in New Delhi. He was depicted as a “mastermind/active member” of the Khalistan Tiger Force. This is a militant group that’s part of the larger Khalistan movement that wants to create a separate homeland for Sikhs in the Punjab region. He was also linked to the Oct. 2007 bombing of Punjab’s Shingar Cinema, which killed six people and injured 37. The suggested motive for the attack, as the Times of India put it, was to “revive terrorism and to create communal tension.”

That’s why Nijjar’s name currently appears on India’s Home Ministry list of terrorists under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

India is furious at this situation, and has dismissed Canada’s accusations. A statement from its Ministry of External Affairs suggested the expulsion occurred due to “growing concern at the interference of Canadian diplomats in our internal matters and their involvement in anti-India activities.” While the Canadian PM told reporters on Tuesday that our country is “not looking to provoke or escalate” this matter with India, it’s far too late for anything like this.

Trudeau and Canada’s intelligence service, however, are doing the right thing by doing their due diligence and investigating this unusual matter. Modern democratic countries aren’t supposed to order trained assassins to head to other democracies and take care of questionable individuals and controversial matters, either in theory or in practice. If India was behind Nijjar’s murder on foreign soil, that’s unacceptable and they need to be held accountable.

Where things go from here is a huge question mark.

The investigation is ongoing. There are currently no set parameters, guidelines or official deadline. Details and revelations will likely be kept secret for an extended period of time. Most countries and allies are seemingly going to keep their distance for political and economic reasons and watch things unfold from afar.

If Canada’s intelligence service has identified something real and tangible that connects the Indian government with Nijjar’s murder, it would be a significant political victory for Trudeau. The PM would have to be given his due for taking this matter seriously and handling it properly. He’s largely been a mediocre, ineffective leader since he was first elected in 2015, and that widely-held perception would remain firmly intact. But if he’s proven right, it would be wrong not to acknowledge it.

If the investigation ultimately turns up little to nothing with respect to India and Nijjar’s murder, Trudeau’s political goose would be cooked. Our intelligence service would obviously be condemned for running with this false information, and rightfully so. The PM would face the same fate for putting out unfounded allegations and incorrect information far too early, and not waiting for missteps and pitfalls to materialize.

Which scenario will turn out to be the correct one? Time will tell.

Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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Ronald Reagan used to get big laughs with his line about “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” But alas the joke’s on the Gipper, because 37 years later far too many people are convinced only the state can do anything worthwhile even though they routinely cackle, or moan, about all the evidence pointing the other way. Including Canadians, out of politeness, gullibility or both.

Here let me mention a couple of items that are noteworthy, as so often, because they are nothing special. Meaning they’re not some deliberate, went-out-of-my-way confirmation bias examples I hunted down with diligent effort. They just showed up in the morning paper on August 31.

First, the federal and Ontario provincial governments were falling over themselves congratulating one another, and themselves, for having provided high-speed rural broadband to fully 66,000 rural Ontario households at a mere $219 million. And I could quibble that in an economy as advanced as our own it’s no boast that they finally did something about a situation that should not exist, to a significant degree did not exist, and that insofar as it did exist they caused.

Canadians infamously pay very high prices for internet, and cell service, and a major reason why is government regulation that protects providers at the expense of consumers. But it’s just possible that this outcome reflects low cunning rather than ineptitude, because of “bureaucratic capture” of regulators by their targets, who have a far more concentrated interest in the policy than its victims.

The real reason for my bringing it up as a ghastly example of smug incompetence is that, as Tristin Hopper pointed out in the National Post, “If those same households were simply to be given satellite internet, meanwhile, the whole project could probably be completed for less than a quarter of its final price tag.”

That’s right. The politicians, and their vast highly paid civil service, found a way to do it badly and quadruple the cost. And then these windbags went into mutual admiration society mode, more proof that another very scary word in English is “non-partisan”. The parties should be fighting each other for our applause, not fighting us for one another’s. It’s why we have them.

Oh, by the way, Hopper also notes that “According to figures released in 2021 by Statistics Canada, just six per cent of Canadians lacked access to a fixed broadband internet connection. When Canadians without internet were polled as to why, 63 per cent reported that they ‘had no need or interest in a home internet connection.’” So to bring in another language, Nikita Khrushchev once said “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.”

And another thing. The same day, in the same newspaper, another story started “Two different federal infrastructure programs have provided funding for more than 43,000 electric vehicle chargers since 2016, but fewer than one in five of them are actually operational, new data show.” So naturally they charged ahead: “The information provided by Natural Resources Canada came as Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson visited Quebec City Wednesday to announce another $25 million to fund 1,500 EV chargers in Quebec.”

