It's official - Stephen Harper Best PM. (Village Media)

[eyeball]

1 hour ago, CdnFox said:

Sorry kiddo, I didn't mean to break your brain again.

You didn't even come close so no worries.

[CdnFox]

9 hours ago, eyeball said:

You didn't even come close so no worries.

You mean it was broken before    Well fair enough

 

[SpankyMcFarland]

In polls of this type there’s a fair bit of memory loss, buyer’s remorse and recency bias. The immediate predecessor looks more appealing than they were and anything more than twenty years ago is the dusty past. Unsurprisingly, Trudeau père bucks these trends. His contribution is too large for anyone to ignore. For good or ill, he was by far the most consequential PM on the list. 

Edited August 9, 2023 by SpankyMcFarland

[Zeitgeist]

Historical context is crucial here.  Pierre Trudeau represented a Canada that had almost nothing but continuous success in its wake when he rose to power: peacekeeping and resolution of Suez crisis, big WW2 contributions, Avro Arrow, Expo 67, etc.   He represents an outward looking, confident, nationalist Canada that was defining itself apart from the US, Quebec, or English Canada.  Multiculturalism and flirting with 3rd way socialism was novel and untested.  He wanted Canada to take control of its energy sector away from foreign interests and implemented the National Energy Program.

The problem is that some of these experiments failed, in some cases not until long after he died.  He significantly reduced the military and had all forces wear the same garish uniforms.  Big mistake we’re still trying to fix.  The National Energy Program failed because it alienated the West with heavy regulations   The socialist social program spending expanded our debt almost irretrievably (though Mulroney continued the overspending).

Multiculturalism has had mixed results  On the one hand it has contained Quebec ethnic-nationalism/separatism and internationalized Canada in positive ways: tremendous cultural diversity, tolerance, forward thinking  On the other hand it has downplayed the cultural values (largely English and French, and yes, Indigenous) that were important to and inseparable from the founding principles and institutions that made much of what is valued about Canada possible   Our current government foments attacks on those cultural roots, which has caused division and damaged national pride and confidence. Multiculturalism is partly responsible for this because it doesn’t preference some cultural values over others, including our founding cultures, even though no one would honestly say that all cultures are equally healthy. Just look at Taliban Afghanistan or Maoist China.

Interestingly, Pierre Trudeau wanted to scrap the Indian Act, including special status and the reservation system. That view is seen as colonial/racist by many Indigenous activists, but the Indian Act is known as highly segregating and backwards internationally. Yet the Indigenous consensus is still to keep it.  Given the recent highly contestable narrative of Canada as genocidal due to residential schools, the seemingly endless reparations to Indigenous, the lack of concrete economic progress on reserves, and the continued lack of independence (from state support) of many Indigenous, we have to wonder whether Pierre’s approach on that file was wrong.  I don’t think there are easy answers on that, and they must come from Indigenous with economic independence (not easy).

Justin Trudeau has opened up pandora’s boxes of divisiveness and distraction on the Indigenous front and through his obsession with identity politics. I won’t get into the reckless experiments on drug enforcement or MAID, the use of martial law, the shmoozing with unaccountable international power brokers, China’s interference, the list goes on.

Now Canadians are more divided than ever, they lack confidence in the value of Canada as a nation, and the government has lost sight of its primary function, which is to facilitate success across areas of federal responsibility with the minimum interference and spending.  Instead they overspend, seemingly to buy votes, with little regard for future finances or national unity.

Looking back, Harper was a much wiser steward of the country.  I didn’t support him initially and his image is bland next to either Trudeau, but he was more responsible than both and far more effective than Justin Trudeau.

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by Zeitgeist

[eyeball]

Justin Trudeau needs to stop borrowing Stephen Harper’s omnibus trick

At the end of George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm, Clover the weary cart-horse finds she can no longer tell the difference between her former human oppressors and her current pig masters, who once claimed to be her liberators. She “looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/macleans.ca/opinion/justin-trudeau-needs-to-stop-borrowing-stephen-harpers-omnibus-trick/amp/

Stephan Harper should be remembered for introducing a new way to get around government accountability while pretending to improve it.

Will PP use it or lose it?

 

[CdnFox]

4 hours ago, eyeball said:

Justin Trudeau needs to stop borrowing Stephen Harper’s omnibus trick

At the end of George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm, Clover the weary cart-horse finds she can no longer tell the difference between her former human oppressors and her current pig masters, who once claimed to be her liberators. She “looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/macleans.ca/opinion/justin-trudeau-needs-to-stop-borrowing-stephen-harpers-omnibus-trick/amp/

Stephan Harper should be remembered for introducing a new way to get around government accountability while pretending to improve it.

Will PP use it or lose it?

 

Well in fact the omnibus thing was used by the liberals before Harper - and in fact has come up many times in our history. And then harper of course used it himself. 

But - there has always been a rule for allowing it.  That rule was that if you were making a bunch of changes to different acts there HAD to be a common 'reason' or 'thread' if you will.  For example - if you were fighting crime and you needed to change 4 acts to bring in the specific changes necessary then you could do an omnibus bill.  But you couldn't just amend 4 different acts without a common reason. It was that way for 150 years and that limited abuse.

In 2017, Trudeau changed that and passed a definition that says an omnibus bill is  ANY BILL that affects multiple acts WITHOUT NEEDING A COMMON THREAD.

So now you can just have 10 changes to 10 acts packed into one bill and cram it through.

Nobody in the public (other than me) complained and of course trurdeau has used it since.

Now that the door is open, My guess is that PP is going to use it just as the liberals did.  Generally when you get one side abusing power, the other side will follow if there's no public blow back.

The liberals changed the laws and got away with it, they used the new laws and got away with it,  why on earth would the CPC not use the laws as well? You can't expect one side to do the right thing if the other side doesn't and gets away with it

He MIGHT take the high road and change the law back to limit omnibus bills  but there's no advantage. It's not like the liberal voters will care and teh CPC voters know the libs will just change it back and abuse it again so what's the point?