Justin Trudeau Archives - Page 36 of 41

Here we are halfway through the first week of this campaign and I’ve got a funny feeling.

I think NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is going to come out with a win. I don’t mean he’ll be the next prime minister, that seems like too much of a long shot, but I think he’s going to make some considerable inroads this election.

There has been something flat about Liberal Leader/Prime Minister Justin Trudeau these first few days. He doesn’t seem to have figured out why he is running other than it looked like the right time to increase his seat count. He hasn’t fared any better than I did trying to talk himself into making this election about getting a mandate to do big things over the next years coming out of a catastrophe like COVID.

Of course it’s early. It’s not like Trudeau hasn’t won elections before, it’s actually something he’s pretty good at. But he’s going to need something a bit bigger than announcing the government will train 1,000 firefighters.

For an election Trudeau has called the most important since 1945, it sure seems to be lacking that tangy zip of meaningful campaigning. And I think the big beneficiary of that is going to be Singh.

People largely seem in the mood to keep government in their lives. The ghosts of Stephen Harpers past are still lurking, and people don’t really care for that kind of grim parsimony.

Besides, Singh has Trudeau pegged.

Watching his opening election ad and you can really see where Singh’s advantage lies. “For six years we’ve heard Justin Trudeau say the right thing with no intention of doing it,” summing up the Liberals’ latest turn in government in a one neat and tidy package.

It’s the kind of thing that works well because it’s just so on point. Conservative attacks that Trudeau is some kind of horribly corrupt bungler just don’t land with the same force.

This is by no means a government that has performed perfectly, but it hasn’t performed horribly, either. It’s walked the line of good-enough governance in a country that doesn’t expect anything much better. So the Tory attacks tend feel hyperbolic and overblown.

But to call this a government that’s all talk and no action? That’s something that lands.

There is nothing they love more than talking about how great they are, and in making a show using the right words. But, again and again, they fail to deliver to the same level as their rhetoric. It makes the Liberal road to a majority victory harder, because this government is a known quantity. The public will be less willing to buy what they’re selling, having been burned so often in the past.

An easy example here is Trudeau’s promise that 2015 would be the last election using the first-past-the-post system. We are now into our second FPTP election since he made and broke that promise.

I could go through a list of things that the Liberals promised and failed to deliver on, but by then I’d have written a whole policy book.

This is why I think the NDP has a good a shot as any this time around.

For all the good the pandemic supports were able to do for regular people, they were still weighted heavily toward corporations, who took in tens of millions of dollars, still turned huge profits, then paid out dividends and executive bonuses like it was any other year. People understand the fundamental unfairness of that.

This is where the NDP promise to claw back benefits to corporations who took public money only to line their own pockets is a good one. It’s also more straightforward that a bunch of new ethics laws, like the Tories are promising.

It’s part of the party’s broader message that government can and should be the vehicle to make people’s lives better. It’s one of the great failings of the current government that they often opt to make people’s lives slightly better, but not too much better.

Plus, Singh is just so personable. His solid debate performances last time around bode well for his second kick at the can. If he’s able to repeat that performance and prove it wasn’t just a one-time fluke, he’ll make a solid case to the public he’s got what it takes to move up in the world.

Campaigns are long, and weird, and what seems obvious at the start can be totally off base by the end. But Singh is starting off with a solid message at a time when Liberal support seems soft and tentative.

It’s a real opportunity for the NDP to make some serious gains. The true test of Singh as a leader is whether he’s able to capitalize on the opportunity. He has everything at his disposal to get this one right, he just needs to make it though the next month without any stumbles.

But deep down, I’ve got the feeling he has it in him. That this is his time, and his party’s time.

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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At least 233,000 people, many of whom are civilians, have been killed in Yemen since war broke out six years ago between Saudi Arabia and its coalition allies, and the Houthi rebels.

A further four million have been internally displaced as a result of the conflict, with 13 million on the verge of starvation and more than 24 million in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

So dire is the situation, so rampant the human suffering, that for several years now, the United Nations has designated it as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

Throughout all this time, one might have expected Justin Trudeau, the self-proclaimed feminist and promoter of international peace and security, to have taken a real leadership role on the issue and helped support a ceasefire between the two warring factions; something any responsible G7 leader would do.

But no.

