The Justin Trudeau Lovefest Gets a Reality Check

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Outside Canada, it looks enviable: a charismatic leader with a powerful majority government and a solid economy. But internally, the shine is fading. Two years into Trudeau’s first term, a polling aggregator run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. shows his support at 37.9 percent, down eight points from a year ago—still strong in Canada’s three-party system. He campaigned as a friendly Everyguy, but scandals within Trudeau’s administration have sullied that image. His finance minister, Bill Morneau, isunder fire for holding substantial shares in his family’s business through a shell company. Although that’s not technically against the rules, Morneau says he’s sold his shares. A bid for tax reform that would’ve hit high-earning professionals blew up, and Trudeau’s chief fundraiser, Stephen Bronfman, is linked in the Paradise Papers to an offshore trust. Trudeau himself was dinged for a secret vacation last Christmas at the Aga Khan’s private island.

Traditional fault lines of Canadian federalism are also reemerging. Some western regions feel underrepresented in Canada’s eastern-centric government. In French-speaking Quebec, identity politics continue to run deep; and across the nation, federal-provincial battles are heating up over health care, climate, and marijuana legalization. Voters’ patience also is being tested as Trudeau’s government has failed to deliver on such lofty pledges as sweeping electoral reform.

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A Nanos Research poll conducted for Bloomberg News shows discontent with Trudeau’s handling of the economy is highest in the prairies, of which Alberta—the heart of Canada’s oil sector and its conservative movement—is the biggest part. The sense of alienation there is “typical of what we’ve seen in Europe and the U.S., where a lot of it is first driven by the economy when it’s down, and then they start looking at things that make it harder to improve,” says Jack Mintz, a professor and Palmer chair in public policy at the University of Calgary.

Alberta is Canada’s richest province by almost any measure; its workers earn the highest average wages and pay some of the lowest tax rates, and its economy leads the nation on a per capita basis. After the price of oil plummeted in 2014, however, job cuts and capital spending clawbacks set voters on edge. Trudeau’s carbon price proposal and mounting delays in pipeline construction don’t help. Attempting to court the middle class, Trudeau cut taxes starting in 2016 on those earning from about $35,000 to $70,000 and raised them on incomes greater than $157,000. He expanded unemployment benefits, particularly in regions affected by the oil downturn, and created the Canada Child Benefit, which gives as much as $417 per month for each child to most families and costs a fourteenth of the federal budget.

The Justin Trudeau Lovefest Gets a Reality Check


but he is a lefty ..... a Progressives Guy [for Canada] his numbers are about the same as Trumps
 
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