He hailed it as dawn of the Liberal "meet the moment" era, an eye-rolling slogan of unclear meaning introduced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week as his party’s challenge for the parliamentary year ahead.
While sitting in an overcrowded hospital waiting room Monday waiting for a preventative checkup, I watched the year’s first question period on overhead monitors. I wanted to see if this government was indeed refreshing itself to confront a daunting list of issues, clearly topped by our ailing health-care system.
But that moment passed as our health and Canada’s underperforming care failed to rate even a mention from the Official Opposition leader or his parliamentary parrots.
The patients in the module with me were left looking at their watches to see how late their oncologist appointments were running. Meanwhile the funding fix for another generation faced zero parliamentary pressure beyond an NDP attack on the private delivery of publicly funded care.
(Former and perhaps future Green Party leader Elizabeth May has an interesting stake in this debate. She has been unable to find a family doctor for basic preventive care in her B.C. riding. So while the public might think MPs have easy, if not preferential, access to care, here we have one of Canada’s best-known MPs languishing on a waitlist with her husband, unable to find a physician to obtain necessary testing for her age group. But I digress.)
Beyond not meeting the health-care moment, Trudeau went on to use his first 2023 parliamentary appearance to serve up hefty helpings of cold rehash, a veritable Groundhog Day buffet of bland and babbled repetition.
The moment to meet spending restraint is clearly upon us, what with recessionary warnings from the Bank of Canada governor and spending alarms from a former governor as the deficit-driven national debt balloons to $1.1 trillion amid uncertain revenue. But Trudeau’s response was to pledge his vague willingness to spend whatever it takes to continue coddling Canadians.
‘A VINTAGE TRUDEAU RESPONSE’
Meanwhile, Conservatives decided their moment for Trudeau was a dozen-question blitz demanding to be told the value of consulting contracts awarded to McKinsey and Co. where former boss Dominic Barton is a friend. Alas, there was no meeting of minds across the aisle as the prime minister delivered a vintage Trudeau response. He simply pretended he didn’t hear or comprehend the question.
And it went on and on, an hour of moments-unmet, questions unanswered and shotguns filled with cheap shots from a prime minister and cabinet reaching back in time for low-calibre ammunition.
He repeatedly, for example, listed his government priority as being one of helping the middle class and those who want to join it, as if that line was somehow new instead of recycled from 2015.
On at least two occasions he delivered an answer to the McKinsey question by stretching back to reference the Canada Child Benefit as his government’s signature helping hand accomplishment. That benefit, by the way, was implemented in 2016.
And he kept trumpeting dental care for kids as the latest grand Liberal scheme, a galling gloat given it was the NDP which forcing that support onto his government’s agenda.
Or course, there will be major moments to come which he can’t help but meet, like it or not.
The cost of subsidies to match massive U.S. inducements for climate change industries to move south, the looming health care accord, the deep hole for military procurement and the need to transition oil workers to new industries are challenging clouds on the fiscal horizon.
Yet while the Conservative “Canada feels broken” slogan is not exactly a ray of brilliant communications sunshine, it better reflects the perception of worried voters than an updated sunny-ways catchphrase dreamed up in a kumbaya focus-group undoubtedly paid for by taxpayers.
Based on Trudeau’s first-day fail in the House of Commons, “meeting the moment” is destined to become the most laughable slogan since the elder Pierre Trudeau’s disastrous campaign rallying cry in 1972, which insisted “the land is strong” just as the economy tanked.
So far, Trudeau has meekly met his big moments with a duck, a dodge and selective deafness.
That’s the bottom line..