If the definition of integrity is the courage to face reality, then the Liberals have a big integrity gap.
For a decade, Canada – and much of the Western world – has operated in a comfortable cocoon of insanity. Those days are over, displaced by a stark, harsh reality.
Remember the comfortable days when our soon-to-be prime minister proclaimed budgets balance themselves? We have woken from that insanity to a national debt that has more than doubled over the last decade and interest payments that consume every dollar Canadians pay in GST.
Mark Carney and the global finance gurus found a wonderful way to “stimulate” the economy. They just printed a lot of money. What a great idea.
The finance guys called it quantitative easing. Governments wrote big cheques and printed tons of cash. Remember those halcyon days when Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau assured us it was just good fiscal planning to borrow great gobs of cash because money was cheap? Total delusion.
Who would have guessed that printing cash would cause inflation, or that interest rates would rise? Certainly not Freeland, Trudeau or Carney.
Money printing and massive borrowing are only part of the damage inflicted over the last decade. The fiscally insane social policies are just as bad.
Trudeau took every opportunity to apologize, solemnly, for Canada. Not for his own transgressions mind you. He enjoyed apologizing for the real and imagined shortcomings of the imperfect people, like our country’s firs prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, who built this country. In a gentler time, we called those people nation builders.
The great feminist Trudeau, aided and abetted by the likes of Carney and Freeland, managed to degrade the notion of diversity into a meaningless woke mess. His version of DEI was limited to head counts and room tone. His government had zero tolerance for diversity of opinion or experience or, for that matter, strong women.
The “investments” made with borrowed dollars increased the size of the public service with a corresponding decrease in efficiency and effectiveness. Canada became a bloated bureaucracy, with a branch plant mindset, overburdened with debt, unprepared to defend our borders and, oddly, seemingly adverse to marketing our resources and skills to a hungry world.
It is a shameful record – and we haven’t even begun to reverse course.
These are the real-world outcomes of the fantasies of Trudeau, Carney and Freeland. The Liberal debt will take generations to eradicate, a task left to more serious future governments.
Those future governments will run smack into a lot of impossible expectations. A bankrupt government has made promises that simply cannot be fulfilled. Indigenous communities are in for a big shock.
The same holds for global commitments made without a grasp on reality. The Paris climate accord comes immediately to mind.
This sad record of blissful delusion would be just more warm mush if the world hadn’t lurched into a harsher reality – but it has.
The response of the Trudeau government to a changing world is disbelief and self preservation. Trudeau shut down parliament, leaving lame duck ministers to parade on the world stage in their final, useless and incoherent moments.
Which gets us back to integrity.
Facing reality requires the courage to face and admit failure. Trudeau, Freeland, and Carney do not have that kind of courage.
They have torn at our national pride, weakened our economy, diminished our standing in the world, created impenetrable bureaucracies, and opened our borders.
They should be ashamed.