What keeps Erin O’toole up at night
What keeps Conservative Leader Erin O’toole up at night is that on Sept. 23, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals will likely announce a tsunami of spending that will permanently damage the country.
“We don’t know what the total in this budget will be,” said O’toole in an interview with the National Post. “We’re worried that the Liberals will try and bribe the electorate with their tax dollars using a generation of money.”
The National Post’s John Ivison recently quoted a senior government official describing Trudeau’s intentions as a “structural change in the way government in this country operates. It is literally frightening. I am very worried about my kids’ future and their capacity to service that level of debt.”
This should also keep every Canadian up at night, along with the fact that exactly 40 years ago, Trudeau’s father destroyed the Canadian economy with confiscatory taxes and giant deficits used to finance his welfare-state dream. It took 30 years to clean up the elder Trudeau’s fiscal wreckage.
Justin Trudeau has steadily increased taxes and driven out $185 billion worth of investment. He has overspent on COVID-19 stimulus. He has covered up his latest scandal by shuttering Parliament and telling Canadians to wait until the end of September to learn about his grand scheme to transform the country into a deficit-driven socialist paradise.
By contrast, the government’s priority, according to O’toole, should be to help the country recover from the pandemic by growing the economy.
“They should be focused on preserving jobs, and not just gargantuan spending under the guise of ‘green’ or ‘build better’ or some such sloganeering,” he said. “We need people working and need the economy to keep growing.”
For instance, one-million full-time jobs have not returned, and there is no plan for those workers, or for small businesses teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, O’toole said.
“If we lose large sectors of our economy — manufacturing and fabrication in Ontario and Quebec; oil and gas in the West; forestry and mines across the country — we will see a permanent and prolonged depression in Canada and an unemployment crisis,” he continued. “Our future is at stake.”
Trudeau has created a culture of entitlement and elitism, and in some cases corruption.
According to O’toole, the Aga Khan private island holiday conflict of interest report showed that “Trudeau viewed himself as a ceremonial figure who leaves details to other people. He thinks he’s the spokesman for Canada as opposed to the leader of Canada.”
Trudeau violated conflict of interest regulations in that case, then did so again when he pressured the attorney general to give Snc-lavalin a get-out-of-jail-free card. Now he’s under investigation again for the WE Charity scandal.
Trudeau’s foreign policy initiatives have also been embarrassing. Our relationships with the United States and China have been bungled, as was Trudeau’s ill-advised tour of despots and aid announcements last year in a vain attempt to win a useless seat on the United Nations Security Council.
O’toole said Canada must restore its global reputation as a dependable ally in NATO, NORAD, the G7 and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.
“I have suggested a positive form of multilateralism with countries that are democratic as opposed to working with international agencies with members who are bad actors and don’t obey norms or laws,” he said.
Clearly, O’toole believes a prime minister of Canada should act like the CEO of a G7 country, not a glad-hander who hands out other people’s money.
“I’m in politics to preserve rights for Canadians,” he said, “and the Liberals are eroding our right to make a living and do well and prosper. Liberals try to avoid accountability on economic and other issues, but our job is not to let them do that … or to let them mess up this country.”