EDITORIAL: A serious case of national amnesia
Have we collectively forgotten the endless stream of scandals, boondoggles and incompetent decisions the government of Justin Trudeau inflicted on us over nine years?
Yes, Trudeau's gone. New Liberal Leader Mark Carney is being hailed as a miracle worker who will single-handedly sweep aside all the problems this country is facing. He isn't — and he won't.
Carney's cabinet is populated with the same people who brought us bad government.
Setting aside the ethics breaches by Trudeau — the trip to the Aga Khan's private Caribbean island, the WE charity fiasco and the SNC Lavalin mess — there are other examples of bad government.
There was the ArriveCAN scandal, which in 2020 saw almost $60 million spent on a sole-sourced contract for an app that's now not used and which a private developer said could have been developed over a weekend for a fraction of the price.
This is the same government that massively increased immigration while failing to build housing. In 2023, it allowed almost half a million immigrants to arrive in this country with no plan to house them. Then it expressed surprise when newcomers were forced to sleep on the streets or in church basements.
This is the government where out-of-control spending has massively increased the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy. The size of the public service has ballooned by 42% since Trudeau's 2015 election.
A report by Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux pointed out that personnel spending within the federal government reached a record high of $67.4 billion in 2022-23.
Meanwhile, government spending on outside consultants skyrocketed to more than $15 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year. And let's not forget the jolly green slush fund. Sustainable Development Technology Canada violated its conflict of interest policies 90 times, according to Auditor General Karen Hogan, and awarded $59 million to 10 projects that were not eligible and frequently overstated the environmental benefits of its projects.
Meanwhile, we shamefully nickel-and-dimed our armed forces and our defence spending is an international embarrassment.
The leader may be different. His cabinet isn't. Let's not rinse and repeat.
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CNN
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Gavin Newsom thanks you for your attention to redistricting
Gavin Newsom knows the popular image of him is of a smooth talker with slicked-back hair, the wealthy liberal who co-owns a vineyard. He knows, regarding the presidential ambitions he's hardly hiding, that the biggest question he would face out of the gate is whether he could sell Americans on wanting California to represent their future rather than seeing it as the place where the wackiest liberal dreams go to run wild. The redistricting fight that Newsom and the state legislature are launching Monday could, he and his inner circle believe, give him all the rebuttals he needs. If it succeeds. Newsom is already raising money and preparing for an onslaught of Republican cash aimed at defeating the November ballot initiative California legislators expect to enact as quickly as Thursday, asking voters to allow a gerrymander of five new Democratic seats in the US House. He has started making plans for what he assumes will be President Donald Trump's retaliation against him for trying to erase Republican gains in Texas. He recently spent an hour on the phone trying to smooth over former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who created California's independent redistricting commission and has made fighting gerrymandering one of his post-politics priorities. (It may not have helped: Schwarzenegger posted a deliberately cryptic photo Friday of himself lifting weights in a T-shirt reading: 'F*** The Politicians: Terminate Gerrymandering.') Democrats often talk about fighting Trump more. Newsom now has yet another actual fight to have. Newsom told CNN that he feels 'blessed' to have the chance and that he's worried Democrats are undermining voters' faith with inspiring but ultimately empty promises. 'It's faith and works,' he said in an interview hours after he formally launched his redistricting push with a vow to fight 'fire with fire.' 'You go to church. It's, as you pray, move your feet. It's passion and action.' 'I don't want to go to another candlelight vigil. I don't want to hold hands. People need to do something. 'Do something!' I hear it. 'Do something.' People are done with us. If I give another speech and I don't follow up with something, I'm done. And (Trump's Republicans) are going to roll us over,' Newsom said. Aides to several of Newsom's potential presidential primary rivals told CNN they weren't going to address directly what the governor is doing. But all the people already thinking about the bigger political picture for Democrats know what this showdown could mean for him. 'What do you mean he can't win a general election?' one of Newsom's strategists told CNN, asking the question they know he'll confront and speaking anonymously to discuss the internal thinking about how this would reverberate. 'He just helped us take back the House. If this wins, and the Democrats win, he's a winner: a leader of the opposition, and an effective leader.' Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco-based former House speaker who has long been a Newsom booster and is already helping him fundraise for the ballot initiative campaign, said that after Trump started the unusual mid-decade redistricting push, 'you throw a punch, you better be ready to take punch — for the children, as I always say, and for our democracy.' 'When this came along, it provided a vehicle like none other,' Pelosi said. 