~ Gheb ~
Trudeau is a very... very mixed bag.
Good:
-His steadfastness about keeping campaign promises. He's got a majority government (it's like having a favorable Congress) so he knows he has no excuses not to.
-Good choices in cabinet ministers from what I've seen -- the Minister of Defence for example couldn't possibly be more qualified. I was concerned about his hard decision to make a 50/50 gender balanced cabinet, as politically incorrect as that is to say, because I think top decisionmakers, like police/firefighters/etc, should have their hiring standards exist outside of affirmative action. But I see no issues with the choices I've looked into thus far, and therefore he managed to have his cake and eat it to by being both progressive and (as far as I can tell) the best choices.
-Super minor point but I'm glad he changed the name of the Minister of Indian Affairs. It's not like it's a sports team with some kind of storied history behind the name, it's just a name borne of (and from a time of) ignorance and carries stigmas of bad policy choices. (For those curious it's now the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs... literally also a better description of the job)
-So far, he hasn't p***ied out on legalizing marijuana. I really think his government was expecting a minority gov't and wasn't expecting to get called on this particular bluff, but after a predictable middling early motion (blah blah medicinal... who cares, medicinal marijuana being under the heel of gov't is straight up cruel and quaint and ridiculous) he apparently handed off the motion to someone whose whole job is to figure out how to legalize it fully and get it into our infrastructure.
-He's shown a willingness to bend to the realities of new developments in the world in spite of his promises, which is good. His ambitious target for refugees to bring in was good, his timeline was
****ing ridiculously unrealistic. He knew if he took office he was going to be spending almost the entire month of November flying around to conferences and the like and have very little time to sit down and authorize particulars, that target was straight up naive and moronic. Thankfully, he decreased the number significantly for the short-term but didn't let up on the total number, simply allotting a realistic time window to get the same number of people in
almost as fast. That was major points for him.
-Creation of a Minister of Science position -- in addition to the "well obviously he won't be muzzling scientists like the Harper government was at times", I just think this is a good step for humanity in general and I hope other countries consider having dedicated government personnel specifically for scientific advance.
-Frankly, I don't care if a terrorist loses their citizenship. It's an unpopular thing to say, but I think if you specifically make an attack of great casualty on a country specifically because of its government and policies, I don't know if you honestly have the right to enjoy the exact things you're clearly demonstrating mean nothing to you. But at the humanitarian level, it's sort of a Batman Policy -- being better than those you fight. So all in all, repealing Bill C-51 (which allows the government to revoke the citizenship of those convicted of a terrorist attack) is likely the right thing to do, and I don't think anyone should have that power anyway.
Bad:
-All the grandstanding. He's a young handsome head of state, and he knows it. He tries
way too hard to make a point of how HEARTFELT he is, clearly trying to go for the JFK factor, and sometimes he makes a fool of himself (and at times I worry, the country) in the process. I still remember watching one of the foreign policy debates before the election and he tried to do a dramatic pause and staredown at his podium during his final comments, and the moderator fairly assumed he was done and tried to move on to someone else, causing Trudeau to awkwardly speak in a machine gun pace. All his constant posturing reminds me of reading gheb's minimafia and seeing how obvscum J was and yelling at the game to notice it lol
-He has preached transparency but frankly very little has seemed to be different from the previous government. Like, very, very little. They give a lot of the same nonanswers about pretty much everything that reminds me so much of the last guy's in office -- "We're looking into every possibility", "we don't want to commit to" etc etc etc. So far, his promise of transparency is only a promise and it's hella gay. I'm hoping this is only until they establish their footing with the Canadian public and the world calms down a bit, because right now I'm not diggin' it.
-After disavowing the Senate, it seems like they're hanging back waiting to see how the corruption trials for Duffy, Brazeau, and other fatcat pieces of **** go before actually doing something about it. Torching the Senate is frankly the right call imo, or scrapping everyone there and starting from scratch, and both of those would be unpopular and financially costly decisions. Frankly I really think the PMO is waiting to see what the easiest way out of that mess is and I hate it.