Governments are good at spending money, of course. Including handing out subsidies for EV battery plants whose total value is now double the annual output of the car industry in Canada. Sorry, not value. Cost. The value is liable to be roughly zero based on the history of industrial subsidies in Canada. Yet no amount of bitter experience with their efforts to “pick winners”, and no amount of politicians swearing off the attempt in disgust, seems able to stop them from doing it, because the companies love it and are happy to give the politicians a platform from which to bloviate.

These examples all share the “squirrel” tendency of politicians to get lunge at shiny high-tech trendy things, and at your wallet to strew cash about on them. But why do we put up with it? Like light rail, which seems high-tech, environmentally and socially conscious and in keeping with hipster urban theory. But almost invariably disappoints. Including because, in Ottawa, they bought European trains not suited to the restraining rails on the U.S. track they also bought… or for our winters. No, really. They were from the government, and here to help, and so full of themselves there was no room for due diligence.

So that was just one day. If we’re willing to consider an entire week, a long time in politics, and again I’m citing Tristin Hopper, the Canadian government forced us all to adopt paper straws for the sake of “the environment” without bothering to check. I don’t mean they got it wrong. I mean, quoting Hopper, “Ottawa has also done little to no research on the environmental impacts or the potential unintended consequences of finding alternatives to single-use plastics. A Government of Canada report on alternatives to plastic straws and checkout bags simply advises retailers to find products that won’t be ‘problematic.’”

Again no due diligence. But maybe science is hard, especially for people who always claim to be following it as they thrash around keeping up with trendy ideas on masks, lockdowns, “climate breakdown” or transgenderism. But here’s one that should be easy: trees.

Back in 2022, in his habitual oh-so-pleased-with-me way, Justin Trudeau praised himself for a 2019 commitment to plant two billion trees. Which shouldn’t have been hard in a country that is basically a giant forest anyway, with about 362 million hectares of forest out of 998.5 million hectares total containing an estimated 300 billion or so of the things which practically plant themselves, but was actually already badly off track.

Since we are a metric country I don’t have to tell you a hectare is 1/100^th of a square kilometre, do I? It’s also 2.47 acres. But I do have to tell some people that in 2023 Jonathan Wilkinson, formerly Environment Minister and apparently still thinking he holds that job, suddenly tweeted that actually they were way ahead of their target, prompting Paul Wells to observe that “This triumphant announcement was reported pretty much as great news in most of the country’s news outlets. Here I intend no criticism of my friends in the older news organizations: they were having a busy day” with the Trudeaus’ separation.

Whereupon Wells rubbished his former colleagues because what they all missed, other than Boris Proulx at Le Devoir and thus in French so the rest of them missed it too, was that the Liberals simply added some other trees from another program to the total and claimed it was in the program that couldn’t plant a tree in a forest. Which you really wouldn’t think was hard or, especially in Canada, a novel challenge as rural broadband just might be if it also were not.

It should not need to be added that our various governments are also making a total mess of health care, immigration, housing, inflation and just about everything else. But since I’m on a Tristin Hopper binge today, I will quote his tweet that “Every once in a while, I try to think of a file that hasn’t gotten decisively worse under the Trudeau government. I usually settle on Parks Canada. If they were anything like the other federal agencies, Banff National Park would be overrun by cocaine-addled grizzlies.”

If it’s better with your provincial or municipal government, I’m surprised and jealous. But as soon as I read that tweet I thought the next thing we’re going to hear of is some policy disaster involving Parks Canada. Like where they changed their logo slightly, removing the cross-hatching from the beaver’s tail, after a $99,100 survey found that 75% of Canadians didn’t know what their logo was, but wouldn’t tell us what the change cost.

Now speaking of Russian, someone once claimed that the three scariest words in that language were “Oh, that’s weird.” As one imagines was said at Chernobyl in 1986 as the safety readings went all wonky. But I think they only said “Russian” because they happened to speak it; the point is universal.

That politicians would hold a high opinion of themselves is not surprising given the temptations of pride and our tendency to reward it. But I certainly think oh, that’s weird when Canadians retain their faith in “government” even as they lose faith in politicians and bureaucrats. I guess Reagan would find it funny.

P.S. While I’m on the subject, or rather subjects of government incompetence, public transit and citizen gullibility, Sabrina Maddeaux recently complained, also in the Post, about Toronto city officials telling obvious lies about streetcar noise, just one example among many of brazen obfuscation that somehow doesn’t make us flinch when governments seek power to curtail the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to fight “misinformation”.

