Who had more power in Canada in 2020, and was less inhibited about wielding it, than Justin Trudeau? Nobody. Nobody else comes close. Dismiss the Prime Minister if you like, knock his brains, his choices, his often demonstrably shaky adherence to principle. But in 2020, the central fact of Justin Trudeau’s place in the nation’s life was that he had and used power on a scale nobody in the country could match.
There are a bunch of reasons for this. First, Trudeau works in Ottawa. No provincial or municipal government, and no organization outside government, had anything close to the clout the federal government enjoyed in 2020. Second, Trudeau leads a minority government, which should have made him more unsure and tentative—as it seemed, in the first weeks after the 2019 election, that it would. But in Parliament, Trudeau has kept his opponents consistently on the back foot. Finally, he leads a party that has historically been divided into factions. But no Liberal leader in Trudeau’s lifetime has led a Liberal party as unified as today’s.
In good times, when a society and an economy are healthy, the selling pays for the buying and most people can earn some kind of livelihood. Amid the COVID-19 conflagration, all of that collapsed. Somebody had to cover the difference between what people had and what they needed, to keep people home, safe and still within sight of a return to normalcy, maybe in 2021. Who was going to do that? Most businesses couldn’t; business was ground zero of the shock. Families couldn’t; household debt was already near the red line. Provincial governments couldn’t; taken together, they came into 2020 with less fiscal room than Ottawa. Only the feds had room to move. And Trudeau has used it. Total federal spending doubled in a year, which has never happened outside wartime. Cheques from Ottawa became the lifeline for households, businesses—and even provincial governments.
[Infuriating Read]
See Also:
(1) Federal Court Hears Injunction Motion to Stop Liberal-RCMP Crackdown
(2) Laurentian privilege, not race, is the real glass ceiling in Canada
(4) As Liberals abandon centre-right Canadians, O’Toole aims for more mainstream Conservative Party (Jack: As an infamous US president was once heard to think ‘It all depends on what you mean by mainstream‘.)
