Trudeau's weird habit of denouncing his own government

At a press appearance in Dartmouth, N.S., on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a quick dissertation on how immigration was out of control. Temporary immigration had “grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb,” he said, adding that it was driving up home prices, depressing wages and worsening access to health care.

Unsaid is that it got that way thanks to the policies of Trudeau's own government. Over the last nine years, the Liberals have repealed or relaxed a series of measures that were keeping temporary immigration in check.

But this is far from the first time that Trudeau has emerged as a public critic of policies for which he is technically responsible. Below, a cursory history of Trudeau denouncing himself.

While Trudeau's Dartmouth statements were among his sharpest criticisms of sky-high rates of temporary immigration, he's been decrying the phenomenon since Christmas. In a series of year-end interviews, one of the main questions he was asked was why he was overseeing an unprecedented spike in immigration.

In every case, Trudeau agreed that immigration was too high and that someone should do something about it. “It's the temporary immigrants that have spiked massively over the past couple of years that is putting so much pressure on the whole system,” he told a joint interview with CityNews and Omni.

He denounced his own office's feting of

an ex-Nazi

After a September incident in which Parliament gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka — a 99-yearold former member of a Waffen-SS unit in Ukraine — Trudeau's initial stance was to blame the gaffe entirely on House Speaker Anthony Rota. Rota had invited Hunka, and Trudeau said in the House of Commons that if he made it a point of vetting the guest list of every parliamentarian, it would be a “grievous attack” on the independence of MPs.

But months later, it would emerge that Trudeau's office had been just as derelict as Rota in vetting its invitees. While Rota had invited Hunka to Parliament, it was the Prime Minister's Office that had invited the ex-Nazi to a reception later that day. As Hunka's invitation read, “the Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, is pleased to invite you to a special event.”

He acknowledged that the carbon tax could indeed make life

unaffordable

From the beginning, whenever opponents criticized the carbon tax as a cash grab, the consistent answer from the Trudeau government was that any affordability concerns with the tax had been addressed via rebates. While Canadians would indeed be paying more for petroleum, it wasn't a drain on household income since most Canadians would actually see a net benefit when their Canadian Carbon Rebate came due.

But last year, this argument was detonated when the Trudeau government made a public concession to the claim that carbon taxes actually were hammering the ability of Canadians to pay the bills. In October, a coalition of dissident Liberal MPs in Atlantic Canada began claiming that the carbon tax was making it difficult for constituents to afford groceries or heat their homes.

Trudeau didn't respond by saying that the constituents would be fine once they received their rebates. Rather, he acceded to the dissidents' claims by approving a carbon tax exemption on home heating oil.

“I'll be blunt ... housing is not a primary federal responsibility,” Trudeau said at the August ribbon-cutting for an affordable housing complex in Hamilton, Ont. The statement is technically correct: much like health care or education, housing is generally governed at the provincial level.

But by denying federal responsibility for housing, Trudeau was contradicting nearly nine years of his party asserting that housing was indeed an issue over which they had jurisdiction. On the eve of Trudeau's election as prime minister, one of the key pledges of the Liberal campaign platform was that they had “a plan to make housing more affordable for those who need it most — seniors, persons with disabilities, lower-income families, and Canadians working hard to join the middle class.”

He said procurement

(particularly in regard to ArriveCan) is a scandalous mess

The gist of the ArriveCan scandal is that a relatively straightforward mobile app was allowed to become a $60-million boondoggle thanks to an unchecked process of freely handing out massive contracts to bidders who often did little to no work (and, in some cases, were simultaneously working government jobs).

It all happened within a Canadian Border Services Agency that was ultimately answerable to the Trudeau cabinet. But in March, Trudeau weighed in on the scandal by saying that the “government” needs to get its affairs in order.

“Government needs to make sure that everyone from the political level to the public service level are responsible, transparent stewards of the public money,” Trudeau said, adding “what we've seen in terms of the procurement process that's ongoing within government: there needs to be significant changes.”

He's been saying immigration is too high for some

time now

He said that housing shouldn't be Ottawa's job

COLE BURSTON / THE CANADIAN PRESS Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently spoke about how immigration was out of control. This is far from the first time that he has emerged as a public critic of policies for which he is technically responsible, Tristin Hopper says.