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Most Canadians think differently about political and economic issues. Some prefer an increased role for the state, while others desire smaller government and less intrusion. Some support higher taxes and more public services, while others want lower taxes and more private sector involvement. Some trust the free market economy wholeheartedly, while others are more skeptical. Some believe our country to be more involved in foreign policy matters, while others feel we’re too involved as is.

You get the drill.

When it comes to national safety and security, there has historically tended to be a meeting of the minds. Most Canadians believed the government in charge, be it Liberal or Conservative, was committed to protecting our nation’s borders. That they opposed totalitarian states, rogue nations and terrorist organizations. That they would always defend the cherished principles of liberty, freedom and democracy.

All of this changed soon after Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister.

In March 2016, Stéphane Dion, a former Liberal leader and Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, spoke at the University of Ottawa about his government’s approach to international affairs. “The guiding principle that I will follow in fulfilling this mandate is something I call responsible conviction,” he said. Dion claimed his government “shares the same conviction as the previous government, but it assesses the consequences of its chosen method of promoting this conviction differently.”

Trudeau and the Liberals would maintain some policies that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives championed in office, but would move away from the “disengagement” position. Early foreign policy goals included: a renewed focus on multilateralism and the United Nations, recognizing that severing ties with Russia and Iran had had “no positive consequences for anyone” and needed to be re-opened, promoting the fact that “human activity-induced climate change is one of the worst threats humanity is facing,” and taking a different tactic to fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Dion was replaced in Feb. 2017 by Chrystia Freeland, who is now the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. She was followed by François-Philippe Champagne, Marc Garneau and, most recently, Melanie Joly. Through it all, the ridiculous, obtuse concept of “responsible conviction” has continued to permeate in Liberal-minded foreign affairs. That’s why Trudeau and his ministers have fumbled this file time and time again.

Here are some examples. The Liberals refused to support the Conservative motion that ISIL’s actions should be declared a genocide until the UN report about the Yazidis confirmed the obvious. The Trudeau PMO crafted a eulogy of Cuba’s Communist tyrant Fidel Castro that depicted him as a “remarkable leader” and “larger than life leader who served his people.” Trudeau and his family embarrassed themselves in India by taking photo-ops with costume after costume. Ottawa wasted inordinate amounts of time trying to get a UN security council seat in 2020, and failed. Trudeau has had strained relations with two U.S. Presidents, Donald Trump (Republican) and Joe Biden (Democrat). Canada was left out of the important AUKUS security pact between the U.S., Australia and UK.

What’s been happening with Canada-China relations has been equally abhorrent. This includes Huawei Technologies and the Meng Wanzhou affair, the two Michaels and the PM’s uncomfortable tete-a-tete with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 in Bali, Indonesia.

There’s also the ongoing saga of accusations of Chinese interference in our democratic election process in 2019 and 2021. It’s been a mess for months, including the removal of Liberal MP Han Dong from the party caucus and the short, disastrous stint of former Governor General of Canada David Johnston as an independent special rapporteur.

Look at what’s happened to Conservative MP Michael Chong, too.

In early May, the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase published contents of a July 20, 2021 Canadian Security Intelligence Service report. It revealed Canada was viewed as a “high-priority target” by China, and mentioned that an MSS officer had attempted to obtain information about an MP’s relatives “who may be located in the PRC, for further potential sanctions…to make an example of this MP and deter others from taking anti-PRC positions.” Fife and Chase revealed that Chong was the unnamed MP.

Trudeau was asked by reporters about this. “We asked what happened to that information, was it ever briefed up out of CSIS? It was not,” he said on May 3. “CSIS made the determination that it wasn’t something that needed (to) be raised to a higher level because it wasn’t a significant enough concern.” Chong would have none of this. “I have just been informed by the national security adviser that the CSIS intelligence assessment of July 20, 2021 was sent by CSIS to the relevant departments and to the national security adviser in the PCO,” he told Parliament on May 4, “This report contained information that I and other MPs were being targeted by the PRC. This contradicts what the Prime Minister said yesterday.”

When reporters went back to Trudeau, here’s what he said: “I’m not going to go into details on that. I shared the best information I had at the time both to Chong and to Canadians.”

Yeah, sure he did.

Here’s the $64,000 question. Do the Trudeau Liberals truly believe they’re protecting Canada’s safety and security? They may think they are, but the political record tells a very different story.

