TRUDEAU’S AUTOCRATIC BENT GOES UNCHECKED
Trudeau embodies a danger to democracy and the economy, Diane Francis writes.
With Bill Morneau turfed, there are no adults left in the room — which is terrifying given Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s autocratic proclivity.
This week, Trudeau, in a move that would make Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban proud, jettisoned his finance minister to distract from a scandal, and then shuttered Parliament for a month to halt investigations into his government’s corrupt practices. He then announced that a cabinet retreat would be held to chart Canada’s economic course by Sept. 23, which, given his inept crew, foretells serious trouble for the Canadian economy.
Trudeau is not a full-blown autocrat, but a small-time version. He has breached the Conflict of Interest Act twice and has allegedly done it again with the WE Charity giveaway. His family has benefited from entities doing business with the government. He has orchestrated cover-ups, misled the press, flouted the rule of law by pushing out an attorney general to get criminal charges dropped against Snc-lavalin, hobbled business with needless regulations, handed out government contracts to his Liberal friends, botched foreign policy and gone overboard with his climate alarmism.
He represents a clear and present danger to Canadian democracy, especially because he lucked out last year when the election removed his majority but guaranteed his tenure unless all three opposition parties rose up to defeat him. They must do this when Parliament resumes on Sept. 23.
Tragically, the opposition’s weak link, both in terms of economic smarts and political standing, is the NDP, which won a mere 15 per cent of the popular vote but holds the balance of power. Heavily indebted and down in polls, the party can be easily co-opted — as part of Trudeau’s new road map for Canada — by throwing billions of dollars into the NDP’S unaffordable national drug and dental schemes.
This is what oligarchs do. They capture the state, then distribute its funds to advance their own interests.
A greater threat is the potential adoption of the loopy recommendations put forth this summer by Trudeau’s Task Force for a Resilient Recovery. It was created as a vehicle to further the anti-business agenda of Trudeau’s former chief of staff, Gerald Butts, who left his post for helping push out the attorney general to help Snc-lavalin.
Now he’s back in business with a hand-picked task force that is a grab-bag of professional Liberals, green activists, former civil servants and self-described social entrepreneurs whose business models are all about getting grants and subsidies.
Not a single business person was included on the list of task force members that I saw a few months ago.
Their recommendations would bankrupt the country. They include: $27.5 billion to build energy-efficient buildings; $49.9 billion to retrofit existing buildings; and a pledge to “jumpstart production and adoption of electric vehicles,” which does not include a price tag, but is sure to be a hefty one.
When mixed with Trudeau’s continuing assault on Canada’s only engine of economic growth — the oil and resource sectors — the outcome is a foregone conclusion: Canadian taxpayers, who already pay some of the highest taxes in the world, will crumble or flee, along with their investors and employers.
On top of that, Trudeau also wants a guaranteed annual income, which will turn us into a nation of trust fund kids and tank the economy.
This is the Trudeau trajectory, and don’t count on our new finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, and her budget whisperer Mark Carney to save us. Freeland chaired the committee that approved the unjustified allocation to WE Charity and Carney is a radical environmentalist who was seconded to the United Nations to bad-mouth the resource base that underpins Canadian living standards.
This is what autocrats and oligarchies do. They despoil democracies and free enterprise.
Be warned.