Too many things are troubling about Trudeau

Change needed, but Liberal leader just isn’t prime minister material

The times they are a changin’. It’s taken Calgary 47 years to catch up to that Bob Dylan classic, but catch up it did. Nearly a half- century after this city sent its last Liberal MP to Ottawa, it broke with suffocating tradition and did it again Monday.

Nellie McClung said, “Always in Alberta, there is a fresh wind blowing.” Well, not always, Nellie.

Sometimes, it takes years for the wind gusts to pick up any speed.

You don’t have to have voted Liberal to appreciate that it was time for some diversity to enter Calgary’s federal political scene. Political diversity is healthy, indeed absolutely necessary, in a democracy.

You’ve got to mix it up. You can’t have the same old, same old. It gets stale. It gets tainted. It gets arrogant. It gets entitled. That’s a conclusion it took 44 years to reach at the provincial level, and almost 50, federally speaking, in Alberta.

Calgary desperately needed change. The Conservative zeitgeist had worn thin. Now, as the Liberals take back the reins of government after a decade of Conservative rule, they need to count Calgary in. The old cry, “The West wants in,” needs to ring loudly in Liberals’ ears. And newly minted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can easily let the West in — by giving Calgary a voice in cabinet. Indeed, he has an obligation to do so.

That said, however, Canada’s prime minister ought to be gifted with more gravitas than Justin Trudeau possesses. He fails to impress. The party — and the country — would have been much better served by someone who isn’t such a lightweight.

Let’s hope the new Liberal government will have a serious climate- change strategy at the top of its agenda, while managing that fine balance with Alberta’s oilpatch.

Let’s hope this will be a much more open and transparent government than the buttoned- lip, top- down regime that Stephen Harper ran. Let’s hope the niqab issue, which suffered from a ridiculous amount of overkill during the campaign, will finally be laid to rest and that women will be free to wear whatever they choose. The state has no business in the closets of the country.

But there are things about Trudeau that are deeply concerning. During the campaign, he promised everything to everybody, rashly vowing to institute this, that or the other thing, at the behest of this, that or the other group, as though he were personally in charge of the Royal Canadian Mint and he was sending it into hyperdrive. There’s also his absurd comment about budgets balancing themselves.

It’s also unlikely that the guy who broke the law he was sworn to uphold as an MP, when he smoked pot, will dump his inane plan to legalize marijuana.

Do we really want Canada to become Colorado, where kids are getting into their parents’ now- legal stashes and taking bags of grass to school? Do we really want to add awareness campaigns about driving while high, to the failed list of other campaigns, such as driving while drunk? That’s what Colorado’s had to do.

Trudeau’s stance on abortion remains as unleaderlike as Harper’s was. This country has not had an abortion law for 25 years; it’s time for the procedure to at least be capped at a certain gestational age, as European countries have legislated. Yet, Trudeau is content with the status quo.

And in the bigger picture, Trudeau’s refusal to approve any candidate who didn’t agree with his position on abortion doesn’t bode well. Harper was dogged by allegations that he muzzled scientists, but Trudeau’s refusal to allow his MPs freedom of conscience is just as egregious. Will MPs have to fall into lockstep on other moral issues, their consciences ordered to become clones of his own?

Calgary will have a Liberal presence in Ottawa. But the federal Liberals needed a different leader from Day 1. Not only is Trudeau just not ready; he is just not prime ministerial material.