GOLDSTEIN: Trudeau was Teflon, now he’s Velcro

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The political trajectory of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from 2015 to 2024 can best be summed up as his transformation from a Teflon PM to a Velcro one.

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Where almost nothing used to stick to him, now almost everything does.

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Trudeau, in power for nine years, now faces a growing public perception that is the hardest thing for any party leader, and any government, to turn around.

That is that, when all is said and done, it’s time for a change, just as voters determined in 2015 that it was time for a change from nine years of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to a Liberal one.

Tuesday’s budget illustrated the dilemma Trudeau and the Liberals now face.

Every public concern they sought to address it in order to reverse their slide in the polls — ranging from the affordability crisis to a severe housing shortage — begs the same question.

That is, if things are so bad now, why didn’t Trudeau and the Liberals act before now, in order to prevent them from becoming a crisis?

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Indeed, Trudeau and the Liberal party of 2015, when they defeated the Harper Conservatives, would today be shocked and appalled by the conduct of the Liberal party of 2024.

In October 2013 as the newly-minted leader of the Liberal party, Trudeau tweeted on what we now call ‘X’ that: “It’s hard not to feel disappointed in your government when every day there is a new scandal.”

Obviously, that hasn’t aged well.

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Indeed, pick a Liberal scandal, from foreign interference — where Trudeau had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a public inquiry — to ArriveCAN (aka Arrivescam), to the WE Charity mess, to SNC-Lavalin, to cash for access, to the Aga Khan affair and more.

Recall that during the 2015 election campaign that brought them to power, Trudeau and the Liberals said they would end  government secrecy which had become the default position of the Harper regime, and promised to deliver “open and transparent government” instead.

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“It is time to shine more light on government and ensure it remains focused on the people it is meant to serve,” they said in their 2015 election platform.

“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.”

Now flash forward to today and federal information commissioner Caroline Maynard warning 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 … the response from the government is clear. There is no legislative change on the horizon. Frankly, Canadians deserve much better.”

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In 2015, Trudeau promised that unlike Harper he would, “not resort to legislative tricks to avoid scrutiny” and 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 them.

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 scandal to prematurely shut it down.

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