Michael Taube, a longtime newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

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We’ve been hearing and seeing slow responses to federal appointments for a while now, whether it’s been around the slow pace of judicial appointments that had the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada reaching out to the prime minister to make a plea to faster action, or if it’s been the neglect of filling seats in the Senate that has reached Harper-esque levels. It turns out that the problem is much worse and more widespread across all federal Governor-in-Council appointments—that nearly one quarter of those positions are either vacant, or are staffed by members who are beyond the expiration of their terms and who are on some kind of extension. This is very, very bad for the governance of our country.

With some of these positions, there is a demonstrably false narrative circulating that Trudeau has been refusing to make appointments, such as with the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. In that particular case, and only that particular case, the problem is not the government, but rather the Parliament of Canada Act which specifies that such a position must be held by someone who is either a former judge or head of a tribunal, board or commission, and though it’s not in the legislation, they would also need to be bilingual. The problem there is that MPs (and the blame lies principally with the Conservatives and former NDP MP Pat Martin) who wrote these requirements as part of the Federal Accountability Act back in 2006 made that qualification so restrictive in a fit of moral superiority they believed that they would attract the “best of the best” to this position. What happened instead is that because they made it too narrow, they created a situation where the people they had in mind for the job would have no interest in it. There was a reason why the first Commissioner under this regime, Mary Dawson, had to have her term extended several times, and the fact that Mario Dion was pretty much the only choice to replace her, as there were really no other applicants.

This particular appointment aside, there are a few problems with how this government has been operating when it comes to its constitutional obligations to make these appointments. On the operational side, they have lacked the general bandwidth and capacity to deal with these issues as a result of a combined lack of attention by several of the ministers involved, as well as their key staff, and this gets compounded by the bottlenecking that happens within PMO when these decisions go for approval. The figures that the CBC compiled have shown some wild disparities between departments when it comes to the number of vacancies, with Transport Canada being among the worst (where the appointments are around positions like board members for port authorities), while Employment had one of the lowest rates (with appointments to bodies like the Social Services Tribunal). Knowing the ministers involved, this isn’t a surprise—Omar Alghabra was more focused on the political ramifications of his files and how to leverage those, while Carla Qualtrough is a no-nonsense minister who can manage complex files and communicate with frank effectiveness.

The bottlenecking in PMO is a known problem that the prime minister refuses to do anything about, because he won’t expand the circle of trust when it comes to signing off on decisions. That means that virtually everything funnels through to his chief of staff, Katie Telford, and her deputies, and none of them want to relinquish any of their power, even when we can see that the concentration of that power leads to decisions being delayed until the last minute, an inability to plan or get ahead of issues, and the kind of problems that are seen here with this lack of action on key appointments that should be made. It’s a problem which the Auditor General has been calling out for years and which they still haven’t managed to speed up or solve.

Outside of the operational problems are the cultural ones within this government, and that has to do with their desire to make more diverse appointments across the board. This is a good thing overall—there is no shortage of studies that prove that more diverse decision-makers leads to reduced risk and better outcomes, whether in the corporate board room or in a myriad of other situations. The problem is that this government hasn’t paid attention to their own rhetoric about issues like systemic racism or structural biases against gender, ethnicity, disability, or any other kind of diversity. As much as this government likes to pay lip service to things like Gender-Based Analysis-Plus, which should mean that they take an intersectional look at the problems they are trying to solve, their usual pattern is to simply mention the words, but not do the work behind it. These appointments are little different.

Because this government is committed to conducting its appointments by self-nomination (meaning people need to apply instead of being sought out), they have put almost no effort into ensuring that the kinds of diverse talent that they want to apply will actually do so. This government seems to think that by simply saying “Hey, we’re appointing diverse candidates!” that all kinds of women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ candidates will rush to apply, and that there will be such a glut that they will have to fight them off. That’s not the case, and when they get a bunch of applications by middle-aged straight white guys and very few from anyone else, they still haven’t stopped to consider how to change their approach to better attract those candidates. Hell, even as a party, the Liberals got the memo that women and minorities need to be asked several times before they would even consider running for a nomination—so why can’t they do that for these federal appointments? It boggles the mind that they have stubbornly refused to put two-and-two together.

While the government told the CBC that of course they plan to fill all of these vacancies, this is one more area where their deliverology is failing them. They need to take this seriously; they need to change up their strategy and actually start sending people into the field and actually nominating people to these positions rather than waiting for applications that will never come. They need to act like grown-ups with eight years of government experience in hand, rather than continuing with these amateur-hour shenanigans that corroding their brand, and their legacy.