Instead of trying to broker peace, or even just eliminating Canada’s culpability, Trudeau has shamed Canadians everywhere by enabling the conflict, including by approving permits and authorizing the export of military equipment to one of the chief antagonists in the war – Saudi Arabia.

Between 2016 and 2020, Trudeau’s Liberal government permitted the sale and export of five thousand sniper rifles (manufactured in Winnipeg by PGW Defence Technologies Inc) along with hundreds of light armored vehicles (LAVs), made locally in London, Ontario by General Dynamics Land Systems, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Perhaps most shockingly, the government has continued to sell military equipment to Riyadh, despite receiving an abundance of evidence over the years demonstrating that the Saudis have been using Canadian-made arms to continue their campaign of terror and violence.

The evidence against Canada began to mount so much that eventually the United Nations took notice. In September 2020, its Human Rights Council panel on Yemen singled out Canada for being one of the few countries in the world guilty of perpetuating the humanitarian crisis through its noxious arms sales.

And they weren’t the only ones.

Amnesty International and Project Ploughshares both found through their extensive, well-documented research that “there is persuasive evidence that weapons exported from Canada to (the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), including (light armored vehicles) and sniper rifles, have been diverted for use in the war in Yemen.”

As Kelsey Gallagher, a researcher at Project Ploughshares has written, not only are these weapons “facilitating the conflict itself” but they also facilitating “potential war crimes.”

Unfortunately, none of this information is likely to deter Trudeau from continuing to supply the Saudis with Canadian-made arms.

Even before he became Prime Minister, Trudeau made his tacit support of Stephen Harper’s $15 billion deal to export LAVs to Saudi Arabia well-known. On the 2015 campaign trail, he absurdly claimed that he wouldn’t cancel the deal because the LAVs were only “jeeps” and that it wasn’t a government sale at all, but rather “an agreement between a manufacturing company here in Canada and Saudi Arabia.”

Both statements were purposely misleading, even patently false, which means that even as rookie opposition leader, Trudeau was reneging on his promise of instituting a more transparent and honest government.

Realizing that Canadians weren’t buying his lame excuses, Trudeau went on to employ a different strategy for sluffing off responsibility; one which involved blaming his predecessor for brokering the LAV deal in the first place, all while conveniently omitting the fact that it was his government who made the “crucial approval of the first export permits.”

With logic like this, soon the Trudeau Liberals will be telling us it’s also Harper’s fault that Canada now exports more weapons abroad than ever before, or that it was the Conservatives who forced the government to approve its 2020 deal with Canadian business connections, for the sale of $73.9 million worth of explosives to Saudi Arabia.

But of course, that would just be more lies and cowardly excuse-making.

The Canadian administration most responsible for facilitating Saudi Arabia’s devastating military campaign, is the current Liberal government.

While Harper was a villain in his own right on arms exportation, it is Trudeau above all others that must be held accountable for enabling the Saudis to lay waste upon Yemen.

Regardless of whatever else will be said about Trudeau in the history books, the desolation of Yemen will always remain a dark and deplorable stain upon his legacy.

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Pestilence, infernos and the Taliban be damned – it’s time for Canada to head to the polls!

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau kept television camera operators in the capital bustling on Sunday, as he dragged his entire family to visit the Governor General at Rideau Hall, ahead of dragging Canadians to the voting booth next month.

For many people, the question was: why?

“Nobody wants an election before the end of this pandemic,” Trudeau insisted to reporters back in May. In fact, mere days before triggering the election, Trudeau claimed he wasn’t interested in playing politics and was too busy governing, precluding him from being able to devote a month to the campaign trail.

Fortunately for Trudeau, a 36-day availability miraculously appeared in his prime ministerial itinerary – the perfect duration for a general election! Despite months of assurance otherwise, Canadians would indeed be heading back to the polls.

Emerging from Rideau Hall and feeling the need to justify his change of heart, Trudeau delivered a speech that offered up the mushiest of pablum, claiming that this was perhaps “the most important [moment] since 1945 and certainly in our lifetimes.”

A curious, if ineffective, attempt at political spin. When it comes to the major issues, nothing has changed sufficiently to warrant an election.

To be fair, it wouldn’t boost a prime minister’s reputation to admit the election is a scheming attempt to acquire more power. But that is precisely what this election is about.

