Canadas Trudeau pushes politics to the left amid the Covid Pandemic

Now he is shifting his agenda in a higher direction, marking one of the largest left-wing movements in Canadian federal politics since the mid-1960s, say political analysts and historians, when the Liberal government of the time introduced health care. universal and a national pension plan.

We can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to adhere to the old ways of thinking, said Mr. Trudeau back in August, when he started making promises for a wider social security network and a more aggressive environmental policy. This is our chance to build a more resilient Canada.

He appointed a new finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, who led Canada’s negotiations with the Trump administration on a revamped North American free trade pact to oversee the development of this new policy roadmap.

Polls show there is an appetite among voters resolved by the consequences of the pandemic for an intrusive, high-spending government.

Canadians are feeling very insecure now, said David Coletto, chief executive of Abacus Data, an Ottawa-based survey firm. There was already a prevailing view on both the right and the left that those with access to resources were doing much better than those struggling to keep their heads above water. This has only been confirmed over the past year.

Other analysts say Mr Trudeaus’s push could receive a boost from Biden’s next administration, given the similar agenda of U.S. presidents focused on the environment and social programs. Mr Trudeau was the first world leader to call Mr Biden when he moved to the Oval Office.

President Biden and Mr Trudeau clearly have a common vision, said Stewart Perst, a policy lecturer at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. They can reinforce each other as well, especially on the world stage. To be sure, there will be changes and setbacks, such as President Bidens’s move to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline expansion.

The Trudeau administration spent aggressively to mitigate the onslaught of pandemics, with Canada’s budget balance in 2020 deteriorating mostly between major developed and emerging economies on a regulated basis. The deficit will reach a record 18% of gross domestic product in the fiscal year ending March 31st. Most of the cash went to families and businesses.

Mr Trudeau has said more government incentives are on the way, roughly 5% of gross domestic product, to start a recovery and rebuild and expand a social security network aimed at additional day care space, care better for the elderly, and a national plan to help subsidize the costs of medicines.

“We are not going to just go back to where we were before Covid-19,” she told reporters. Freeland, who was also deputy prime minister. The pandemic has revealed critical gaps in our social security network. And the virus has hit certain sectors, certain groups of people, more than the elderly, women, low-wage workers, young people, people of color, the natives.

But the push is also raising concern. Robert Asselin, a former senior aide to the Trudeau government, points out that costs are pushing the budget deficit to half a trillion Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $ 390 billion, and said the government lacks focus when it comes to generating longer-term economic growth.

It seems a little disturbing to me. It is primarily about wealth redistribution, said Mr. Asselin, now senior vice president at the Business Council of Canada, a lobbying group representing the countries’ chief executives. The approach by the next Biden administration, by comparison, is shifting the policy agenda to the left, but there are detailed strategies in place aimed at boosting growth in certain sectors of the economy, he said.

Among the tasks Mr Trudeau has given to Finance Minister Freeland, according to a letter issued by Mr Trudeaus’s office outlining her term, is the introduction of new taxes aimed at extreme wealth. Before politics, Mrs. Freeland was a journalist and wrote a book about the worlds rich elite and income inequality.

The measures of the Trudeau governments come at a time of heightened expectation that Mr Trudeau will seek elections as early as the spring, to take advantage of strong public support for his response to the pandemic and try to bargain in his minority government for a majority mandate.

Mr Trudeau returned to power in the autumn of 2019 with a minority mandate, partly punished for a scandal over the role of his offices in trying to intervene in the prosecution of a Montreal-based engineering company. While Canadian election laws indicate that the next ballot is scheduled for October 2023, the Prime Minister has the authority to dissolve parliament and cause elections by his order.

Mr Trudeaus’s calculation that Canadians want more government seems to be yielding results. Polls by Abacus Data and other public opinion firms usually show that Mr Trudeaus The Liberals have a solid lead over their biggest rival, the Conservative Party, as most Canadians approve of his governments’ response to the pandemic.

The Liberal Party of Canada has been the dominant force in Canadian politics in the country’s 150-year history, in part because of its ability to assess the public mood and move the policy agenda as appropriate, political analysts say. For example, the Liberals in the 1990s ruled mostly from the right, as they cut spending on government programs to deal with budget problems and cut taxes to avoid conservative opponents.

Kathy Brock, a political scientist at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, said Mr. Trudeaus left shift which also includes more aggressive measures in combating climate change, such as a proposed sharp increase in carbon taxis to persuade progressive voters to park their votes with the left New Democratic Party or elsewhere . In the last federal election, in 2019, approximately one-third of voters cast ballots for progressive parties, while two-thirds voted for either the Liberals or the Conservative Party.

Mr Trudeau has dismissed election rumors, arguing that his focus is on pandemics and overseeing the spread of vaccinations.

Mrs. Brock said the signs point to a vote in the spring, but that could be removed, especially if the spread of vaccinations in Canada faces further delays and lags far behind the US, UK and other Group of Seven countries.

A poll released Friday by the Angus Reid Institute showed that public approval of governments’ plan to distribute vaccines fell sharply in January to 45%, up from 58% the previous month. However Shachi Kurl, the president of the institutes, said the frustration of vaccination has not yet weighed on Mr Trudeaus’s popularity.

Write about it Paul Vieira at [email protected]