Want Change? Engage the Left on its home turf.

What better time than during an election?

(Not to be Bossy, but) Accept these three truths:

1. You don’t know everything

2. Others will look at the same facts and arrive at a very different conclusion

3. If you constantly challenge yourself to sincerely attempt to understand why that “person on the other side” has arrived at their particular position, you’ll either i) come to learn you were wrong on XYZ, or ii) have the benefit of now confirming the wisdom of your original position. (As a bonus, you will sometimes learn a trick or two from a talented Pol about how they spin an issue, even when the facts aren’t on their side {see representative prior post “Adam Vaughan is at it again” Nov. 14-12}.)

To that end, here’s an excerpt of a speech I gave to members of The Albany Club of Toronto last month:

U.S. journalist Gerard Baker sees President Trump’s return as “an overdue recognition and repudiation of the regime of oppressive insanities we have been subjected to for a decade or more.” Not just for the U.S.A., but “perhaps for the rest of the West too.”

America’s Democratic Party just discovered that voters, who’ve had to cut back on their groceries due to inflation, are going to worry about the core priorities of a politician who once advised that “everybody needs to be woke.”

Closer to home, name a swim club parent who understands the point of having girls aged eight to 16 competing in a pool against a 50-year-old transgender swimmer who teaches at York University. Yet that’s exactly what happened in Barrie in the Fall of 2023, despite a 2022 vote by World Aquatics, the world governing body for swimming, that “effectively banned transgender women from participating in women’s swimming competitions.”

Every media outlet in Canada except one thought this wasn’t newsworthy, but whatever your politics, the time has come to start calling out the B.S.

Joseph Atkinson was Publisher of The Toronto Star for 50 years, and one of his principles was that the State has “the right, and duty, to act when private initiative fails.” I think we are now in a circumstance where its the State that is failing us, and its we private citizens who have the right and duty to act.

If we don’t re-establish Canadian Values, to have the courage to say that they actually exist, no one is going to do it for us. If you wonder what those are, ask yourself this question: “what would my Grandmother say?”

The wisdom and common sense of the women who lived through suffrage, two world wars and a painful Depression is all we need to guide us.

We just have to lock arms and channel the same modesty and courage that saw them through far darker times.

It’s our turn, and you need to get more openly engaged. On the Left’s home turf, and not the usual “safe spaces.”

As I come upon the first anniversary of being a Columnist at the Toronto Daily Star, I’ll admit to spending too much time thinking about all of the issues that we’ve been facing as a society. How many of those challenges tie back to the priorities and choices of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was a hot topic until a few days ago, but before the federal election starts — sans Mr. Trudeau — I thought an early review of his career was in order; prompted by a Toronto Star editorial.

When this exercise is finished, I hope you’ll agree that our democracy benefits from a robust, domestic media corps. Whether or not you see flaws in The Star Editorial Board’s analysis of a PM who was pushed out by his own #2 (see prior post “Freeland wins the Prisoner's Dilemma” Dec. 17-24).

The Star Editorial of March 9, 2025 begins like this:

As Justin Trudeau exits the national stage, he remains a man of contradictions. As Prime Minister, he has inspired and disappointed, offered lofty ideals yet often under-delivered, shown resolve but been accused of lacking empathy. The greatest contradiction may be that he stayed too long yet is enjoying one of his finest moments as he is headed for the door.

Finest moments?

If this was our first time seeing Pearl Jam, for example, I get why you might be enthralled by Eddie’s performance (Editor’s note: except Manchester 2024). Governing is more consequential than a fleeting night at a concert. Heartfelt speeches is what launched Mr. Trudeau’s career, but I’d hope that we can agree on the negative consequences of style over substance. As I pointed out in a Star column dated Jan. 13 -25 (to delineate between quotes from others vs myself, words in this post in italics are my own):

Many of the 20 per cent of families that pay almost two-thirds of all income tax collected worry about how their taxes are being spent. For the families and young people who live paycheque-to-paycheque, inflation and government ineptitude have undercut much of the benefit of the expensive new programs that were designed to make their lives substantially easier.