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Two reports were released by the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute about the state of housing, both nationally and in Ontario specifically. It’s also the subject of some actual policy ideas within the Ontario Liberal leadership race, which seems to have its participants largely stepping up on a file that has been largely marginalized by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, at least in a substantive way—he has certainly used the rhetoric about the housing crisis as cover for the corrupt dealings that happened as part of the Greenbelt scandal that the province’s Auditor General outlined in no uncertain terms last week. While both reports—one on the rental housing situation in the country, the other about needing a plan to build 1.5 million homes in Ontario over the next decade—do contain a certain level of overlap between them, the key recommendation between both is coordination, not only between all levels of government, but also with industry and labour. And that’s the part that I worry the most about.

“No one actor in the system can ensure that housing completions keep pace with population growth,” the Ontario report recommends about coordination. “All orders of government, the higher education sector, builders, developers, and the non-profit sector all play a vital role.”

“Create a coordinated plan with all three orders of government and create an Industrial Strategy led by a roundtable of public and private builders, the non- profit housing sector, investors and labour,” the rental report states in its coordination recommendation. “The federal plan should include targets and accountability measures. The plan should include enhanced data collection, more robust and frequent population forecasts and better research to understand Canada’s housing system. The plan should also include a blueprint to fund deeply affordable housing, co-operative housing and supportive housing, along with seniors housing and student residences and double the relative share of non-market community housing.”

The housing crisis is one of the most pressing domestic issues the country faces, the notion of a national round-table discussion that involves the federal government, provinces, major municipalities, and representatives of labour, higher-education and developers seems unwieldly. I have no doubt that these conversations need to happen, and that it would probably help if most, if not all, of the players were in the same room together, but we have had a pretty terrible run lately in this country when it comes to calling big meetings to coordinate things. If you add in the Indigenous component that the rental report recommends, that may be an impossible task—not because they shouldn’t be included, but because their housing needs are so much vaster and more specialized in many cases (such as dealing with the challenges associated with remote communities who are only accessible by ice road for a few weeks out of the year) that it may strain the ability to come to any kind of joint resolution for action to its very breaking point.

Trying to salvage our failing public healthcare systems, particularly after the height of the COVID pandemic, has given us a taste of just how able our federal and provincial governments are when it comes to even trying to work together in order to solve what is a particularly existential crisis for one of Canada’s defining intuitions (well, according to public opinion surveys in any case). In that particular instance, you had provincial premiers who were willing to let the system collapse because they thought that it would give them additional leverage with the prime minister, whom they insisted on sitting down with in order to personally demand more money from, with no strings attached. It didn’t help that these same premiers were also in the thrall of a normalcy bias that had them believing that a healthcare collapse wouldn’t be that bad, because after all, the system didn’t collapse at the height of COVID, so why would it now? Suddenly emergency rooms were being force to close in some hospitals, and the premiers found out just what their unwillingness to do anything about the system was costing the public.

In the end, prime minister Justin Trudeau simply dictated terms to the provinces because they had caught themselves out, and he gave them some money—not nearly as much as they were demanding—with some of the tightest strings that have ever been attached to healthcare dollars, because the federal government had been particularly burned at the height of the pandemic when emergency dollars sent to the provinces didn’t go toward testing, tracing, nurses salaries, or shoring up the healthcare system in anyway. Rather, most provinces simply put the money directly onto their bottom lines in order to eliminate their deficits as their healthcare systems continued to deteriorate past the point of collapse.

I worry that the housing crisis will be little different—particularly as premiers are already demanding a face-to-face thirteen-on-one meeting with the prime minister on infrastructure and housing, which is transparently an attempt to try to bully him into simply turning over more money to them with no strings attached—the way they like it. Not to mention, the provinces already have a history of taking federal transfers intended for social housing, and much as they have done with healthcare dollars for decades, spent them on other things. And while the PLACE report recommendations do talk about targets and accountability measures, that is unlikely to happen without some pretty powerful incentives from the federal government, which is likely to mean money—a lot of it at a time when the federal government is trying to at least look like they’re interested in fiscal restraint.

None of this is to say that the different levels of government shouldn’t be meeting to try and hammer out some kind of coordinated effort on the housing crisis, because they absolutely should. My biggest worry, however, is that too much expectation is going to be placed on the federal government to do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting, the work, and the financing to do what needs to be done, while premiers can feel content to not hold up their end of the bargain and put all of the blame on the federal government while legacy media says things like “nobody cares about jurisdiction.” We are in a housing crisis. We do need all hands on deck. But we also need to ensure that premiers or mayors can’t shirk their duties without consequences from the public, because that is where the pressure needs to come from.