Canadians will mark their ballots on September 20th for three reasons. First, Trudeau misses the convenience of leading a majority government. Having to collaborate with other political parties is presumably just too much exertion for the inheritor of an Imperial Oil trust fund. Putting on boxing gloves and smashing the face of a Conservative Senator is one thing, but having to compromise with the opposition around the negotiating table? How tedious.

This is perhaps to be expected from the government that shot down its own electoral reform promise, as working with other parties would have become the norm rather than the exception under improved voting systems.

The second reason for next month’s election? Public opinion polls gaze favourably upon the Liberals, and perhaps more importantly, suggest the official opposition borders on a shambles. Both the Conservatives and Greens have embraced the curious hobby of self-cannibalism, with Erin O’Toole determined to be equally ineffective as his Tory predecessor. There’s no better time to strike than when your enemies flounder, fixed-election-date legislation be damned.

Third, history indicates that minority governments are rarely punished for calling an early election, even amidst a pandemic. Both the British Columbia New Democrats and the New Brunswick Progressive Conservatives called snap elections as minority governments last year, yet both were rewarded by voters with majority governments.

In fact, examples of minority governments punished for calling snap elections are incredibly scarce. Earl Washburn of EKOS Research asked on Twitter if anyone could provide any instances, and the best I could come up with – from both federal and provincial elections – was the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives losing a mere two seats in 2006. There didn’t look to be any examples from British politics, either.

If history suggests a snap election is rewarded, and timing is ideal in regards to the largely staggering opposition, perhaps the only mystery is why it wasn’t called earlier.

But other than Trudeau’s quest to amass greater power, there is no justification for an early election. Trudeau has enjoyed the confidence of the House of Commons, able to pass most legislation without hassle. And it’s been less than two years since voters last went to the polls.

Canadians do not fancy an early trip to the voting booth. It’s summer time, the fourth wave of the pandemic has begun to rear its fangs, much of the country is literally on fire, and honestly, many Canadians just don’t perceive a tangible connection between Parliament and their day-to-day lives at the best of times.

But as the world endures one crisis after another, what Canadians do crave is convincing, assuring leadership to navigate said problems. Climate change, a lingering pandemic, and housing affordability perch atop a litany of issues that require urgent and aggressive government intervention.

On Sunday, during a speech meant to curtail criticism as much as it was to inspire voters, Trudeau said, “The decisions your government makes right now will define the future your kids and grandkids will grow up in.”

He’s right. But many public opinion polls suggest that, at least on a personal level, it might not be Trudeau who Canadians prefer to shepherd them through such tumult.

For the NDP, whose leader is enjoying ballooning popularity, their challenge is to bridge the gap between Jagmeet Singh’s support and his party’s approval rating. And if they can, they might find next month the opportune moment to finally achieve what has proven elusive for them federally over nine decades: forming government.

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I have three unrelated observations to start this campaign.

Here’s the first:

We’ve all heard how politics makes strange bedfellows – but in the 2021 federal election, so far what’s strangest is how the current bedfellows are an exact inverting of the 2019 script.

Whereas in 2019, Justin Trudeau ran – hard – against Ontario Premier Doug Ford, in 2021 we read The Star’s Rob Benzie reporting that there is a “nonaggression pact” between the federal Grits and the provincial Tories.

But it’s more than a ceasefire; is there an actual alliance at play here?

The first sign was when federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole was in a bind to start the campaign, walking into the trap set by the Liberals over mandatory vaccines. As O’Toole sputtered to clarify his position – ahem, not unlike Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath, who wanted to try out all the positions before settling on the right one – Ford put out hints that he would unveil mandatory vaccines in Ontario’s health-care settings and in schools.

He then did so, more or less.

As O’Toole launched his platform, a central component of which is to end the Liberals’ agreements with various provinces to deliver childcare, Ford’s education minister was hinting Ontario could reach a deal with the feds to deliver the Liberals’ signature social program.

Here’s the second:

Having canvassed for four Liberal candidates in the Greater Toronto Area – North York, Newmarket and Etobicoke – I have a pretty direct observation.

The gender gap right now is wild. Even doors that our canvassing data management app, Liberalist, says should be historically Liberal come with a wrinkle: the “man of the house” is very grumpy about Trudeau. The rest of the family is still Liberal, but the male of the species is going to shut the door or not-so-politely shoo you off his lawn.