Troubled by Canada’s trajectory, many parents with means are rationalizing the $500,000 cost of a U.S. university education for their child. I’ve heard of several billionaires who have, rather than waiting for an election, already voted with their feet and moved abroad, taking their investment and philanthropic capital with them.

At the same time, our political leaders crow that from 2000 to 2023 Canada’s average GDP growth was second-highest in the G7, and that the International Monetary Fund projects Canada will lead the G7 in 2025.

Rosy economic headlines like these should have presented the Liberal government with a viable shot at a fourth mandate. Except for the reality that, as highlighted by the Fraser Institute: “there’s a serious problem with these measures — they fail to account for population growth rates in each country and therefore don’t measure whether or not individuals are actually better off.”

That’s why most Canadians feel like they’re treading water. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars of “strategic investments,” our economy has expanded almost exclusively due to immigration-fuelled population growth.

This has come at a cost, and most of us have suffered from this lazy approach to growing an economy: increased taxes, longer hospital wait times, congested roads and lack of public transit and higher youth unemployment.

Canadians saw it all for what it was: theatre — and it earned Mr. Trudeau just 17% popular support by the end of his tenure. The Star’s Editorial continued:

Ten years ago, all seemed possible for Trudeau. It was a morning of remarkable warmth and sunlight for an early November day in Ottawa when he introduced his first cabinet. He had just lifted his Liberals from a distant third in national polling to an unlikely majority government in 2015.

When asked to explain why he had crafted a gender balanced cabinet, he answered with a line heard around the world: “Because it’s 2015.” Indeed, that iconic response merely highlights one of those many contradictions. The self-described feminist Prime Minister had some of his darkest days in office when doing battle with strong women. Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott threw his government into crisis during the SNC-Lavalin scandal.

I’d argue that it wasn’t either of these female Cabinet Ministers who “threw” Mr. Trudeau’s government “into crisis during the SNC-Lavalin scandal.” Indeed, it was Mr. Trudeau’s attempt to interfere in the administration of justice that led to the departure of two of his most powerful female Cabinet Ministers. It may have been even worse than we know, as the Hon. Jane Philpott intimated to Paul Wells (then at Maclean’s) back in 2019:

…“there’s much more to the story that needs to be told” but that it can’t come out because “there’s been an attempt to shut down the story”—an attempt she attributed to the Prime Minister and his close advisors (Editor’s note: is she referring to former PMO Principal Secretary Gerry Butts, who’s now steering Prime Minister Mark Carney?).

Of course, it fell to another strong woman, the Hon. Chrystia Freeland, to unsheathe the fateful dagger to finally bring Mr. Trudeau down (see prior post “Freeland as ‘The Fall Gal’” Dec. 15-24). Can you imagine the current political environment had she agreed to go along with Mr. Trudeau’s proposed Cabinet demotion? He might still be Prime Minister, buoyed by the same forces that have boosted Mr. Carney’s electoral prospects.

Anyway, The Star Editorial continues:

A strong advocate of action on climate change, Trudeau lost his nerve and dismantled a carbon pricing policy brick-by-brick until all his would-be successors kicked it to the curb. A man who legitimately wanted to bring lasting Indigenous reconciliation wildly over-promised and has largely left disappointment in his wake. He established a national holiday to honour residential school survivors — then took a vacation in a surf town on the day he had created for introspection. He promised electoral reform then cynically reneged. His pronouncements too often seemed performative, and he never shed a sense of entitlement that his name had always given him. Under Trudeau, home ownership has become increasingly out of reach for the middle class and food bank use is up.

Need we say more? Feel free to review the Liberal campaign platforms from 2015, 2019 or 2021, and you’ll see that these failures represent much of the meat of those wishful documents. The Star Editorial continues:

Yet, when this country needed leadership during times of trauma, Trudeau was there. He steered the country through our first challenge with the chaos of Donald Trump and he led us through a pandemic in which this country lost comparatively fewer lives per capita than most G7 nations, particularly our neighbours to the south. He acted quickly and boldly to keep individuals and businesses afloat. When resentment over vaccine mandates exploded with the so-called Freedom Convoy, Trudeau acted decisively to end the occupation, although his words often inflamed and divided and there are conflicting views (and judgments) as to whether he was right to invoke the Emergencies Act.

