Before the House of Commons broke for the holidays, Navdeep Bains, the federal minister of innovation, gave a telling answer to a simple question. Asked about his government’s chief accomplishments, he unwittingly evoked one of its chief failures.

The minister pointed not to a piece of legislation or to a new program, but to a pair of welcome and overdue prime-ministerial apologies – one to LGBTQ people for discriminatory policies of the past and one to survivors of the Newfoundland residential schools. These apologies, he said, “set a very important tone for this government.”

The prime minister’s statements of contrition were important. But more than halfway through his mandate, Justin Trudeau has too often had little to show for himself beyond such tone-setting gestures, sunny though they may be. He has too often failed actually to deliver the laws and programs that would give substance to his words.

The reason Bains did not instead cite any new laws is perhaps that there are so few. As a CBC News analysis demonstrated earlier this month, the Liberals passed just over half as many government bills in their first two years in office as the Harper Conservatives did in the first half of their majority mandate – 34 Liberal laws to 61 by the Conservatives. By this standard, the Trudeau Liberals have been among the least productive governments in decades.

Some of the bills Trudeau has managed to usher through Parliament are important, and will make a marked difference in people’s lives, including the expansion of the Canada Pension Plan, the creation of the Canada Child Benefit, and the legalization, in response to a Supreme Court ruling, on medical assistance in dying.

However, in vital areas such as the criminal law and indigenous issues, tax reform and democracy, among others, the prime minister has shown a legislative lethargy that risks souring the hopeful symbolism of his government’s early days.

Part of this no doubt comes down to inexperience. Trudeau’s first House leader, Dominic LeBlanc, lacked the diplomatic finesse required to rally support around government bills. LeBlanc’s replacement, Bardish Chagger, a rookie MP, was a confounding choice for a government that could use an experienced leader in Parliament, especially given some of the fraught and complex issues on the agenda.

Part of it, too, as we have argued before, might be the inevitable consequence of a more democratic approach to governing. There is always a tension in government between efficiency and democracy, between how quickly laws and programs can be delivered and how robust the study and debate. The Harper government chose expediency at every turn, railroading bills through Parliament and burying important measures in omnibus bills. Insofar as Trudeau has delivered a more democratic approach, the efficiency of his government has suffered for it.

The prime minister’s attempt to remake the Senate as a less partisan body of true sober second thought, for instance, has freed the Upper House to slow the passage of bills, as it did with the assisted dying law and the bill to make O Canada gender neutral. If Conservative senators get their way – and because of Trudeau’s Senate reforms they just might – the government will miss its summer 2018 deadline to legalize marijuana. Trudeau’s admirable commitment to use fewer omnibus bills and rely less on legislative tricks has paid democratic dividends, but at a cost.

Yet there is also something more troubling at work here. Too often with this government, delays in the name of democracy seem to serve as a smokescreen to avoid tough decisions.

Take just a few of the Liberal campaign promises still undelivered ostensibly because they are in some stage of consultation or review: rolling back the most egregious aspects of the Tories’ costly and ineffective tough-on-crime laws; closing regressive tax loopholes that benefit the richest few at a great cost to the public purse; addressing the Indigenous child-welfare crisis; overhauling Canada Post. Just this week, after two years of delay, the government finally fulfilled its promise to restore lifetime pensions for injured veterans. Sort of. The policy isn’t as generous as many hoped and in any case it won’t take effect until 2019.

In each of these areas, voters gave Trudeau a strong mandate to play an activist role. The prime minister has both the evidentiary and the democratic bases to deliver – and he should. His government’s emphasis on democratic engagement is most welcome, but how much consultation is needed before it is prepared to deliver on its promises?

Nowhere has the emphasis on process over substance been more egregious than in the cases of electoral reform and the overhaul of our access-to-information law.

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Both of these ate up a great deal of public and parliamentary effort, though the first resulted in nothing and the second in something profoundly inadequate. These failures to realize ambitious promises, too, set an important tone.

If, at the end of next year, the Liberal government is still touting a better tone as the prime minister’s chief accomplishment, if Trudeau is still signaling commitments without delivering the substance and paying the cost, it will be even harder to take him at his word.

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