The Last Progressive?

I found this article interesting in regards to how it’s holding Justin Trudeau up as perhaps one of the last western progressive leaders following a year that has seen things like the upset in Italy, Brexit and Trump.

 

Here's the link to the article.

The Last Progressive

Now I voted for Trudeau. Why? Because I felt that the Canada I was raised to be proud of was growing further away and heading down a dark path and I wanted to try to plug my finger in the dam so that my son could grow up in a country that still stood for decent things.

 Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure over the next 3 years the Trudeau Gov will do plenty of things that I’m not 100% okay with, but that’s pretty much every Government for my entire life, be they Conservative or Liberal.

 Trudeau campaigned on a promise of shared prosperity, inclusion, diversity and political change –and to some degree he’s delivered on this so far.

 So here are my thoughts on this particular article.

1.       “When progress stalls, fear moves forward.” –We’ve seen it time and again and I feel the words hold true. When people take stock of their lives and see that they are not moving forward, can’t get ahead, or others prosper where they cannot despite all their best intentions and hard work, they naturally seek outward to find something or someone to blame.

 

       The insidious “Them” becomes the perceived enemy. The Government. The Right. The Left. Those people. That religion, etc. People look for, in fact they seem to NEED someone else to blame. Because if there is not someone else, well then all they are left with is themselves.

            Once they’ve fixated on “Them” it’s almost impossible to get them to change. They entrench themselves in a victim mentality and this is exactly the type of divisiveness that Trudeau was speaking about.

2.       The approval of two pipeline projects shows me that Trudeau understands that moving towards a sustainable energy future is the right thing to do, but that there needs to be a transition and he sees that families are impacted by this in a real way. I personally am not a fan of pipelines but I think this was a sign of being a progressive and balanced leader and should help bring some much needed relief to industries hit hard by the economic downturn.

3.       The price on carbon, though not a popular thing –I didn’t like seeing gas prices go up any more than the next guy –will also create a revenue stream that can help pay for the infrastructure projects over the next 3 years and mitigate some of the budget deficit we will have.

4.       The Government has a goal of raising the median family income to $105,000 in Canada by 2030. The current median family income in case you were wondering is around $76,000. So, over the next 13 years, the Government wants to find ways to create an average yearly increase of $2230 –or raising the median by around 38% by 2030 or 2.9% yearly.

Now current average inflation is projected at 1.14% yearly, so the Government’s intention is to find ways for middle class families to increase year-over-year by a percentage that’s higher.

This is a lofty aspiration and while a detailed analysis of just “How” they will do this can certainly be discussed in a later post what I want to focus on is that to my mind, I never heard such an ambitious plan by the former Harper Conservatives. For that matter I certainly haven’t heard it ever from Trump.

So for this part, I will have to score a point on the side of Progressive leadership at the moment. We’ll see if the Trudeau Government gets to keep the point, depending on what happens over the next 3 years.

5.       The article indicates that an innovation agenda, a poverty reduction strategy and a review of the tax system are all on the table. And that proposals are already out there and in the works.

Sounds promising. I’ll give another point to the Progressive column.

6.       The next portion of the article talks about a bunch of things in the works such as poverty-tracking, infrastructure and interesting things like wage insurance. Whether you think it can be done, or whether you agree or not, these things indicate that there is some real thought being given behind the scenes as to how to accomplish the goals.

I get into a lot of conversations/arguments about how the Government needs to do more to help folks. I have to be honest, I think that if those same people were better off financially, they’d never make a peep about “needing to help people at home more”. Others just simply would not be on their radar.

How can I make this assumption? Because the ONLY time I hear them moan and complain is when they are kicking up a fuss about Liberals –be they Provincial or Federal. When it’s just a regular day or even when the Conservatives were in power I never heard a peep.

 So, what do I take from this article? I think that Trudeau represents a far more progressive agenda than the previous Government and certainly way more than the current politicians vying for leadership of the Conservatives.

 What will happen over the next 3 years remains to be seen, but I encourage everyone –Left or Right or somewhere in between –to follow the progress on the Governments promises.  I have provided a link below to the Trudeau Metre site, which tracks the promises made and how they are doing.

https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/

You’ll find that currently of the 290 campaign promises Trudeau made, they have achieved 38 (13%) of them and have 67 (23%) more in progress and various stages. They have failed at 28 (9%) of them –but NO Government ever follows through on all of them.

So, for the first 400+ days in office, around 36% of the promises made have been completed or are in progression. At this rate, if they stay true to the numbers currently by the end of year 4 they should have achieved around 52% of the promises, with more still in progress and a projected failure rate maybe around 30% or so. Hard to really determine accurately.

To my mind, if he’s not quite the “last hope of mankind” he still stands as a Progressive Leader in regressive times.