Whatever relationship gains were made with Donald Trump circa 2016 were unfortunately sacrificed in support of the 2025 Liberal re-election strategy (see prior post “One big winner of the U.S. election: Justin Trudeau” Nov. 6-24). Many parents will contest the life-altering choices made throughout the pandemic, and Mr. Trudeau’s infamous attack on the dubious among us (“where ‘these people,’ the anti-vaxxers, [are] ‘often’ being women-haters, racists and science-deniers, as well,”…“Should we ‘tolerate them?’”) can never be forgiven. Until a government shows some curiosity about the true costs of the exercise, applause is premature (see prior post “Ottawa should strike a Royal Commission on Canada’s COVID-19 Response and our Advice for Future Pandemics” Jan. 13-25).

As for how Mr. Trudeau handled the Freedom Convoy, I touched on his choices in an early Star column last March:

I can’t separate Canada’s car theft mayhem from the never-ending court case against Truck Convoy sympathizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.

Our criminal justice system appears unable to deal with increasingly violent armed gangs, but it has had both the time and budget to spend 38 days in court and counting on a trial involving bouncy castles and truck horns.

That’s 38 more days than police and the Canada Border Security Agency have spent looking for your stolen car as it sits in a container at Montreal’s federal Port Authority before being shipped to its new owner in Africa or Eastern Europe.

You might not have supported the convoy’s tactics, but armed truckers didn’t break into homes in Ottawa’s Rockcliffe neighbourhood looking to overthrow the government.

Sadly, the Convoy was relevant again in June 2024, following years of Liberal indecision about the Iranian regime (“Why do the Liberals find the easy parts so difficult?”):

The most recent head-scratcher out of Ottawa was that Justin Trudeau’s government needed more than 1,500 days to weigh Iran’s downing of UIA Flight 752, not to mention the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) overt backing of global terror groups, before finally agreeing to designate the IRGC as terrorists.

Am I the only one who recalls that it took Trudeau less than 30 days following the start of the 2022 Trucker Convoy protest to seize more than 200 bank accounts (a decision a federal court later deemed to be overreach)?

Anyway, the Star’s Editorial continued:

He also has been steadfast and correct in his backing of Ukraine after Russia’s illegal invasion and has had to deal with the fallout of Middle East war which spilled on to the streets of Canada. All the while, he has been pilloried by opponents on social media who railed against everything from his socks to his hair, questioned his manhood, shut down campaign appearances with protests and waved “F—- Trudeau” flags from the backs of trucks.

I fully agree with the point about Ukraine, although if there were four times as many Russian-born voters in Canada as ones of Ukrainian heritage, one has to wonder if that might have gone differently. The specific anti-PM protests sound in keeping with what the Rt. Honourable Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper all experienced at various points during their tenure.

The Star Editorial continued:

He will be rightly remembered for raising many children out of poverty with the Canada Child Benefit, as well as for creating a national child care program which now includes every province but Alberta and Saskatchewan. In partnership with the NDP, Trudeau created a national dental care program and gave us the embryonic start of a national pharmacare plan.

No source was cited, but according to advocates, child poverty has actually been rising: from 622,000 in 2017 to 1.4 million kids at last report (up by 360,000 in just two years, via CBC). Families that have kids in daycare can assess for themselves how that program is performing against their needs. Dental / pharma care invariably round out the broad, long term Liberal strategy adopted from former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne: to create a labyrinth of programs that ultimately deliver a Guaranteed Annual Income, without calling it such — it’ll be a few years before economists know if this impacted the labour force participation rates of people who’d otherwise be earning minimum wage somewhere.

We know there’s at least one Steelworker who feels strongly that the answer is “obviously,” and may well be connected to an influx of Temporary Foreign Workers to backfill the resulting hole in our domestic labour force (see prior post “Liberals go hog wild on immigration, hoping to secure victory in 2029 and beyond” Aug 21-24).

