As a new citizen who came to Canada with a lot of optimism, I've been pretty underwhelmed by Trudeau's government. I feel like there have been a lot of high-profile policies that they've rolled out that seem poorly thought out and poorly executed -- off the top of my head, I'm thinking about capping international student visas, the carbon tax heating exemption, the temporary GST waiver, and even replacing the GED with the Canadian Adult Education Credential. All of these (to me) felt like things designed to capture headlines rather than well thought out policies.
Again, I'm new here, and I have no idea if another government would have done it better, but as a Business Analyst / Project Manager, I was underwhelmed. In addition, despite the fact that I consider myself quite politically liberal, I share the feeling expressed upthread that the biggest issue I see facing Canada is the tremendous bloat of bureaucracy. Much to my surprise, I could see myself voting conservative just on this issue alone.
Nope, you're spot on. The past year and a bit of highly publicized policies have been largely chaotic due to internal conflict in the party.
The GST holiday was, in particular, a messy abomination of a voter-bribe policy. The enormous publicity around the disability support benefit hyped it up so much that they brutally alienated the disabled community by ultimately producing a paltry nothing of a policy and then shrugging their shoulders and saying "well it's actually the responsibility of the provinces."
I was just speaking to a dentist here in Newfoundland about the new dental program and how unbelievably poorly that was executed. They literally didn't even consult the dental governing bodies on how to implement it.
Lots of policy nonsense recently has been for the sake of good press, either rushed or just poorly conceived to begin with, and it's been frankly insulting to the voters they were designed to court.
The desperation and floundering were patently obvious over the past year-ish, and it's just been increasingly embarrassing to watch.
What surprises me is that the inevitability of the public turning against Trudeau was so predictable. He, of all people, should have had a game plan for a precipitous and unrecoverable loss in popularity.
As had been mentioned multiple times in this thread, governments have a life cycle. No party can stay in power indefinitely and 9 years seems to be the longest best-before date anyone can manage before the public grievances and gaffs add up and everyone kind of forgets how much they hated the last guy who stayed that long.
The absolutely unavoidable rotting fish smell should have been planned for, and at least a very clear succession plan should have existed.
It's the hubris of thinking that you can bribe-policy your way out of an inevitable collapse in popularity that blows my mind. And this coming from one of the most well-mentored politicians in the history of Canadian politics.
None of this should have surprised him, and yet he seemed perpetually surprised that he couldn't swing public favour back towards him. That's what drove me nuts for the last while.
I have an aunt who is 70 who has gotten so much plastic surgery that she literally looks like a drag queen, and that's what this reminds me of, letting yourself end up looking fucking ridiculous just because you can't accept that your time in the sun was never going to last forever, no matter what crazy shit you try.
This is why so many of us are so saddened by this. It should be er have come to this. There should have been a plan for exactly what happened, because everyone who has ever paid attention to politics knew it wasn't avoidable. So the silly antics of the death rattle of his leadership are just tragic and embarrassing.
