Trudeau’s ambitions

Re: Start Using Pencil For Those Pledges, Sir, Robyn Urback, Dec. 26. The most serious indictment Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau delivered against former Conservative leader Stephen Harper during the recent election campaign was that he lacked an ambitious agenda for Canada. Trudeau’s campaign promises were indeed ambitious and beyond reach. But ambition is often striving for what is beyond reach. Canadians recognized this. That is why they changed their government.

Howard M. Greenfield, Montreal.

Robyn Urback is quite right in calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s original commitment to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by year’s end “plainly unfeasible.” He’ll be lucky if he can achieve 10 per cent of his pledge by Dec. 31. I am reminded of a scene in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which the delusional protagonist, Randle McMurphy ( Jack Nicholson), an inmate in a mental institution, boasts that he can single-handedly dislodge and lift a heavy plumbing fixture — a truly unrealistic task. Not surprisingly, he fails in his effort. But McMurphy is only a fictional character in a fictional lunatic asylum, whereas Trudeau is a very real prime minister of a very real country. There ought to be a difference between these two scenarios, but is there?

T. R. Simon, Thornhill, Ont.

Robyn Urback surely doesn’t buy the absurd UN claim that “only 6.3 per cent of refugees said they were interested in coming to Canada, a totally foreign land.” I’d consider it an extraordinary revelation if 100 per cent of the Syrians who fled the bombs and bullets of a war- torn, Third World hellhole to languish in squalid refugee camps didn’t claw and kick for a seat on an Air Trudeau charter to Canada — all flight, food, lodging and health-care expenses paid — and all for the minimal, implied price of being a Liberal voter for life.

Gary McGregor, Ladner, B. C.

The problem is not, as Robyn Urback points out, that the Liberals should be writing their promises in pencil and not pen. The problem is that Liberal promises are written on toilet paper.

Andrew Spencer, Paris, Ont.