There’s always been a gender gap, but this time it seems pronounced beyond anything I’ve previously experienced.

How will the Liberals look to correct their standing amongst men? Is it about fiscal probity? Is it about something that helps pocketbooks? I’m stereotyping here, because the policy solution seems less effective than just the fact that there is something about this PM and his government that men of a certain age… resent.

As a senior Tory friend said, the one thing the Liberals have going for them is that it’s not clear that these men are inclined to vote for O’Toole just yet. Moreover, O’Toole – notwithstanding his strange Mr Clean slash Men’s Health slash Bouncer at a Gay Bar (to quote Jenni Bryne) platform cover photo – is not working to shore up his support with women. Again, a stereotype, but he is deliberately poking many women in the eye with his vow to “pull a Harper” and cancel childcare.

The final observation:

The Conservative ad is an image of a boxer punching Canadians with red gloves, hitting us with debt and high house prices. But then the solution this image demands is B-roll of some guy who I know to be O’Toole but not everyone does, and then “vote Conservative”. It’s an interesting opening, then followed by not a lot of anything.

The Liberal ad, on the contrary, is all about how Canadians worked together with the Liberals in their corner to get through the pandemic, narrated by a smiling, familiar Trudeau.

Obviously, both messages can’t be true. But at least the Liberal one features the leader.

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After months of speculation, it is now pretty much confirmed that we are headed into a federal election. A pandemic federal election, at that. Unless Justin Trudeau changes his mind over the weekend or if, unexpectedly, Governor General Mary Simon decides to ignore the advice of the man who just put her on the viceregal throne and chooses instead to listen to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who provided her with a rationale to refuse Trudeau’s request.

Both scenarios are on the outskirts of political fiction, so Canadians will likely have to cast their ballot by September 20th. Opposition parties, along with pundits and columnists, have been saying for weeks that we shouldn’t have an election during this pandemic, especially considering the Trudeau Liberals have won every confidence vote they faced in the House of Commons, giving them the ability to push their political agenda forward despite being in a minority situation.

However, while opposition parties pontificate about the needless election that is coming in the midst of the pandemic`s 4th wave and complain loudly about Trudeau’s power-grab motives, they are wasting valuable time trying to frame the electoral narrative that is before us.

Truth be told, we’ve seen similar attempts made by opposition parties in provincial contexts. While these political pressures perhaps helped Premier Moe to decide to back away from calling a snap election in the Spring of 2020, it was not an issue for Premier Horgan in British Columbia or Premier Higgs in New Brunswick. It doesn’t seem to be an issue for Nova Scotia Premier Iain Rankin either.

While a pandemic election is a gamble, most voters actually were not deeply offended by those who decided it was time to choose another government. Polls always indicate that voters never want an election anyway, so for political operatives making such a call, voters’ wishes about election timing are usually not a consideration.

However, things can still turn sour for Trudeau. It did for Premier Furey in Newfoundland and Labrador, after he too called a pandemic election. Cases were low on The Rock, and considering how elections unfolded in other provinces, the NL Liberals were pretty confident they were going to surf it too. Unfortunately for Furey, COVID-19 blew up in Newfoundland during the campaign. Candidates had to self-isolate after being exposed and in some cases contracting the disease. Things got so bad that in-person voting was cancelled and the deadline for mail-in ballots was extended numerous times. Andrew Furey saw his Liberals drop almost 20 points during the campaign, from a high of 65% before the election was called to 48% on Election Day.

That’s the cautionary tale for Justin Trudeau: unlike Furey, he doesn’t have the luxury to lose 20 points during a 4th wave campaign – and still win. Which probably explains why Liberal Ministers have been targeting Premiers, mostly Jason Kenney and Doug Ford, to pre-emptively set the blame stage for the 4th wave, in case things take a turn for the worse during the campaign. Surely, the feds can’t be blamed for a 4th wave spreading through schools, since that is a provincial jurisdiction!

Examples of a backlash for calling a snap election are few and far between. David Peterson in Ontario and Pauline Marois in Quebec come to mind. They prove that governments calling an election early without a valid reason can sometimes pay a heavy price.

