Eleven more Trudeau government failures. Pictured: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Photo Credit: Justin Trudeau/X.
Here is the current state of 11 Trudeau government programs that indicate nothing less than mismanagement, sheer incompetence, or calculated deceit – or a combination thereof.
TREES: In 2019 the Liberals promised to plant two billion trees by 2030. It took nearly two years for the Trudeau cabinet and Ottawa bureaucrats in the department of natural resources to finalize their tree-planting plan. In October 2023, at a parliamentary committee, an official reported that there were 100 million trees planted and plans to plant another 370 million trees by 2031 (that’s less than 25 per cent of the original goal). An internal department memo that has become public and reported out by Blacklock’s Reporter states the tree planting promise was fake. The government estimates the decade-long program will cost $3.16 billion, but the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) calculates actual expenses at $5.94 billion (to plant 470,000 million trees!). Consider Canada has 318 billion trees or the equivalent of 25 per cent of the planet’s forest cover.
GUNS: Four years ago, the Trudeau cabinet proposed mandatory buyback of some 200,000 “assault-style” firearms. The department of public safety estimates that there are approximately 200,000 high-powered firearms affected by the ban, but the PBO estimates this figure is 518,000 firearms. Cabinet budgeted $37.4 million for the operations of the buyback program – this does not include the actual costs of buying back the guns, estimated by cabinet to be “between $300 million and $400 million” (but the PBO forecasts a cost of $756 million). In fall 2023, the police had taken in only 2,123 blacklisted firearms (one per cent of their estimated total), according to public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc. Cabinet has now suspended the gun program until October 30, 2025, after the next election, due to the unknown costs of program implementation (and likely the fact this initiative in no way addresses illegal gun smuggling, sales and crime).
SCHOOL LUNCHES: On April 1st of this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his 2021 promised national school lunch program to start in fall 2024. According to Trudeau, the $200 million annual program will feed 400,000 students. Social development minister Jenna Sudds further claims the program will save a family with two children $800 per year in grocery costs. But in a parliamentary committee hearing, Breakfast Club of Canada reports the program is considerably inadequate: to feed 400,000 students over 180 days, on an average of $4.50 per day, it would cost $324 million annually. In Canada, currently there are a million school children enrolled in such lunch programs. The government math calculates meal costs for the program at $2.78, a little more than half of the actual costs of lunch. Sudds will not share how she calculated the $800 of family savings and her department officials would not comment.
DENTAL PROGRAM: The government indicated in 2021 that it would establish a national, universal dental care program, promised as a condition of the NDP support for the Liberal minority government. The Trudeau government committed in December to spend $13 billion over the next five years on a national dental plan for kids and seniors, who have no access to dental insurance and earn less than $90,000. Health minister Mark Holland has publicly reported that 2.3 million Canadians have been approved for the dental program and nearly 450,000 have received care, although not all were provided with 100 per cent coverage. Approximately 19,000 (75 per cent) of dental care providers are participating in the program. These are promising first steps, however aside from questions concerning the total costs of the universal program, outstanding issues include complaints from dental care offices about increased administrative duties, and additional costs of the program when employers begin offloading private dental plans to the public program.
GREEN SUBSIDIES: An $8 billion green subsidies program to help manufacturing industries reduce their emissions has been labeled “a failure” by the federal commissioner of environment and sustainable development and the government refuses to provide MPs any details of the program’s operations. Another government agency created to manage subsidies for green ventures has been unceremoniously shut down this year after a government audit. Auditor general Karen Hogan found the agency paid out $856 million in subsidies and violated conflict of interest guidelines 90 times in providing tens of millions of dollars to companies with ties to its own directors and managers. Perhaps most alarming, the PBO now estimates the Trudeau government has subsidized the development of EV factories at more than $30 billion; the total $50 billion federal-provincial subsidies for capital and operating expenses has taxpayers spending more than the EV companies are spending.
CRIME: Statistics Canada reports that violent crime continues to rise, and the murder rate stands at the highest it has been since the early 1990s. The severity of violent crime is at its worse since 2007. Between 2015 and 2022 violent incidents have increased 39 per cent – driven by increases in homicides, armed robbery and extortion. In 2019, the Trudeau government introduced a new bail system that has been nicknamed a “catch and release” system by law enforcement. In 2023, provincial premiers sighted that this new administration of law has compounded an increasingly bad situation with “a small number of prolific and violent offenders.” This year the government moved to adjust and strengthen the bail system for serious repeat violent offenders, after continuous criticism of the lax bail policies. There remains a high recidivism rate for non-violent offenders; case in point, the Toronto Police revealed 44 per cent of their carjacking arrests this year were people out on bail.
