A new round of broken promises shatter Trudeau's Sunny Ways

BY LORNE GUNTER

As if Canadians needed any additional reminders that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just isn’t very good at his job, a new handful of broken promises and failed attempts at policy implementation were on display this week.

Not to mention ethical lapses by Finance Minister Bill Morneau that would have brought down a minister in any other government.

I don’t think Trudeau’s dishonest, I think he’s clueless. He truly seems to believe if he just says something, it will happen.

He governs as if by magic spell. Trudeau has become the Harry Potter of Canadian politics.

The Canadian Press carried a story Monday showing that in September, Canada had just 68 soldiers and police officers on UN peacekeeping missions, our lowest level in almost 30 years – lower than the lowest level under for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And Harper was always openly contemptuous of the U.N.

When the Liberals promised during the 2015 election campaign to take our CF-18 jets out of the fight against ISIS, the trade-off was to be a return to our peacekeeping glory days. Canada was not a war-making country, Trudeau explained.

In February of 2016, three months into his term, Trudeau reiterated his promise to redirect our military to peacekeeping under command of the United Nations. The occasion was an official visit to Ottawa by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that came one week before our air force officially ceased dropping bombs on ISIS targets.

Six months later, the Trudeauites re-upped their verbal commitment to peacekeeping. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and then-Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion announced the Liberals would provide 600 soldiers, engineers and medics – plus helicopters, planes and field hospitals – to blue-beret missions overseas.

Another $450 million, and 150 police officers and civilian experts, would be available for reconstruction missions in countries recovering from war.

So what has come of all those wonderful Liberal words? Exactly 68 soldiers and police officers on missions around the globe. The low of the Harper era was 88.

Once again, the former motivational speaker and substitute drama teacher has trouble turning his flowery rhetoric into real-world action.

Then there are the Liberal deficits.

Monday, Vancouver’s Fraser Institute released a study showing that the Trudeau Liberals will rack up more per capita debt, faster than any other administration since Confederation that has not faced a recession/depression or a world war.

Last week, the Parliamentary Budget Office also estimated it will take until almost 2040 to balance the federal budget again. So much for Trudeau’s promise of three small deficits and a quick return to fiscal equilibrium.

Even Monday’s by-election win by the Liberals in Quebec speaks indirectly to another broken promise – energy development and environmental protection.

To increase his party’s chances of scooping up Bloc and NDP support in Quebec, Trudeau stealthily stiffened his government’s back against pipelines, such as Energy East. He knew pipelines were particularly unpopular in Quebec. At the same time, though, he promised to buy good favour with environmentalists and “green” politicians with measures such as his upcoming carbon tax.

Now Canadians will get the tax side of the so-called “social licence,” but not the economic upside of new pipelines.

Finally, despite promising “the most-transparent” and ethical government ever, Trudeau has refused to demand the resignation of Bill Morneau.

The finance minister’s lack of a blind trust for his vast personal holdings, his failure to disclose a villa in France, his championing of a law to permit new pension benefits – benefits marketed by the family company in which he retained part ownership – would rightly get him tossed in any other government.

But not in Sunny Waystown.

http://ottawasun.com/opinion/columnists/a-new-round-of-broken-promises-shatter-trudeaus-sunny-ways/wcm/63964b6a-40b2-43b9-9fc4-54f69b144695