Opposition leaders can keep trying to demonstrate the foolishness of a snap election, but chances are it won’t work. O’Toole, Singh and Blanchet have taken turns over the past week. Erin O’Toole has been attacking Trudeau by saying that the planned election is a Trudeau vanity project. Thus far, these personal attacks have failed to land. Jagmeet Singh has openly offered to support the government through the pandemic, stripping the credibility of Trudeau’s argument that Parliament is dysfunctional. Blanchet keeps repeating that Trudeau is the only one who wants this “hasty, unnecessary and dangerous election.”

A major flaw in their rhetoric, of course, is that these 3 leaders are making these arguments while being on the campaign trail, actively nominating candidates, announcing policies and even, in the case of the NDP, dropping its entire electoral platform. None of them want a pandemic election, yet they are all out there campaigning. Meanwhile Trudeau has been vacationing away from scrutiny and pesky questions about election timing. He is in effect the only leader currently not campaigning or even talking about the election. When he does, voters will forget about all the noise related to election timing and move on to making up their mind about who should lead the country in the post-pandemic recovery. The sooner the opposition leaders move on as well, the harder it will be for Trudeau to remain above the fray.

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The ballot question.

That’s the name political hacks and flaks give to what is otherwise known as “what the election is all about.”

What is at stake? What is being decided? What are the choices?

For Ronald Reagan in 1980, it was: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” He won big. For Bill Clinton in 1992, it was: “Change versus more of the same.” He won big, too.

Ditto Joe Biden in 2020, who said the election was “a battle for the soul of the nation.” It may have been a bit of hyperbole, but it worked. Biden – who, full disclosure, this writer worked for – won more votes than any presidential candidate in American history.

Up here in Canada, too, the biggest victories have happened when the ballot question is clear and understood.

Brian Mulroney’s massive 1984 victory was the direct result of his televised debate with Liberal leader John Turner. Turner had approved a raft of patronage appointments, which Mulroney called horrible. He demanded Turner apologize to the nation. Turner responded: “I had no option.”

Mulroney immediately, and brilliantly, framed the choice: “You had an option, sir – you could have said no.” Voters shortly thereafter said “no” to Turner, and in record numbers, too.

Jean Chretien’s 1993 winning ballot question, ironically, was cooked up by Kim Campbell’s Conservatives themselves. They broadcast a TV attack ad that mocked Chretien’s looks (the then-Liberal leader, who I then worked for, had a partial facial paralysis). “Is this a Prime Minister?” the Tory ad asked, over an unflattering photo of Chretien.

Canadians overwhelmingly answered: “yes.” It was the face of a Prime Minister. And they made Chretien PM in a landslide, and reduced Campbell’s party to two seats in the House of Commons.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives flipped the table in 2011, and reduced the Liberal Party to third place with a two-pronged ballot question. Their “here for you” was bland and boring.

But when coupled with their relentless barrage of “just visiting” attack ads against Grit leader Michael Ignatieff – who had lived outside Canada for decades – the Conservative triumphed.

Justin Trudeau, hate him or not, is a genius at reducing complex political choices to simple, understandable words and phrases.

In 2015, he partially plagiarized the Clinton 1992 approach, and said the choice was about “real change – now.” He – like Mulroney, Chretien and Harper – won a majority.

He lost it in 2019, however, when his ballot question was poorly executed, and widely misunderstood. In that campaign, the Grit slogan was again about choice – “choose forward.” But his wearing of racist blackface, and his obstruction of justice in the LavScam scandal, didn’t seem very “forward” to many Canadians. He lost his Parliamentary majority.

This time around – with the Delta variant surging everywhere, and vast swaths of Canada on fire – what is the ballot question?

If Trudeau calls an election this weekend, as expected, he will stride up to the media microphones at Rideau Hall and declare what he wants it to be. It will likely be a (false) claim that he managed the pandemic well, and a (false) claim that he offers stability in uncertain times.

But for most of us, it’s hard to think of a ballot question that in any way justifies a $500-million Seinfeldian election about nothing.

And, if the ballot question becomes something like this – “Have the Trudeau Liberals become tired, and arrogant, and out of touch, and need to be taught a lesson?” – the answer will be clear.

The answer to that ballot question will be “yes.”

[Kinsella was Jean Chrétien’s Special Assistant, and ran the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.]

