Canada needs its wisest leadership - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

In the post-pandemic world, voters are angry. In country after country among the democracies, governments have been turned out, including by our neighbours in the U.S. where people seem to forget how scary Donald Trump was in his first term, even after he tried to overthrow a government that ended his first term.

 

Here in Canada, a recent Nanos Research poll showed the governing Liberals in third place behind the NDP and far behind the Conservatives. Because Justin Trudeau has been Prime Minister since 2015, this is not surprising, in a way, but still it makes you wonder if voters are paying any attention to the man who would replace him if an election were held today.

 

Writing recently in The Globe and Mail, columnist Shannon Proudfoot summed it up nicely. “As Canadians have been feeling squeezed by everyday life, Pierre Poilievre has enthusiastically blamed Justin Trudeau for every single thing that’s gone wrong in Canada and the world at large,” she wrote.

 

“Housing and grocery costs, drug problems, urban decay, too few houses, too many newcomers - problems that fairly land at the Prime Minister’s feet and others that don’t, the  Conservative Leader accuses him of causing all of them with his ineptitude or fecklessness.”

 

Have Canadian voters spent any time figuring out what a government headed by Poilievre would be like? We know what he is against - anything that Trudeau is for - but what’s he for? One thing he has strongly indicated is that he will rid Canada of the carbon tax. In fact, like Donald Trump to the south, he seems to see little need to reduce the use of carbon-based fuel. This will win him popularity in fuel-producing areas of Canada, like Alberta and Saskatchewan, but in a world in which forest fires have become an annual plague, does it really help the country?

 

It appears it will please voters who seem mostly concerned about what’s expensive or inconvenient, not what will make the world better for our children or grandchildren. Somehow those days will look after themselves as we continue to drive extra miles or fly to all the exotic places in the world.

 

In order to combat President-Elect Trump’s pledge to impose a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian and Mexican goods if those countries don’t prevent exporting of drugs and refugees to the U.S., Poilievre argued, Canada needs to unleash oil and gas production and find a solution to the softwood lumber dispute, which has been a problem for so long that if it were a person, it would, Proudfoot suggests, “now be old enough to wake up creaky in the morning and wonder where the time went.”

 

Poilievre did suggest some proposals, Proudfoot said, such as strengthening the border and beefing up the Canadian military, “but mostly, he plunked a new title on the same tunes he’s been banging out for months.”

 

Is this really the leader that Canadians want to listen to day after day, one wonders? Poilievre has done a good job pointing out failed aspects of Prime Minister Trudeau, but what would he be like as Prime Minister himself? He could only go on blaming a former Prime Minister for a couple of weeks and then he needs to provide his own solutions.

 

It’s hard, for instance, to imagine any solution to Trump when he becomes President. Some of the people Trump has named as potential cabinet ministers are absurd. One imagines even people who voted for Trump thinking they didn’t know they were voting for this. To be fair, Trump gave every indication of the leader he would become, but enough voters were upset with the efforts President Joe Biden had to take to overcome the results of the pandemic that they didn’t really listen to what Trump said.
One wonders if the same thing is happening in Canada. Are voters really listening to what Trudeau and Poilievre are saying or are they so upset by all the things they’re lived with, like first pandemic restrictions and later, inflated costs, that they’ve turned totally against the government? Are voters thinking anything is better than the current government, even though they have no real idea what “anything” will mean?

 

Poilievre is such an unpleasant man - so negative and whiny - that it’s hard to imagine that at the end of his first government voters are going to want to re-elect him to a second term. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so. Canada needs the best leadership it can find.

 

I just think as we look at the unfolding disaster south of our border, we need a clear-eyed view of politics. We can’t afford weak leadership in Canada if we’re going to deal with what appears likely to be an endless stream of erratic decisions by an erratic U.S. president.

 

We need the wisest leadership we can find if we are going to survive the next few years. Is your choice the wisest?