Of all of Justin Trudeau’s tweets on what we now call ‘X’ that haven’t aged well, his observation on October 17, 2013 that, “It’s hard not to feel disappointed in your government when every day there is a new scandal” has aged the worst.
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With ArriveCan the latest in a long, list of Liberal scandals — and with the Liberals struggling to contain it in the wake of a scathing report by Auditor General Karen Hogan on how an $80,000 IT project ended up costing taxpayers almost $60 million — it demonstrates one of the oldest truisms in politics.
That is that over time, governments become the thing they once despised.
Prime Minister Trudeau and the Liberals have become the things they once despised.
Indeed, the Liberal party of 2015, when it defeated the Stephen Harper Conservatives, would today be shocked and appalled by the conduct of the Liberal party of 2024.
Pick a Liberal scandal, from foreign interference — where Trudeau had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a public inquiry whose effectiveness, for that reason, is already suspect — to the WE Charity mess, to SNC-Lavalin, to cash for access, to the Aga Khan affair and more.
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The Liberal response has always been the same.
Deny, deny, deny and stall, stall, stall.
Recall Trudeau’s infamous comment in February 2019 that the allegations in the Globe and Mail story that broke the SNC-Lavalin scandal — were “false”.
In fact, they turned out to be true, that Trudeau had, according to the federal ethics commissioner, broken the conflict of interest act by pressuring then attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould to grant a deferred prosecution agreement to the Quebec company.
During the 2015 election campaign that brought them to power, Trudeau and the Liberals said they despised government secrecy as the default position of the Harper regime and they would deliver “open and transparent government.”
“It is time to shine more light on government and ensure it remains focused on the people it is meant to serve,” they said.
“Government and its information should be open by default. Data paid for by Canadians belongs to Canadians. We will restore trust in our democracy, and that begins with trusting Canadians.”
Flash forward to today and federal information commissioner Caroline Maynard has repeatedly warned that under the Trudeau government, their administration of the access to information act has deteriorated “to the point where it no longer serves its intended purpose … and no longer meets the expectations or the needs of Canadians.”
Despite a backlog of thousands of complaints from the public, she said, “the response from the government is clear. There is no legislative change on the horizon. Frankly, Canadians deserve much better.”
In 2015, Trudeau promised that unlike Harper he would, “not resort to legislative tricks to avoid scrutiny” and that he would not “use prorogation to avoid difficult political circumstances.”
Despite that, Trudeau used prorogation in August 2020 to shut down investigations by parliamentary committees into the We Charity affair.
When the committees resumed their work in September 2020, the Liberals used filibustering to derail their work.
In 2015, Trudeau promised to “strengthen Parliamentary committees” and ensure they were properly resourced to do their jobs.
Instead, when the Trudeau Liberals had a majority government in their first term of office, they used their majority in the parliamentary committee investigating Trudeau’s SNC-Lavalin conflict of interest scandal to prematurely shut it down.
The Liberals have become the things they once despised.
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