In my most recent column for the Toronto Sun, I looked at Justin Trudeau’s legislative record.
It is thinner than you might think.
For all his activist tendencies he hasn’t passed that many bills.
I looked through the 82 bills he has put before Parliament and found the answer is not that much.
So far, 47 bills have received royal assent and 22 of them allow the government to spend money or implement parts of the budget.
That means he has passed just 25 bills that could be of substance.
Well, it should, but the truth is he has stuffed his budget bills full of all kinds of legal changes, using the omnibus bills that he was so outraged about during his time in opposition.
As I detail in the column, and please read it and share it on social media, Trudeau’s accomplishments are not many but they are offensive.
Trudeau’s bad bills.
Bill C-4 took away the secret ballot in union elections and removed the legal backing for workers to see how their dues money is spent.
Bill C-6 giving citizenship back to terrorists. Remember the Harper government passed a bill to take away citizenship from people with dual citizenship if they took up arms against Canada or committed a terrorist act? Yeah, Trudeau hated that and declared that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.
Unless you are an old Nazi that lied to get into the country, or the children of Russian spies born in Canada, or anyone else they think lied on their application to come to Canada. To Trudeau, lying on a government form is worse that killing Canadians or attacking our troops or allies.
Paying women less!
There were bills that I didn’t get to like Bill C-24, this is a bill that didn’t get much media coverage. It should have.
This was the bill Trudeau introduced to fix a problem that he created. Remember when he announced a gender balanced cabinet and said it was because it was 2015?
Well it turned out that 5 of the 15 women in cabinet were only junior ministers getting a junior minister’s salary and staffing levels. Once the story because public Trudeau was embarrassed into vowing to fix it and ensure the women he had just appointed to junior positions were treated the same as the 15 men, all of whom were full ministers.
They passed an order in council as a temporary fix but the full legal change only came into law this past June 21. That is almost three full years after the mistake was made.
Because it’s 2018?
Bills passed are only part of the story.
But of course Trudeau’s truly offensive actions don’t come from the bills that he and his government have passed.
There is the $10.5 million to Omar Khadr.
We could look to his famous tweet, which yes, bureaucrats credit with bringing about the surge in illegal border crossers. And as Trudeau and his team would say, we need to respect and believe our civil servants.
Starting culture wars.
His government got behind a private members bill to change the English language lyrics of O Canada. It was nothing short of the culture war move.
The bill was brought forward by Mauril Belanger, a long time Liberal MP and Franco-Ontarian that stood up for Francophone rights his whole career. In my 20 years in Ottawa, I never heard Belanger complain about the English lyrics of O Canada.
Yet this became a cause for Trudeau, backing Belanger’s private member’s bill as a dying man’s last wish. And a wedge issue, culture war attack on the opposition.
Screwing with our military.
Without passing a bill, Trudeau has screwed over our air force. He has refused to buy the F-35 based off of an ill-conceived campaign promise. Yet he has not removed Canada from the F-35 program.
He pledged to buy jets from Boeing then pulled out over a corporate fighting between Boeing and Bombardier. So now we are getting some used Aussie jets to keep our ageing CF-18 fleet going because protecting Bombardier is more important that equipping our military.
Along the way, Trudeau has alienated pretty much every ally we have. So much so that when we had a spat with serial human rights abuser Saudi Arabia, no one would come to Canada’s defence.
We are just about a year away from the next federal election, the Liberals will say they will run on their record.
The question is will the media tell the truth about Trudeau’s record over the next year or will they keep playing defence for him as they have for the past three years.