The Star Editorial continued:

His greatest challenge is one he will now hand to his successor. Canada is dealing with a U.S. president who is not only treating the Canadian economy like a toy on a string but is intent on weakening us to the point that we would be annexed as the 51st state. In recent days we’ve seen Trudeau at his best — passionately defending Canadians in plain language while showing the world that we will not be cowed by Donald Trump’s threats. When his foreign affairs minister, Melanie Joly, came to meet the editorial board this week, it was clear that Trudeau’s team is working tirelessly on a serious response.

It’s hard to argue with much of that, even if the so-called “serious response” was referring to the U.S. President as “Donald” during Mr. Trudeau’s last series of press conferences, and trotting out the exact same list of targeted tariffs that were used during Mr. Trump’s first term. If they meant working feverishly to remove Inter-provincial trade barriers, that was also promised in their last three election platforms.

The Star Editorial continued:

His critics will point out that Trudeau did not spend on defence or focus enough on adapting our economy to a changing world, making us more vulnerable to this existential threat.

Is that not the whole ball of wax, and would those observations not be accurate? To frame this in the voice of “his critics,” the writer avoids having to acknowledge that this is the most damning sentence of the entire offering.

It’s clear vis-a-vis military spending (see representative prior post “Hitting NATO’s 2% target a pipe dream without addressing Ottawa’s faux procurement machine” Mar. 26-24 or this Star column from May-24 “Incoming defence chief must be set up for success”), as well as the economy, a sample of which was outlined in a Star column I wrote last April:

In 2020, the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that Ottawa had spent just 29 per cent of the Liberal’s promised Supercluster commitment at that point, with the majority of those dollars going to administration costs. Hiring more bureaucrats won’t solve Canada’s much-discussed productivity woes.

Little had improved by 2022, according to an Ernst & Young report. Over one five-month period studied by E&Y, the Supercluster program had doled-out just $44 million in total new project funding. With that bleak track record, it’s hard to be confident the Liberals will make good on their vow that their Supercluster initiative will create an additional “$50 billion of GDP by 2028.”

In an effort to distract voters from the underachieving Superclusters, the 2022 Federal Budget promised a new $3 billion Canadian Innovation Corp (CIC). Few disagreed with “the urgent need to address low business investment in R&D,” but Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recently delayed CIC’s launch until 2026-27.

The Star Editorial continued:

We will soon see whether a new Liberal leader can reset a relationship with an American leader who is recklessly changing the world order and erasing every historical link the two North American nations crafted over centuries. But Trudeau has channelled this country’s anger and frustration expertly and has again risen to a threat with a tough response to illegal American tariffs.

Thanks to Trump, he is turning over a Liberal party that has been revived, something unthinkable only a couple of months ago.

As he departs, there will be a surfeit of hot takes on this polarizing Prime Minister. The white-hot anger directed at him in the final months of 2024 will give way, we suspect, to a more nuanced appraisal, both sunny and dark, with time and perspective.

I’m hoping that this post doesn’t get thrown in with the “surfeit of hot takes” given that a decade hasn’t yet passed. Perhaps the best way to compare Mr. Trudeau’s legacy is not by my hand, but against the Toronto Star’s own 2015 Editorial recommending that Canadians dump Stephen Harper. Here are some highlights:

Canadians are a decent, progressive people who deserve a decent, progressive government that holds out the prospect of a better and more constructive future.

Fortunately, when they go to the polls on Oct. 19 voters will be able to choose a strong, hopeful alternative to the Harper Conservatives: Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party. They have crafted an alternative vision for the country that deserves the support of those who believe Canada can be more generous, more ambitious and more successful.

Who believes that succeeded to any material extent?

Over the course of this long campaign, Stephen Harper has offered voters simply more of the same – more regressive social policies, more whittling away at government, more settling for a stagnant economy that leaves too many behind.

Turns out that if you grow both your government and population far faster than the economy can handle, the entire nation suffers!

More than any other party, the [Liberals] offer what the country needs most after almost a decade of division: hope for those who believe Canada should aspire to be a better, more inclusive community.