-Walls upon walls of rhetoric. So, right now Canada is pulling its CF-18s out of the ISIL fight. That's okay. We're only doing 2% of the bomb runs anyway. Trudeau continually says we're going to "continue to assist in a
responsible way". Now, this was the rhetoric back during the election -- before November, a month where official ISIL terrorist attacks claimed ~500 lives. That's of course,
a big ****ing deal and very clearly changes the political landscape, but the same soundbites and stalling tactics are being offered while they make up their minds. His spokespeople are regularly on news panels/debates and constantly deflect this issue to "humanitarian contributions such as the refugees..." and it annoys me. Shut up. EVERYONE is taking in refugees. America is doing it in the face of a hundredfold the resistance. France is doing it and
they had the terrorist attack. EVERYONE is taking in refugees, doing so is NOT taking on a bigger role, and it is not contributing to the fight. It's a tangent issue that makes them look good, and they know it, so they keep trying to use it to obfuscate the issue and I REALLY don't like it. Engage the question you're being asked, not the question nobody asked; so far their PR modus operandi is almost indistinguishable from the conservative gov't they replaced.
-Cloud nine thinking. Trudeau makes a lot of comments that seem borne of a desire to show off how open his mind is and what a big thinker he is. And as a social scientist myself, I find his comments hilariously ignorant at times. Within days of the Boston Marathon Bombing, Trudeau was lambasting the American response to the bombers and saying that "these are people who feel excluded", etc etc. Basically playing armchair sociologist. I looked up his credentials and was unsurprised to find out that Trudeau was a LITERATURE major who later took engineering. What does this mean? It means
I'M more ****ing qualified to comment on the Boston Bombers' mentality than he is, and I wouldn't ever dare. It took a literal team of psychiatrists and psychologists ten years with full access to all the relevant materials and investigative evidence to EVENTUALLY diagnose the mental problems suffered by the Columbine shooters and work up an offender profile. Why does Trudeau think he can do that just from his fee-fees and baseless speculation? Oh, and he essentially engages in victim blaming on top of it. Yeah, you're a real thinker, Justin. Stuff like this really makes me question just how realistic he is and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Let's talk about how rapists just feel excluded from romantic and sexual closeness while we're at it, might as well.
-His "middle class tax cut". If you make 47K (near the bottom range of the cut), you get a whole fifty extra dollars in the year. Guess what? That means his tax cut is only benefitting the wealthy -- people making upwards of 65K or more. A MacLean's article recently [correctly] referred to his tax cut as "taking from the rich and giving to the almost as rich". When questioned on benefits for those of low income -- like myself, and you guys know what a tough time I've had of things -- they talk about "other benefits" like the child care benefit and.... other things that target specific populations and people with specific problems not everyone has. Including me. I'm a white single male with no kids and no indigenous heritage, there is
absolutely nothing in their fiscal recalibration that benefits me AT ALL. Which worries me when...
-When questioned on where the money would be made up in the tax cut, and asked if this would create new taxes such as carbon taxes and etc, Trudeau's gov't merely (and very vaguely) said "nothing is off the table". Carbon taxes, as anybody with an iota of logic would know, are ostensibly targeted at the extremely rich and corporations and their various business endeavors. But of course, this is only going to be passed straight down to consumers (like me) in the form of higher prices. And food is already expected to go up ~5% in price (like I ****ing needed THAT!), increase the cost of transporting the food in the first place? **** me. And that's just ONE new tax possibility. Scandinavian countries like Norway do amazing things with carbon taxes but only because they TRULY gouge the corporations and make sure the cost doesn't go straight down to the bottom rung of society; Canada and most western countries don't have the legal framework to prevent that.
Evil Eye
@Raziek @Kantrip ...?