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The NDP decided to take the opposite tactic that parties have established in recent election cycles, and put out their entire platform before Parliament has even been dissolved. After campaigning for a full week before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has even headed to Rideau Hall to request a dissolution, Jagmeet Singh released “Ready for Better: New Democrats’ commitment to you” (emphasis theirs) to minimal fanfare from his stop in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador on Thursday. For a leader who likes to criticize Trudeau as only speaking pretty words and taking no action, Singh has demonstrated that he has only the same to offer.

The document is 115 pages of pretty words. Lots and lots of them, interspersed with photos of Singh around the country, but it’s a document that is hard to take seriously once you actually read it. A lot of it are platitudes, and some back-patting for things they are taking credit for that they didn’t actually do. Because most of their promises are simply reheated versions of their 2019 platform, they didn’t even bother to update it to reflect the fact that the Liberals have either already accomplished or have been actively pursuing and are at various stages of completion many of the things they describe. Well, one generously assumes that they simply neglected to update the pledges, lest it be said that they’re lying about the state of accomplishments in order to create a sense of disillusionment to drive votes, and the NDP would certainly never do that, now would they? (That was sarcasm – it’s one of their most common tactics).

Of course, they padded out the document by repeating many of the pledges over, and over, and over again in each different section, so it looks like they’re really being comprehensive. But more than anything, it’s a lot of what we’ve come to expect from Singh and the NDP, which is a complete inability to distinguish what falls under areas of provincial jurisdiction, and where they do acknowledge that they need to negotiate or “work with” the provinces, the expectation in the text is that the premiers will sign right up to everything that they have on offer – pharmacare, dental care, guaranteed liveable income, changes to labour codes, changes to building codes, free public transit, binding carbon budgets, you name it. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the federal government has been working for over two years to implement the Hoskins’ Report on creating national universal pharmacare, and in that time, the only province they’ve managed to convince has been Prince Edward Island, and it’s only to implement the very first steps of the program, which is to cut some of their existing costs. Early learning and child care has progressed more rapidly because of the amount of money the federal government put on the table, but even then, there are still three provinces including Ontario which have thus far dug their heels in and refused to sign on. And no, just applying more willpower won’t change those facts – there is no Green Lantern Ring of federalism.

There is also a pervasive sense throughout the document that everything can happen at once – pledges upon pledges that can happen at the drop of a hat. Not only will negotiations with provinces resolve satisfactorily overnight, apparently there is also infinite capacity within government to accomplish these things, and the laws of physics don’t apply when it comes to solving pervasive problems like boil water advisories on First Nations reserves. There are also some literal impossible pledges sprinkled throughout as well, such as promising to expunge the criminal records of those convicted of cannabis possession – something the current government explored doing but realized that it could not be done because those records are too disparate and scattered for this to happen. Even the current commitment to expunge the records of gay men convicted of gross indecency has proven exceeding difficult to uphold.

There are also a number of promises that stretch the bounds of credulity, such as making social media companies stop the spread of disinformation (good luck with that), abolishing the Senate – and in the interim, “insisting” that they change their own rules to rubber stamp all bills rather than exercising their constitutional veto powers (not going to happen), and lowering the voting age to 16. They’re also promising to institute a form of mixed-member proportional representation that “works for Canada” – and farming out the design to an “independent citizens assembly” so that they are absolved of any accountability for the decisions that are made. Once again, good luck with that.

I will say that I was surprised that in an age of “defund/abolish the police” rhetoric and aping American Democrat talking points at every opportunity, the document was not calling for that in any regard. Not breaking up the RCMP, ending their contract policing services, or anything remotely like that. If anything, it called for the expansion of current police forces by providing them with even more resources for dealing with hate crimes, gun control, and by enforcing “zero tolerance” policies, you would basically need a steady influx of new police officers to replace the ones who are being drummed out. It’s certainly not what I would have expected from a party that bills itself on being the progressive voice in Canada – the branch plant to the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crowd – and my only guess was that this was their way of forestalling the “soft on crime” taunts rather than being bold in setting policy, especially considering that they don’t care about jurisdiction in any other regard.

All of this to say that this particular platform was an entirely predictable effort from Singh and company – a lot of blue-sky ideas, unachievable promises, disingenuous characterizations of the current situation, and the belief that simple willpower will make all of their dreams come true. Singh may accuse Trudeau of being a man of pretty words, but he should look in the mirror.

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The good news is the election speculation can finally end. The bad news, well the bad news is all around us.

