Diane Francis: Justin Trudeau is letting down Canadians (and doesn’t seem to care)

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In February 1984, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau took a walk in the snow and had an epiphany that led to his resignation. Perhaps history will repeat as his son, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, strolls through the summer months shirking his duties, botching foreign policy, neglecting Canada’s Armed Forces, refusing to answer media questions and cancelling events that may attract protesters.

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Justin Trudeau seems wholly uninterested in running the country and, as a result, recent polls suggest that nearly 60 per cent of Canadians disapprove of his performance.

Unlike his father, who had a majority of seats in Parliament when he left, the current prime minister won only 32.6 per cent of the popular vote in the last election and clings to power by virtue of an agreement with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who won only 17.8 per cent.

Their deal guarantees Trudeau’s tenure until June 2025, but is an arrangement that neither Liberal nor NDP voters were asked to approve. The result is an inept government cobbled together by two career politicians who have never met a government program they didn’t like.

In Justin Trudeau’s Canada, politics outweigh policies. For instance, Trudeau has ratcheted immigration goals up to 400,000 a year, but hasn’t made a dent in terms of overcoming the current labour shortage.

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Nearly 37 per cent of all businesses say they’re facing a skilled labour shortage. Clearly, our immigration system, which has been skewed toward family reunification and other politically motivated goals, is not helping this country meet its economic goals.

Trudeau’s government cannot even build a working app to collect information on incoming travellers, or maintain properly functioning airports. ArriveCAN is a disaster that’s stranded travellers, and the country’s busiest airport, Toronto’s Pearson International, was named as the worst airport in the world due to the high number of delays.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Over 53 per cent of flights departing Toronto Pearson between June 1 and July 18 arrived late at their destinations, according to flight-data specialist FlightAware. That was the highest rate among the world’s top 100 airports by number of flights.”

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Meanwhile, Trudeau’s environmental zealotry has stranded Canada’s resource endowment and is about to afflict its agricultural sector, too. Ottawa torpedoed attempts to become a world leader in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, which would have been a boon for the economy, while reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Over the years, 18 LNG export facilities were proposed in Canada, according to Natural Resources Canada, but only one is now under construction in British Columbia (though a couple proposed terminals on the East Coast may now end up being built, after years of delays). The rest have given up. If even half those terminals had been built, theoretically, Europe would have been dramatically less dependent upon Russian gas than it is now, and Canada could have taken its place alongside the United States as one of the world’s biggest LNG exporters.

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Despite this dreadful energy track record, Trudeau never misses an opportunity to pass up a prestigious photo op and is planning to meet next month with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has expressed an interest in Canada one day supplying Europe’s energy needs.

But in order for that to happen, we would need not only to build LNG export facilities, but also pipelines to connect the natural-gas producing region of western Canada to the East Coast. Yet the Trudeau Liberals have consistently stood in the way of LNG terminals and pipelines such as Energy East.

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Energy East was a project that should have been built, despite provincial objections, because it was in the national interest and guaranteed our energy security. The result has been that Quebec’s refusal to allow pipelines to cross its territory has made it and Atlantic Canada dependent on Saudi and American oil and natural gas.

Canada deserves an engaged and knowledgeable leader who puts the country first. Justin Trudeau needs to get himself a new job, because he does not seem interested in the one he has.

Financial Post

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