The Liberals refused to let themselves be handcuffed by the prevailing wisdom that balancing the federal budget must trump all other priorities. That has freed them to propose a major stimulus program aimed at building up the country and prodding the economy out of its doldrums.

Ten years later, the “new” Liberal government is again promising a major stimulus program to attempt to dig us out of the economic doldrums that the last Liberal government created. As the late John Honderich would say: “You can’t make this stuff up!”

[The Liberals] have stood up for bedrock Canadian values of tolerance and decency against the Harper scare tactics. They have pledged to put an end to the Conservatives’ most destructive policies: their pointless war on environmentalists, their partisan manipulation of foreign policy….

I’ll defer to Canadians of Jewish faith if they’ve seen any “partisan manipulation of foreign policy” by either Mr. Trudeau or Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly following the Hamas attack of October 7th.

The Liberals have proposed an ambitious plan to make government more open and accountable – including reform of the electoral system, a better way to appoint senators, and more diversity in cabinet and government appointments.

I look forward to a considered follow-up piece about Mr. Trudeau’s success at making “government more open and accountable.” Electoral reform died an early death, and Mr. Trudeau appointed dozens of allies to the Senate.

They show a balanced and realistic appreciation of the big challenges ahead – including the need to integrate Canada into the world economy while making globalization work for all, not just the elite. And they stand firmly for upholding Canadian unity….

National unity is no less perilous than it was in 2015, and while the Liberals boosted the highest tax bracket by probably 6% or more to fund a bunch of “investments,” is the economy working for anyone under the age of 40 right now? I’d say not.

The NDP was right, for example, to come out four-square against Bill C-51, the Conservatives’ badly flawed “anti-terrorism” law, back in February. The Liberals prevaricated at the time, supporting the bill but promising to amend it later. In office, they should scrap it and start over.

I summarized the Liberal track record on terrorism in a Star column last summer:

There were 37,326 active immigration arrest warrants outstanding in 2023, according to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), including 306 individuals deemed “a danger to the Canadian public.” All at large in Canada. That was three years AFTER the Auditor General chastised CBSA for losing track of tens of thousands of foreign nationals facing deportation from Canada, including convicted criminals. The Liberal government has increased the size of the public service by more than 40 per cent since 2014, yet they still can’t find and apprehend these known threats (unlike the Eldidi duo, who weren’t even on police radar).

Seventy-eight per cent of 30,746 immigration investigations in 2022-23 ended with CBSA’s determination that the individual in question was “inadmissible” to Canada. There are many reasons why you might be found “inadmissible,” including security concerns, human rights violations, criminal record, misrepresentation, health issues, a loss of refugee status, etc. That’s not a one-off: CBSA inadmissibility findings were even higher in 2021 and 2022.

If the vast majority of CBSA investigations turn up troubling information, it’s frightening to think our immigration screeners missed a publicly available ISIS execution video where Ahmed Eldidi allegedly dismembered “a spy” in Western Iraq prior to being granted Canadian citizenship. Was this a case of bad luck, underfunding, or inadequate training at our embassy in Egypt?

How many other would-be terrorists have been missed over the past decade?

The 484 refers to the number of people on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “terror watchlist” that American officers “encountered” at the U.S.-Canada border in 2023. What’s more troubling: that the number of encounters rose 55 per cent since versus 2022 or that the figures for the U.S.-Mexican border are “significantly lower?”

Terrorism concerns lead CBP to turn away almost 10 people a week at border crossings such as Ontario’s Peace Bridge. These are folks we’ve already admitted to Canada on some basis.

How? Why? Where are they now?

You’re exhausted, I know. I fear that’s what Progressives hope will give them a chance at a do-over: you throwing-up your hands.

I understand why Conservatives don’t want to patronize periodicals that come up with such different interpretations of the same set of facts. I believe we will win more folks over to our side if you get more engaged. Alert their Public Editor when a piece is wrong or unfair. Write letters to The Editor. Debate in the comment section, with facts and not animus.

All of which requires you to regularly tread on to the Left’s home turf, and not the usual “safe spaces.”

What better time than during an election?

MRM

(note: this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece)

(photo credit: Blast Furnace Tender, New York 1951 by Irving Penn)