From foreign policy to child care to ideological renaming to math and literacy scoresm there's lots of room for improvement in 2024
We are all accustomed to government failure, but some recent failures are inordinate in their magnitude and embarrassment.
Begin with foreign policy. When the Trudeau government voted at the United Nations last month for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Michael Levitt, former Liberal MP (2015-20), former chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and current president and CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, wrote: “I am appalled to see Canada’s policy shift.” The government had supported a resolution “denying Israel’s right to defend itself,” he continued, which “failed to even condemn the terror group Hamas and the atrocities it perpetrated against innocent civilians.” He was right to be appalled; so should we all be. Meanwhile, a Hamas terrorist leader had the opposite reaction, releasing a video thanking Canada for its vote. The Trudeau government’s failures are voluminous but having its foreign policy praised by a terrorist leader must top its list of infamies.
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Far less consequential, but also a government blunder causing considerable embarrassment, is Toronto city council’s renaming of Yonge-Dundas square. The cancellation of Dundas’s name, said Mayor Olivia Chow, was part of the city’s commitment to “acknowledging the impact of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery” and “confronting anti-Black racism.” But Henry Dundas, for whom the street and square are named, was not a slaveholder. He was an abolitionist. The cancellers’ grievance is that he did not advance abolition quickly enough — though that was a reflection, not of any sympathy for slavery, but of the political realities of 18th-century Britain. The cancellation of Dundas nevertheless went ahead, with the square now renamed Sankofa Square.
The Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington called it revisionist madness: “There’s no way any real Torontonian will ever refer to the square in the heart of the city by a made-up, politically correct name that no one had ever heard of, that they were not consulted on and didn’t get a chance to vote for.” Even worse, journalist Andrew Lawton pointed out, “Sankofa” is a word from the Akan tribe of Ghana — many of whose members “were active participants in the slave trade and imported slaves to develop their own economy.” Both the chair and vice-chair of the Yonge-Dundas Square Board of Management resigned over the renaming: though supporting the idea of renaming the square, they disagreed with how it was done. The whole thing has been a fiasco.
In addition to embarrassing disasters, another category of government failures is the false triumph. The Trudeau government is trumpeting its national takeover of the child-care sector by highlighting progress in Prince Edward Island, where it says it is delivering $10-per-day regulated child care two years ahead of plan. But what do the numbers show? Despite substantial government spending the percentage of P.E.I. children aged zero to five years in child care actually declined — from 65.6 per cent in 2019 to 59.7 in 2023, according to Statistics Canada. Moreover, the percentage of families looking for child care but having difficulty finding it rose significantly, from 46.7 per cent in 2019 to 60.8 per cent in 2023. It’s clear the government takeover of child care is a massive failure gilded with deceptive marketing.
Another false government triumph: public schools. Ontario’s minister of education, commenting on the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, boasted earlier this month, “I am proud to share that the PISA 2022 results released this morning show that Ontario has maintained its strong international standing in math, reading and science.” It’s true Ontario students do relatively better than students in other countries, but that is damning with faint praise. In fact, the 2022 results show a marked decline in Ontario students’ test scores versus the previous round of tests in 2018, which itself continued the steady deterioration of student achievement in Ontario since the first PISA tests were administered in 2000. Average Ontario test scores in 2022 were 495 in math, 512 in reading and 517 in science, versus 2018 scores of 513, 524 and 519, respectively. These numbers are hardly a ringing endorsement of the performance of Ontario’s schools or education minister.
Disastrous government programs and initiatives accompanied by boasting by the politicians who have enacted and overseen the disasters are nothing new. What is new is just how spectacular and embarrassing these disasters have become. On both foreign and domestic policy, the Trudeau government in particular has much room for improvement in 2024.
Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.
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Matthew Lau: Liberal government failures going from bad to worse
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02.01.2024
From foreign policy to child care to ideological renaming to math and literacy scoresm there's lots of room for improvement in 2024
We are all accustomed to government failure, but some recent failures are inordinate in their magnitude and embarrassment.
Begin with foreign policy. When the Trudeau government voted at the United Nations last month for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Michael Levitt, former Liberal MP (2015-20), former chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and current president and CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, wrote: “I am appalled to see Canada’s policy shift.” The government had supported a resolution “denying Israel’s right to defend itself,” he continued, which “failed to even condemn the terror group Hamas and the atrocities it perpetrated against innocent civilians.” He was right to be appalled; so should we all be. Meanwhile, a Hamas terrorist leader had the opposite reaction, releasing a video thanking Canada for its vote. The Trudeau government’s failures are voluminous but having its foreign policy praised by a terrorist leader must top its list of infamies.
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
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