In eight years, Justin Trudeau has managed to destroy Canadian unity to the point where confederation is fraying on all sides.
While all prime ministers have issues with national unity, most try to heal the wounds, but Trudeau picks at them and makes things worse.
If he had even half a brain I’d suspect it was deliberate.
You can’t help but admire the audacity of his hopes as Justin Trudeau’s horrible year ends.
The prime minister faced marital separation on the home front, endured political challenges across Canada and stoked global controversies in 2023.
Yet he still defiantly declares, without giving himself even a millimetre of wiggle-away room, that he will stick around to lead another campaign to victory, an optimistic expectation without much supportive evidence.
It became the number-one question in Canadian politics in 2023: will Justin Trudeau stay or go?
The prime minister has an easy answer for this: He’s staying. Next question.
Yet the speculation will carry over into 2024, no matter how many times Trudeau insists he’s leading the Liberals into the next election, whether that happens in 2024 or 2025.
I predict immigration is going to be one of the biggest issues of 2024 because so many other issues – housing, employment, per capita GDP, health care and school crowding – are affected by it.
That means we will have to have an intelligent public debate about just how much immigration is the right amount. And that won’t be easy, because anyone who dares say there is too much immigration can count on being labelled a racist or a xenophobe. You neither have to be a bigot nor fearful of foreigners to understand the math, though.
Three gigantic waves will roll over Alberta in 2024, political tsunamis that will disrupt our politics and help wash away the momentum for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s agenda of aggressive social change.
The first wave? For the first time in many years, fears about immigration will become a major issue even in welcoming Alberta.
The mass of new immigrants allowed in by the Trudeau Liberals is already a fierce preoccupation in Toronto, Trudeau’s former electoral stronghold. Folks there shudder and fret about the unprecedented number of newcomers competing for already scarce resources, such as apartments, homes and jobs.
Brace for impact, taxpayers.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be reaching deeper into your pockets in the new year with payroll tax hikes, a carbon tax hike and alcohol tax hikes.
What kind of screening of these Gazans will be done? Will those applying for visas to be admitted to Canada be asked, for example, about their view of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7? Of course, they will claim to be just as horrified as anyone else. But we have the results of a Palestinian opinion poll conducted in December, in which 82% of Gazans expressed their support for the October 7 attacks (the percentage was even higher in the West Bank, where 85% of the Palestinians supported those attacks).
Canada’s demographic revolution is running at a furious pace, with population growth outstripping even the boldest predictions, mostly due to immigration, with important implications for Canadian identity as much as demography, according to a new poll by Leger for the Association for Canadian Studies.
Canada’s population surpassed 40 million people this summer, earlier than predicted. Statistics Canada reported recently that Canada’s population grew by more than 430,000 in the third quarter of this year, for a total of 40.5 million.
The newcomer landed in a district of northern Toronto and announced his bid for Canada’s Parliament. Though few knew him, an important factor helped offset his lack of name recognition — the backing of prominent local Chinese-Canadians.
“I’m very happy that I feel very well supported, surrounded by friends,” the candidate, Han Dong, said at a news conference.
By playing down per capita data, the Trudeau government is hiding Canada’s economic anemia behind an immigration boom
The latest GDP data from Statistics Canada shows that our economy shrank by 1.1 per cent in the third quarter of 2023. While this is already a sobering figure, the reality is much worse than many realize, as this data does not account for the fact that economic growth is being artificially inflated through high immigration.
The Trudeau government finds itself embroiled in controversy yet again over allegations of misusing taxpayer funds to benefit allied interests. The latest case centers on a series of questionable grants to the environmental group Equiterre, an organization with close ties to Liberal cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault.
This incident is part of a pattern of accusations that public money has improperly flowed to third-party groups whose agendas align with and amplify Liberal policies. The cozy arrangements allow the government to effectively outsource promotion of its agenda by funding sympathetic organizations like Equiterre.
h/t Mauser
OTTAWA – NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is ruling out the possibility of forming a coalition government with the Liberals if no party wins a clear majority after the next federal election.
“That’s off the table,” Singh said in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, even though the two parties have been working closely together.
A year in which everything seemed to go sidewards for the Liberal government began with a pair of modest victories for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The first, an agreement signed in early February with the provinces, to bolster health care transfers by $46.2 billion. The premiers left Ottawa grumbling, as they always do, about the size of the cash infusion, but all agreed to it. Trudeau predicted the new money would “protect our health care system now and into the future.” For the moment, there was a measure of rare peace with the provinces on health funding.
During a 2015 visit to China, MP Han Dong was photographed wearing a red scarf, which is a symbol of the Young Pioneers, a youth organization under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The photo, released by the Chinese Consulate in Toronto, also featured former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Both were photographed wearing the scarves alongside children at a Shanghai public school as part of an Ontario business delegation. At the time, Mr. Dong was a member of provincial parliament in Ms. Wynne’s Liberal government.
It would be wrong to expect a Canadian prime minister to lace their year-end interview with uncertainty and self-doubt. But these interviews were particularly devoid of any acknowledgement that Trudeau has ever misjudged an issue, altered course due to changing circumstances or failed to prevent a crisis.
When interviewers asked him whether he’d been late to the issue of housing affordability, Trudeau said he’d actually been ahead of the curve with his 2017 National Housing Strategy.
