It would suck to take Justin Trudeau’s order at McDonald’s. Though you’d be meeting Canadian royalty, he would probably take forever to decide what he wanted, and then ask to change or add things to his order after it had begun to be made. Like a bad customer, Trudeau has shown himself to be unable to commit to prior statements, and unwilling to announce a detailed platform that Canadians have been demanding for almost two years.
Instead, the Liberal leader spends his days vaguely accusing the Harper government of just about anything, like impoverishing the middle class or being intolerant of Muslims. Politicians are not judged in a court of law, and shouldn’t be allowed brush off questioning because they might be wrong. Withholding information from voters, like refusing to release a policy book until the election campaign starts, is just as bad as lying to them.
Trudeau may be far from the confrontational brutes that Harper and NDP Leader, Tomas Mulcair are, but will probably never defeat them until he chooses to announce his positions, instead of flip flopping between the Government’s and Official Opposition’s policies.
Harper went into the December break a wounded warrior, and emerged a defiant maverick in 2015. Trudeau’s inconsistent performances have fuelled Harper’s rise in the polls, and put the Conservatives back in pole position to win another election. Harper’s surging numbers, which are being described by CTV News and Threehundredeight.com as his strongest since Trudeau became the Liberal leader almost two years ago, can mainly be attributed to his messaging on funding trades education, balancing the budget, lowering taxes and fighting terrorism.
Mulcair’s response to rising Conservative support in Canada has been to attack Harper even more and expose various flaws in his agenda. On the other hand, Trudeau’s answer to Harper’s very Happy New Year has been to move his own message to the right, by choosing to support some of the Conservatives’ positions and bills.
Though he’s by no means out of the race, desperately turning his back on students, environmentalists and progressive Canadians to target Harper’s suburban voters is a strategy that won’t help Trudeau in the long run. His scruple and lack of explicit stances on key issues will only continue to make him look inexperienced and in a way afraid of voters. Political leadership in Canada has always been measured in black and white, not in grey or a mixture of blue and orange in Trudeau’s case.
When the Conservatives announced they would table a new Anti-Terrorism bill in the aftermath of the Parliament Hill and Paris shootings, the Liberals came out and said they would support the legislation, before even seeing it. Bill C-51, which was introduced by the government in early February, has been met with concerns from past politicians and legal experts who say it will lack sufficient civilian oversight. What’s even more confusing than the bill itself, is why the Liberals would support a mass expansion of our surveillance state that is being objected to by three of its former Prime Ministers.
The answer to that question is clear but less obvious. Since becoming Liberal leader in 2013, Trudeau has stumbled on many issues, including ones concerning national security and the War on Terror. When he has been required to lead and sound competent on issues regarding counterterrorism laws, he has instead attacked the government for fighting terrorism while failing to bring alternative policies to the table.
There’s no doubt that Trudeau’s attractive features will continue grace the cover of Chatelaine magazine for years to come. But there are serious doubts about whether he can indeed govern this country and be good for anything more than questioning government policies he has no answers to.
Trudeau is on the border between winning the election and losing it. If he were to lose this election after leading in the polls for so long, his defeat would resemble the Seattle Seahawks’ last minute collapse against the New England Patriots in last month’s Super Bowl. His refusal to lead on issues of mass importance like the construction of pipelines, oil development, counterterrorism and middle class economics are only going to keep suburbanites in Harper’s coalition and radical progressives in orange ridings.
Attacking Harper because he’s Harper isn’t working anymore, and like the NDP, Trudeau’s going to have to start doing what he hates the most: getting specific. Whether it’s his plans for marijuana, his views on the origins of terrorism or his position on the Northern Gateway Pipeline project, Trudeau has made ambiguity his middle name, and saying nothing to Canadians at this point, is just as bad as lying to them. If Trudeau continues to fence-sit for the rest of the year, the only fence he’ll be staring at come October will be the one outside 24 Sussex Drive.
Capilano Courier
