Into every life a little rain must fall. And there might not be many sunny days this fall for the Trudeau government. After almost a year in office, it is time for some tough decisions. You can hardly please all of the people all of the time. And most of these decisions are landing with a thud on the Prime Minister’s desk.
The most serious of these is the demand for a decision on the twinning of the American-owned Kinder-Morgan pipeline over the Rockies to Burnaby, B.C. Despite our Quisling news media referring to it as an oil pipeline, it is not. It is a high-pressure dual pipeline for diluted bitumen from the tar sands. Mr. Trudeau is being pushed by Canadian business, the People’s Republic of China, the Alberta and B.C. governments and the lagging Canadian economy to get this pipeline flowing.
Some of those same pressures are behind the Energy East pipeline to Saint John, New Brunswick. At least with that decision, Trudeau can delay by making the National Energy Board more of an impartial regulator. It should have happened when he took office.
By December, Mr. Trudeau’s office will have received the report from the special commons committee on electoral reform. The committee is expected to recommend a modified form of proportional representation that will be opposed by the Conservatives MPs unless there is a referendum.
But even more serious are the financial decisions that will require negotiations with the provinces. The first of these is the sharing of Medicare costs. It will not be as simple as having a selfie with the Prime Minister and being sent home with less than your province wants.
This might be a give and take situation if the federal government can control carbon pricing as it really should. What it gives out in Medicare solutions, it might just take back in carbon pricing. Those should be interesting negotiations. To make the negotiations more interesting, Quebec will be expecting the Trudeau government to come up with another billion to help out Quebec-based Bombardier.
One of the more interesting traps for Justin Trudeau is the planning for refugee settlement in the coming year. Any major increases in those figures are going to be welcomed by factions within the Conservative Party as they head for their 2017 leadership convention. While MP Kellie Leitch might have bungled her opener on the ‘Canadian Values’ agenda, there are going to be more attempts by Conservative leadership hopefuls to work that street.
The prime minister might enjoy his rock-star status with the citizens of the countries he visits but like Mr. Harper, he has to remember that politics start at home.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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