Article content

Justin Trudeau enters his second summer as prime minister with a thin record to look back on, across a landscape littered with abandoned promises and public reversals.

Balanced budgets have been abandoned. Limited deficits are a thing of the past. Electoral reform crashed and burned like a damaged drone. Parliamentary reform turned into an embarrassing retreat as the opposition ganged up against Liberal efforts to bend the House of Commons to its will.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Kelly McParland: The Liberals have created a political landscape littered with abandoned promises and policy reversals Back to video

Canada’s indigenous people have refused to be jollied along with happy talk and photo ops, signalling that it will take more than a renamed office block in Ottawa to reverse generations of built-up anger. “Peacekeeping” – that magic Liberal realmwhere proud Canadian soldiers in blue helmets keep order in far-off lands – turns out to mean a $30 billion increase in conventional military spending over the next decade. The firm belief the Liberals held while in opposition – that the paranoid Tories of the Harper government saw terrorists behind every lamp post, has given way to a vast expansion of Canada’s spy agency and an enhanced priority on identifying and halting extremists before they can do to Canada what they are doing to Europe. Warning of the potential evils Canadians face, and the need to be vigilant, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale even sounds a little Harper-like if you close your eyes and listen.