Western Standard - March 28, 2024


The Trudeau government is about to get much worse

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Pierre Trudeau Jagmeet Singh John Turner
Budget 2024 Funding for Acute Care and Surgical Initiative April 1st carbon tax protest at Parliament Hill

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

224.81

Word count

938

Sentence count

56

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Justin Trudeau's Liberals are in full lame-duck mode, and it's going to be costly for all of us to live in a government that no longer even cares what we think. The Liberals are going to have a hard time holding on to power for much longer than a year and a half, and we're going to pay the price.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.180 Trudeau's Liberals, and they've moved the proposed general election date ahead by a week
00:00:04.460 to ensure that 80 MPs who wouldn't previously have qualified will now be eligible for the gold-plated federal pension plan.
00:00:12.500 Now, the Liberals are claiming they moved this date because it clashes with a religious holiday. 0.98
00:00:16.440 That's a load of crap, guys. Come on. 0.99
00:00:18.220 We've known the date of that religious holiday, what, for probably a few thousand years.
00:00:22.460 They suddenly realized now that was the date? Of course not.
00:00:25.120 No, they realized something else has happened.
00:00:28.000 And so what's changed? Well, the Liberals are facing the reality that they haven't a hope of winning the next election.
00:00:33.720 Their poll numbers have collapsed, and they continue to migrate downwards.
00:00:36.980 Even if they unload their wildly unpopular leader, they likely can't keep the ship from sinking.
00:00:42.340 And many are quick to point out that most of the MPs who would qualify for the pensions due to this change of date for the election
00:00:47.540 are Conservative members of Parliament. And that's true.
00:00:50.200 But it doesn't really matter because most of those members are looking at comfortably being re-elected.
00:00:54.080 The change was made for the Liberal MPs who are either going to be fleeing before the next election comes 0.97
00:00:58.940 or be kicked out on their asses in the next general election. 0.97
00:01:02.840 And while it's a good thing that the writing's on the wall for this terrible administration, 0.99
00:01:07.000 this also signals that the Liberals have entered lame-duck mode.
00:01:11.060 And that's going to be costly for all of us.
00:01:13.220 See, the only thing worse than a Liberal government that's trying to win an election
00:01:16.200 is a Liberal government that isn't trying anymore.
00:01:19.080 I mean, let's face it, Justin Trudeau isn't a thoughtful or pragmatic Prime Minister.
00:01:23.420 He's a simple man, driven by ideology.
00:01:26.060 Trudeau's going to be pushing his obsessive agenda of trying to battle climate change through carbon taxes
00:01:30.880 and attempting to buy himself international love and respect
00:01:34.300 through transferring Canadian tax dollars to other nations.
00:01:37.440 Now, his efforts are going to fail, but he's willing to spend Canadian citizens into penury trying.
00:01:42.680 With Trudeau convinced he won't win the next election, remember he said he doesn't care if he's popular anymore.
00:01:46.760 That's good, he should stop caring because he's not going to be popular again.
00:01:49.780 But he's going to focus on building a legacy for himself, and we're all going to suffer dearly for that.
00:01:54.040 Look back to Justin's father, Pierre, when he notoriously appointed over 70 of his pals
00:01:58.200 to plumb government positions during his last couple months in power.
00:02:01.460 It was a poison pill that crippled his successor, John Turner's chances of winning the next election.
00:02:07.620 But Pierre didn't care.
00:02:08.780 He just wanted to make sure his friends were well cared for on the taxpayer's dime as he went out the door.
00:02:13.160 Now, if Pierre Trudeau did that much damage in a couple of months as a lame-duck leader,
00:02:16.200 just think of what Justin's going to do with a year and a half to play with.
00:02:19.480 Cabinet ministers will be doing the same.
00:02:21.220 We're going to expect a flurry of sole-sourced contracts to well-connected liberal companies.
00:02:25.900 Yeah, I know that's been happening for years, but now that the party has lost over re-election,
00:02:29.540 they're going to become even more bold and blatant with their influence peddling and favors for friends.
00:02:34.540 Liberal cronies are going to be jammed into high-paying positions within crown corporations,
00:02:38.020 and if those positions run out, I won't be shocked to see if we have new crown corporations formed in the next year and a half.
00:02:43.600 We're going to see more judges, ambassadors, countless special envoys with high-paying roles with indeterminate agendas or obligations.
00:02:50.260 They're going to get appointed to things all over.
00:02:52.180 Things are looking bad in Canada right now economically and socially, but prepare for them to get worse.
00:02:56.760 We got where we are today through the actions of a government that was trying, albeit poorly,
00:03:00.300 to implement policy while garnering favor among citizens.
00:03:03.340 Now we face a year and a half of governance from a government that no longer even ostensibly cares what we think.
00:03:08.680 We're about to acutely feel the pain of a system that gives people no means of imposing accountability upon governments between elections.
00:03:15.240 Even if Trudeau's support dropped to 5% nationally, we'd be stuck with whether he either chooses to step down or calls an election.
00:03:23.460 I mean, clearly Jagmeet Singh's never going to bring him down.
00:03:25.560 He's as close to power as he's ever going to get, and he knows it.
00:03:27.860 He's not going to rock that boat.
00:03:29.000 And let's not forget, according to the Constitution, actually, Trudeau could theoretically hang on until the fall of 2026 before having to call an election.
00:03:36.660 The election date can be adjusted at any time.
00:03:38.400 The Liberals just proved that.
00:03:39.900 Sunny ways are long gone.
00:03:41.360 Trudeau said as much in his clumsy and awkward way recently when he said it's not his job to be popular as he tried to defend his failing carbon tax.
00:03:47.560 He's convincing himself that he's martyring his political career for the larger cause of battling climate change.
00:03:52.780 He thinks he's saving the world and that history will look on his actions kindly, even if the voters don't.
00:03:58.000 He's wrong, of course, but nothing's going to convince him otherwise now.
00:04:01.260 There's nothing more dangerous than a person who feels they have nothing to lose.
00:04:04.600 Canada's now facing an entire government that feels that way.
00:04:07.440 So I hate to tell you guys, but we're up that creek and in for some tough times.