DRUGS: The Trudeau government’s pioneering drug policies are being recognized internationally for their disastrous outcomes. The federal government’s pilot program with the province of BC – safe supply programs, “safe” injection sites, and decriminalizing small amounts of all drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, etc. — proved tragic. The Economist sums up the Canadian experience: “In 2012 fentanyl was involved in just 5% of overdose deaths. In 2023 that figure was 85%. The annual body count has risen ten-fold over the same period… BC’s fatal overdose rate is more than double Canada’s overall rate… overdoses are now the leading cause of death for British Columbians aged 10-59, taking more lives a year than murder, suicide, accidents and natural disease combined.” British Columbia Premier David Eby asked that the pilot program be stopped, and, after some consternation, the Trudeau cabinet agreed to suspend the program.
ASSISTED SUICIDE: The Trudeau government legalized state-assisted suicide in 2016 and then expanded access to its program in 2021 for Canadians who do not have a terminal health condition. Today, Canada has the most permissive and easy to access – and fastest growing – state-assisted suicide program in the world. From 2017-22, the program accounted for 4.2 per cent of all deaths in Canada. Of those who requested the service in 2022, 81 per cent were accepted and resulted in a death (3.5 per cent of requests were deemed ineligible) and the median length of time between a request and the euthanization was eleven days (in 2021, people waited only nine days). The Trudeau government is planning to open the program to mentally ill persons, an expansion they have put off until after the election.
FISCAL POLICIES: The Trudeau government has delivered nine successive deficit budgets in its nine years, accumulating more debt than all other governments in the history of Canada – combined. The federal debt has doubled from $619.3 billion in 2015-16, the first year of Trudeau’s government, to $1.2 trillion last year. It’s expected to climb to $1.4 trillion by 2028-29. Since Chrystia Freeland has become finance minister in 2020, Canada’s debt has grown more than $400 billion. Annual spending has ballooned 75 per cent and the national debt ceiling had to be raised twice since 2015. Underscoring the Trudeau government’s fiscal mismanagement has been many contracting scandals: McKinsey’s sole-sourced contracts, GC Strategies’ $250 million contract largesse including the ArriveCan app, Catherine McKenna’s $188 billion infrastructure program, countless COVID contracts for everything from vaccines to ventilators, SNC-Lavalin, just to name a few of the more noteworthy boondoggles.
BUREAUCRACY: Since 2015, the Trudeau government has grown the bureaucracy by 42 per cent – adding more than 108,000 federal employees. During this time, Canada’s population only grew by 14 per cent (even with the Trudeau’s “open border” immigration policy). The average annual compensation for full-time federal bureaucrats is $125,300, when pay, pension, and other perks are accounted for, according to the PBO. In doing the math, bureaucrats are paid 31 per cent more on average than those in the private sector. On top of this, the government has handed out more than $1.5 billion in bonuses since 2015. The federal government is the single largest employer in the country – and still the Trudeau government has exponentially increased the number of external consultants on contract. In a word: unsustainable.
CARBON TAX: According to Liberal Party policy backgrounders, the carbon tax is specifically designed as a punitive consumer tax to increase the cost of fossil fuels and encourage consumers and businesses to pursue cleaner, greener alternatives. The Liberals have defended it as a centrepiece of their green plan, “Canadians’ price on pollution.” The government-appointed environment and sustainable development commissioner Jerry DeMarco concluded this Trudeau green plan is a failure with “too many unrealistic assumptions and projections” and “no cohesive plan to reach the targets set for 2030 or 2050.” He concludes it is nothing more than a “punitive tax approach” and has failed the government’s stated objective, given that Canada’s emissions have risen since 2015. Today, the country has the worst performance of any of the G7 nations when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. According to the most recent U.N. Emissions Gap Report, Canada is set to miss its next emissions target in 2030 by 15 per cent. Meanwhile, the government annually hikes its tax at the pump and on home fuel.
To return to that Mark Twain quip about politicians, this government record is certainly a full diaper to dispose of!
Chris George is an advocate, government relations advisor, and writer/copy editor. As president of a public relations firm established in 1994, Chris provides discreet counsel, tactical advice and management skills to CEOs/Presidents, Boards of Directors and senior executive teams in executing public and government relations campaigns and managing issues. Prior to this PR/GR career, Chris spent seven years on Parliament Hill on staffs of Cabinet Ministers and MPs. He has served in senior campaign positions for electoral and advocacy campaigns at every level of government. Today, Chris resides in Almonte, Ontario where he and his wife manage www.cgacommunications.com. Contact Chris at chrisg.george@gmail.com.
