The damage Trudeau has inflicted on Canada will be hard to reverse

Canada needs new leadership and needs it now

Since Trudeau ran for office leading up to his 2015 election and appointment as Prime Minister, Canada’s business investment has done nothing but fall relative to our American competitors. Canadian productivity has suffered in parallel. Lower productivity has an inescapable consequence - lower per capital GDP.

Trudeau’s pretense that carbon dioxide emissions cause catastrophic climate change has led to environmental policies that do more harm than good. Trudeau’s subsidies for electric vehicles (EV’s) are a needless waste of taxpayer money, and his plans to mandate EV use over internal combustion engined (ICE) vehicles is doomed to fail owing in part to the shortages of materials needed to produce EV’s and in part owing to the lack of demand for EV’s by consumers. While the vehicles themselves, in particular those assembled by Tesla, are elegantly designed and exhibit high performance, they are heavier than ICE vehicles with significant road damage, have a nasty habit of bursting into flames now and then, and lack a grid or charging infrastructure capable of supporting their widespread adoption. Small wonder Stellantis, Ford, GM, Volkswagen and even Tesla have cut their workforces or reduced their planned volumes of EV production.

Along the way, Trudeau’s government has been hiring bureaucrats at an alarming rate and running up debts Canadians can ill-afford to ever repay. The 2024 Liberal budget calls for another massive deficit, and federal debt now stands at $2.1 trillion, double the debt at the time Trudeau came to power. Canadians per capital GDP, the best measure of economic health as it affects Canadian citizens, is lower today than in 2018 expressed in constant dollars.

It is no wonder Canadians can’t afford to buy homes or even meet mortgage or interest payments on credit cards. Inflation caused by excess borrowing punished household budgets, mass immigration exacerbated demand for housing and put pressure on hospitals, schools and communities lacking the infrastructure to accommodate millions of newcomers, and interest rate hikes needed to keep inflation from runing out of control made it harder for households to make ends meet.