If there is a wish among many ordinary Canadians, hard-pressed to make ends meet, it’s surely that 2017 finally brings to an end Justin Trudeau’s political honeymoon.

A wasted 2016 now lies one day behind us.

Taxpayers, the life blood of the Trudeau government’s free-spending recklessness, will know soon enough if the Liberals finally focus on our domestic economy or wrap themselves instead in the Canadian flag as if the country’s celebration of its 150th birthday on July 1 is all about them.

It is not, of course, but we are talking here of a prime minister who so obsesses to be the centre of attention that, when he posed last summer with some of our victorious Olympic athletes from Rio, he actually posed with their medals around his neck.

In a year-end interview with Canadian Press, for example, Justin Trudeau spoke of his so-called goals for this year, stating that he hoped to use Canada’s birthday celebrations as a time “to really connect with Canadians.”

This reeks of party-specific politics.

If Trudeau wants to “really connect” with Canadians, he should be creating the jobs he promised, because one would be challenged to find a new middle-class job under the heaping helping of purple prose the prime minister endlessly spouts as if he were a messiah rather than a political leader.

Where is there a shovel in the ground for all those infrastructure projects supposedly behind the $10 billion deficit in his election platform that has now somehow ballooned to $30 billion?

It is not difficult to tell when jackhammers are silent and one suspects the $14.2 million Trudeau gifted to Indonesia for infrastructure projects during one of his many foreign forays will see quicker action than any project here.

It may appear to be chump change in the greater scheme of things, but millions quickly become billions when we have a PM addicted to selfies and international photo ops, and is seeking to buy Canada’s return to a seat the UN’s Security Council.

By May’s end, the former Harperites will have a new leader, and Conservatives will undoubtedly throw a big party for Rona Ambrose for keeping the ship on tack as interim helmsperson.

Then the game will truly be afoot.

At the moment, however, the media is preoccupied with the shiny object that is Kevin O’Leary, and whether the millionaire businessman and Shark Tank reality-TV star will commit before the Feb. 24 deadline or keep the leadership race in a state of suspended anticipation.

This sideshow has become the main act.

As for Trudeau, ordinary Canadians can only hope that the Privy Council Office, the bureaucracy which oversees the Prime Minister’s Office, will finally grow a pair and start disallowing Trudeau from mixing partisan politics with non-partisan government announcements.

Not even the controlling Harperites, known for pushing the envelope with the PCO, would have been allowed to say in a government announcement that “Canada is back,” as if the previous government and its bureaucrats had done nothing but filled time.

It breaks every rule in the separation of partisan party politics and non-partisan governance.

One can almost see heads within the PCO nodding in agreement, for they are sticklers when it comes to this, and necessarily so in the separation of party from the process of legislation being passed by Parliament.

It is a process where all members of all parties have a vote in the House of Commons on proposed legislation, and then it is off to the Senate for its vaulted sober second thought.

It is not a one-person show, but democratic consensus.

We need a prime minister in 2017 who will be home more than away, and a prime minster who will look in the eyes of the ordinary Canadian and see a need for jobs and economic security, and not an opportunity for another self-promotion.

It should not be too much to ask.

markbonokoski@gmail.com