Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be bracing for an earful from his caucus when Liberal MPs gather in Nanaimo, B.C. today to plot their strategy for the coming election year.
It will be the first time he faces them as a group since MPs departed Ottawa in the spring.
Still stinging from a devastating byelection loss earlier this summer, the caucus is now also reeling from news that their national campaign director has resigned and the party can no longer count on the NDP to stave off an early election.
“They should be giving the prime minister a rough ride,” said strategist Ginny Roth, who served as director of communications for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s leadership campaign.
She’s skeptical they will, though.
I do think he deserves an earful.
Since 2022 the party has entirely fallen apart.
Life for the average Canadian has objectively gotten harder since then. The only group with net worth growth have been the top income quintile of the 45-55 age bracket. everyone else is poorer today than in 2022 when economic growth per household went flat.
The flattening started with inflation, flattening in 2021Q4 when inflation started picking up, and declining in 2022Q1, which was months before interest rate hikes.
Immigration policies were incredibly poorly considered, they listened way too hard to business insiders at the tail end of COVID trying to stave off a recession. The pendulum has swung too far and average people are looking at immigration as the obvious Boogeyman. And it’s easy to see why, with over 10,000 TFW fast food workers.
We don’t have a per-capita recession, we have a class recession. The businesses are more profitable than ever, and Canadians are losing wealth faster than any time since 2008.
They’ve failed to increase housing affordability, which is an issue I’ve been complaining about since 2018. The first time home buyer plans have all been ill conceived. The CMHC has let private insurance supplant it, which has increased the risk level of mortgages. We’ve only explored demand side solutions to housing.
In a very real sense, the liberals since the 2021 election have been one of the worst governments in living memory.
Prior to 2021 they were doing incredibly well, especially on NAFTA and the Trump presidency, where we honestly did need that centrist touch to keep Canada’s economic interests safe. Pandemic performance was better than most countries too.
They’ve lost the plot though. The media message is bad, foreign influence from China, the US, Russia, and India are all problematic right now. The recent FBI bust of foreign funded influencers that spills into Canadian politics is evidence of that. The Conservatives are doing an excellent job stirring the pot and just yelling about how bad things are, and they’re not wrong, but I don’t see them doing the things we really need to fix it. Their current statement is they want an immigration system that works, with zero info on what that means. But nobody is asking how, they just know the current path isn’t working, the status quo is painful.
Anyways, I’m frustrated. This election I truly don’t know who to vote for. The NDP might help, but Singh is a losing candidate and he just announced he’s going to run.
I want to yell at Trudeau. I want to know why he’s going to run, and if he just plans to be a martyr for a post election shakeup. I want to know how they’ve been asleep at the wheel for the last 3 years. I want to know how they’ve failed to really listen, and when they expect things to get better for the 95% of Canadians who aren’t feeling good.
God, the clock is running out, and at this point anything helpful they do will get credited to the CPC after the election anyways.
Just to add, in 2021 it was already incredibly clear Trudeau was becoming unpopular. That was the time they needed to start sunsetting leadership for the parties sake. Instead we got a few people speaking out get sidelined, and that’s escalated this last year.
I think they need to decide on their leadership future and who isn’t totally burned by association. We’ll probably not see the liberals in power for 8-12 more years based on historical averages.
Every single thing you just pinned on the Liberals or suggested we do was done or attempted by the Conservative government and the UK is just as bad as Canada is right now.
Unfortunately, no party in Canada is suggesting the policies changes that would actually fix any of these issues. So despite the likely Conservative win next year, we’ll still be worse off in 2029 than we are today. Plus we’ll have regressed socially into permitting hate of certain groups again.
yay!
Yeah, you’re probably right. These problems aren’t only Canadian problems, especially housing costs.
But in some ways Canada has gone into these issues a lot worse than we should have, and we have done a lot less to get past them than the level I want to hold a government accountable for.
For example, Canada has had the highest immigration growth in the G7 and it was almost double the average. Canada’s housing prices are number 2 in the OECD for price vs incomes.
Anger about immigration in Canada is actually relatively new, 2016 would see Trudeau’s first year, the election of Donald Trump (on his “We’re going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it” campaign), and Brexit passed. That year the economist wrote that Canada was strange in our open celebration of immigration.
Honestly this article is a great read about the sentiment of 2016 vs this one about sentiment today.
Since this thread is largely just my political thoughts, I at least still have some sympathy for Trudeau’s government, I still feel at the time when I voted for them, they were the clear right choice. This time I don’t feel there is one, it’s a messy time, and I worry we’ll pick easy answers without much weight behind them.
Maybe, but not because some CPC mouthpiece claims he does.
And many of the loudest complaints seem to ignore that the Prime Minister isn’t some all powerful dictator who singlehandedly controls everything.