Western North America is on fire, or if not on actual fire, suffering from severe drought. Greece is on fire. Catastrophic floods are occurring everywhere from Europe to China. There was a “heat dome” that settled over B.C. And elsewhere, when it has been hot this summer, it has been very hot indeed.

Just this week, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body studying climate science, put out its latest report which confirmed what is increasingly obvious: climate change is already here.

So, in some ways, now is the perfect time for an election. The IPCC lays out a coherent, and pretty dire, case for where we’re at.

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” the report says according to a Bloomberg report.

Bloomberg sums up the report succinctly:

The past decade was most likely hotter than any period in the last 125,000 years, when sea levels were as much as 10 metres higher. Combustion and deforestation have also raised carbon dioxide in the atmosphere higher than it’s been in two million years, according to the report, and agriculture and fossil fuels have contributed to methane and nitrous oxide concentration higher than any point in at least 800,000 years.

This is pretty grim stuff, but it is not sounding our ultimate doom. Not yet, at least. There is still time to put the brakes on some of the worst case scenarios. The earth’s temperature has, so far, only risen about 1.1°C from the 19th Century average. In the next 20 years, that will rise to 1.5°C without taking serious action.

And so far, none of the signatories of the Paris Accord have done enough to prevent warming from crossing the 2°C mark, beyond which the effects on the climate get much worse.

“This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels before they destroy our planet,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

That’s certainly a dire statement, but it also means there is still time to make a difference.

So here we are at the start of a federal election — which reports suggest will kick off this Sunday — wherein we could perhaps maybe see some kind of solution proposed.

The current likeliest outcome is Justin Trudeau and the Liberals win again with a solid shot at a majority government. Which, if you listened just to their rhetoric particularly about climate change, you might think is a good thing. But it is probably worse that not good, but actively bad.

The trouble with the Liberal Party, this one especially, is how the way it talks about itself becomes all consuming, to the point they might actually believe their own bullshit.

Listen to your own voice enough talk about the serious and important work you’re doing to combat rising global temperatures — hey, there’s a carbon tax now! — and you start to really think that that’s enough. That good will and saying the right words is enough. This is a government, after all, where the prime minister and then-environment minister Catherine McKenna both marched in climate protests that were…protesting their own government.

(You can see a similar mindset at work when Trudeau took a knee at anti-police brutality protests, which again were protesting his own government, all the while he was surrounded by RCMP officers.)

Look no further than current environment minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, who was asked on CBC how that might change the government’s approach to doing things because of the seriousness of the IPCC’s findings. His answer leaves much to be desired.

“Canada needs to ensure that in the context of that transition, it’s extracting full value for its resources and using that money to push forward in terms of reducing emissions,” Wilkinson told CBC. “What we’re doing is saying it’s got to be part of the transition, but part of the transition is being able to raise the revenues that enable you to actually make the investments that are required to go there.”

So, you see, the federal government bought an pipeline, and is finishing its construction, to make sure that we’re able to suck as much oil — of higher-than-average carbon intensity! — out of the ground, so that we can make enough money to counter the cost climate change.

While it is a truly incredible answer, but it is quite honest. The government will never do what is necessary to actually reduce this country’s carbon emissions enough to meet the requirements of our own commitments. Never mind trying to exceed them.

There is far too much money to be made by oil companies for them to get in the way of that.

I would say something like, ‘This presents us with a stark choice in the coming weeks for election day.’ But I’d be full of shit.

There is little chance of a stark choice being offered, because we don’t have the sort of political culture that offers stark choices.

Instead we get variations on a theme. The best hope this election for a more serious climate policy might be the NDP under leader Jagmeet Singh. But pinning hopes on the modern NDP is a fool’s errand. Their party is not one that is looking for a radical departure from the status quo, but instead a party that is focused on wooing Liberal voters to pick up enough seats to wield slightly more influence in the House of Commons.

That sort of focus is not going to lead to the sort of boldness required.

The Conservatives are of no hope on the climate file, and the Greens simply have no hope of anything given the state they are in.

So, once more, we will fight an election on a bunch of piddling issues, with tiny solutions being sold as big promises.

All the while more carbon enters the atmosphere, and the globe grows ever hotter. At some point something will have to be done, but by the time this country is mobilized to truly do something serious, it will be too late.

We have our shot, but don’t worry, we won’t take it.