The wife wanted to send our prime minister a Valentine card. She is a fan. Maybe we both are in our different ways. She only wants him to lose the rock-star role and start to look more prime ministerial. She is right in that. It is time he got down to the real job and stopped acting like a playboy.
And he could learn much from an honest assessment of where he is at and how he got there.
First of all, that was not a particularly brilliant campaign that his people ran for him. Opportunities missed were many. Delays were common. The mistakes of his opponents afforded him opportunities. The extended length of the actual campaign was only Stephen Harper’s first error. Thomas Mulcair ceded Quebec to Trudeau when he could not sustain the Orange Wave.
It is critically important to remember that the Liberals did not win over the older voters. It was the millions of new voters, overwhelmingly supporting change, who made the difference. What people considered a brilliant social media campaign was nothing more than self-indulgence. The real work should have been put into building the computerized lists of workers and supporters.
(This Liberal somehow kept getting all the e-mails from Beaches-East York in Toronto—a hundred kilometres from our electoral district of Barrie-Springwater-Oro-Medonte—which told us much about why the Liberals would win in Toronto and lose in Barrie.)
What the Liberals have done well in the first hundred days was to bring a steady flow of Syrian refugees to Canada without being overly concerned about the numbers. The gender parity of the new cabinet was a master stroke but is unlikely to be sustained over four years. Pulling out our F-18s was a necessary step but putting all our ground support with the Kurds could come back to bite us in the future. It might be a smart tactic but shows a lack of forward planning.
But promises such as putting the end to first-past-the-post voting are foolish. It is better to study a question first and then make promises.
And starting the day with tax cuts is just aping the Conservatives. The true definition of this administration will be in its financial strategies. They have yet to be fully defined.
We should send our Valentine’s wishes to our prime minister anyway. He deserves a fair chance. He got rid of Stephen Harper for us.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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