'And people who had been saying, 'Give me something to do, what can I do?' or, 'Why aren't we doing more?' are now really very excited about the leadership that is being provided by California under the leadership of Gavin.' Just a few months ago, after calling a post-election special session of the legislature to pass several 'Trump-proofing' laws, Newsom began to reach out to the president. First came the devastating Los Angeles wildfires. Newsom, exhausted and frantic by the scale of the destruction and what rebuilding would entail, spent days in a command center managing the response but also apoplectic about the misinformation he saw spreading on social media, often from the Trump directly and with signal-boosting from Elon Musk. Still, he showed up at the airport to greet the newly inaugurated president and kissed the first lady on the cheek, then spent 90 minutes in the Oval Office, pleading for disaster aid. Then was what came off to many allies and rivals as a journey of self-exploration via podcasting. He seemed to switch his position on transgender rights to better match the Democratic backlash that set in after those questions helped take down his old rival Kamala Harris. He invited on MAGA celebrities Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, saying he was looking for common ground. Many Democrats felt betrayed. Others dismissed Newsom as being purely opportunistic. Even people who worked for him said that he seemed adrift, following his own sense of what he wanted to do, and he needed to decide whether he wanted his future to be on the iTunes charts or in the White House. Weeks before standing up to the president's June immigration enforcement crackdown in Los Angeles, Newsom introduced massive social services cuts for the state budget, which he said were the only way to deal with the coming shortfalls under Trump. At the time, Lorena Gonzalez, a Democratic former member of the State Assembly and now powerful California Labor Federation president, told CNN that Newsom was behaving like 'a San Diego Republican of the 2000s or 2010s.' Responding to Trump that way, Gonzalez told CNN in June, 'is a choice. It's not a choice I would make.' Gonzalez was one of the speakers at Thursday's redistricting kickoff in Los Angeles, introducing Newsom in lionizing terms, while Sen. Alex Padilla called him 'the person who has brought us together for this fight of all fights.' A few minutes later US Rep. Maxine Waters said he was showing 'the kind of leadership that's going to determine the future of this country.' And underscoring both the Trump administration's crackdown in California and Newsom's feeling that retaliation is coming, Border Patrol agents arrived outside the rally to detain people with cameras rolling. For those who wanted more pushback right away in Trump's second presidency, Newsom is ringing a little hollow now. 'I'm very glad that Gavin Newsom has abandoned the 'sit down with our mortal enemies for podcasts' phase of his political career,' said one top Democratic strategist starting to think through the 2028 race, asking for anonymity to not speak directly toward a candidate's calculations. 'But his turnabout here speaks to the fundamental problem he has with the Democratic electorate: He says and does what he thinks is right for him in the moment as opposed to what is right for the country.' Newsom's response: 'Give me a goddamn break. What a bulls*** comment.' He was riled up, calling himself 'the guy who's done more progressive policy than anybody,' ticking through his record on expanding health care, raising the minimum wage, building housing, and enacting a wide range of larger social, racial and economic justice initiatives. 'They can't be serious, because they're not serious, because they don't know what the hell they're talking about,' Newsom said, saying he's still the same man who as San Francisco mayor first made headlines 20 years ago for officiating the first legal gay marriages in the country. 'I've been hiding in plain sight. It's, like, really? You've now discovered something that's been there the whole time,' Newsom said. 'I think it's maybe a secret power because, you know, get ready.' Many Democratic governors who tangled with Trump through the pandemic walked away chastened, believing they could never work with him again. Newsom said he got everything he asked for even after the last intense wildfires. He said he started out wanting to believe that he could work with Trump again until that meeting in the Oval Office in February, when it quickly hit him that the president is 'a different person.' Trump, Newsom said, kept talking about himself, pointing to a picture of Franklin Roosevelt and talking about running for a third term like Roosevelt did before the US Constitution was amended with a two-term limit. 'It was maniacal,' Newsom said. 'You felt those authoritarian tendencies coming in a way that even — when I say even, in quotes — even in the first term, were not as present.' As for hosting Kirk or Bannon on his podcast, Newsom said it's ridiculous to argue he was doing anything to platform people who already have huge followings. 'Just because you turn your back, they're going to disappear? How naïve is that? How stupid? Give me a break,' Newsom said. 'We need to understand what makes them tick, what motivates them.' Plus, Newsom said, there are areas of agreement, like when he felt Bannon seemed in favor of California's tax system. Maybe there's some opportunity for Democrats there, too. Newsom's podcast, for all the snickering it caused, is at breakthrough levels of listeners. His email list is generally considered the second-best in Democratic politics, only after Harris' from the presidential campaign. His press office's social media account has become a multi-aide operation itself and shifted to a Trump-aping full-time troll, complete with schoolyard nicknames and 'THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!' sign-offs. Asked last week by a reporter to defend the tone he's adopted online, Newsom said, 'If you have issues with what I'm putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he's putting out as president,' decrying what he said was the 'normalization' of that approach even as he noted he was 'pleased with the attention.' Newsom is fundraising. He will campaign hard through November. He will hope that a combination of Democratic turnout, a pitch about giving voters the voice in redistricting, and the reaffirmation of the independent redistricting commission for future cycles will get him to victory. The next fight is already on his mind, as he says he will make sure the University of California, Los Angeles, does not agree to a settlement with the Trump administration – 'we'll never settle out, like Harvard appears to be selling out,' he said. But Newsom said he already knows what he will say if he loses this one. 'I'll tell people: I put it all on the line. Did what I thought was right. And you know what? I value your opinion. I value your point of view. And I pray for all of us,' Newsom said. 'Because, you know, God help us if we're not successful. And I mean it. You may have enjoyed one of your last free and fair elections. And it will be a free and a fair election, despite these guys showing up in masks.'
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CUPE: Liberals reward Air Canada's refusal to bargain fairly by crushing flight attendants' Charter rights
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