By Abbas Rana
The governing Liberals are already in the 2019 election campaign mode, but opposition MPs say Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s strategy to “demonize” the right and “steal” policy ideas from the left won’t work and plan to focus on the Grits’ unkept promises in the next federal campaign.
“That seems to be their strategy that they’re going to try to demonize the right while stealing from the left,” said five-term NDP MP Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) in an interview with The Hill Times.
Mr. Cullen said his party will keep reminding voters about the Liberal Party’s broken promises on such progressive issues as sweeping electoral reforms and Indigenous issues. Before believing the Liberals’ new promises, he said, the NDP will be reminding voters why the Liberals haven’t delivered on some of these major promises.
According to trudeaumeter.polimeter.org, a website that regularly keeps track of the promises that the Liberal government made during the last election campaign, as of last week, the government had achieved 66 of the 227 promises, 69 were in progress, 51 not started and 41 had been broken.
“Fool me once, shame on Justin Trudeau, fool me twice, shame on me, and I don’t think Canadians will be shamed twice,” said Mr. Cullen. “The first question that will come to Canadians is you were just in power for four years. You didn’t move on all these things and in fact you betrayed your promises. It’s a question of credibility.”