In one of his many election commitments in 2015, Justin Trudeau promised Canadian seniors that by 2024 the minimum amount of money low income seniors would receive was $2000 per month, further committing to keep the retirement age at 65 (Stephen Harper stated he would raise the retirement age to 67 and, later, age 70), and immediately upon election raising seniors’ monthly payment by $100. Note should be made that one-third of Canadian seniors then lived on less than $17,000 annually.
Even now, half of all Canadian seniors live on less than $26,000 a year — and if you’re not living in social housing or a housing co-op, where you pay only 30% of your income for housing, you’re pretty much hooped.
As of September 2019, minimum pension payments to individual Canadian seniors — Canada Pension, Old Age Security plus the federally mandated Guaranteed Income Supplement — had risen to $1835.30 monthly, or a thirty-one per cent increase from the miserly $1400 minimum payment afforded Canadian seniors by the Stephen Harper government. In other words, four years after the election of a Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government, low income Canadian seniors are receiving $5,223.60 more in their bank accounts annually from the Canadian government, raising the annual payment from $16,800 in early 2015 to $22,023.60 in 2019.
Earlier this year, the Trudeau government announced that eligible seniors and their spouses can earn up to $5,000 a year each before the government starts rolling back their GIS benefits (an increase of $1500). The Trudeau government has made it clear they care about the welfare of seniors, and accept the responsibility of ensuring the health, financial and otherwise, of our low income seniors population. The Conservatives? Not so much. Well, to be perfectly honest — not at all (cuz they care only about the wealthy … it’s a dog eat dog world Andrew Scheer and his ilk believe, and “if you ain’t planned for your retirement then that’s on you buster!).
And you know what, during the course of the 2019 federal election campaign voters haven’t heard word one from the Liberal campaign on how the Liberal government needs to continue their work lifting the one-third of Canadian seniors living solely on Canada pensions out of poverty.
Why — given that seniors tend to get out to the polls in droves — the Liberal campaign hasn’t brought this entirely encouraging fulfillment of their pension election promise to the attention of all Canadians befuddles this reporter. Perhaps Liberals believe it unbecoming to sing one’s own praises, that the Trudeau government is prepared to just run on their record ???
In the final week of the election campaign, the focus of the mainstream press in its coverage of the election, as well as the other five federal political parties has set about to obfuscate about the achievements of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and his generally progressive Liberal government.
On Sunday, Georgia Straight editor Charlie Smith took a look at Justin Trudeau’s record as Prime Minister. Weren’t none too complimentary. Today, VanRamblings will offer a perspective on Mr. Trudeau that is at variance with Mr. Smith’s conclusion on Mr. Trudeau’s continued fitness for office.
As an example: in October 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected to government, he appointed 31 Ministers of the Crown, for the first time ever comprised of fifty per cent women and fifty per cent men (could you imagine Tom Mulcair doing such a thing? uh, no), and as broad a cross-section of Canadians as could possibly be imagined, from 29-year-old Afghan refugee Maryam Monsef — first as Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality, and in 2019 as Minister for International Development — to 35-year-old community organizer Bardish Chagger, first as Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion and Tourism, and since 2018 Government Leader in the House of Commons.
Generational change: the youngest Cabinet in Canadian history, hard charging, competent, and the most accomplished Cabinet in a generation.
Once sworn into office, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first act in office was to cancel both the TransCanada and the East-West pipelines, and ban tanker traffic along the coast of British Columbia. A Prime Minister Andrew Scheer would reverse the ban, and has announced he would seek to work with the oil industry to build a raw bitumen carrying pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat, and then have the bitumen tankered down B.C.’s west coast.
And then there’s this: over the course of the past four years, 900,000 Canadians — 300,000 of whom are children — were lifted out of poverty through policies set by the Justin Trudeau-led Liberal Party of Canada.
Meanwhile, the Justin Trudeau administration has invested in green public transit, investing billions of dollars to extend light rail lines in Canadian cities: Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montréal, and more.
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Marijuana is now legal in Canada, after Uruguay becoming one of only two countries across the globe to legalize possession and use of recreational cannabis.
- In late 2015 through mid-2016, the Canadian government settled more than 40,000 Syrian refugees. In 2018, Canada accepted 28,100 refugees from war torn countries for permanent resettlement in our country.
Addressing our climate change emergency emerged as a top priority for the Trudeau administration. According to Mark Jaccard, a professor of sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management …
“While global experts agree that the (Trudeau government’s) national carbon tax is impressive, they are equally impressed with several other climate policies: the government’s phased closure of coal plants; co-ordinating electricity decarbonization with increasing its use in vehicles, buildings and industry — which comes fully into force in two years, only if the Trudeau government is re-elected.
The government’s pending regulation on methane emissions is another example of a policy of global significance that is unknown in Canada. Flexibility provisions in the policy will ensure that emitters such as the oil and gas industry can choose the least-cost options to reduce these emissions. Again, other countries are studying this policy.
Rather than avoiding industrial regulation altogether, like some jurisdictions, Canada is innovating a model of growing interest to policy-makers in developed and developing countries. In just four years, these and other policies have transformed Canada from a global pariah under the Harper government to a model for climate action under Trudeau. In climate policy, experts agree that Canada is finally a global leader.
I wonder if enough climate-concerned Canadians will recognize this, before it’s too late.”
The long-form census is reinstated. About which Peggy Taillon, former head of the Canadian Council on Social Development — which led the charter challenge to save the census — said “this move will have a lasting impact on Canada’s ability to measure the effectiveness of government policy and hold those who make these decisions to account.”
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A majority of senators are now Independents. In 2014, as then-leader of the third party, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the national Liberal caucus, and since becoming prime minister he has embarked on creating a non-partisan Senate, with a new and independent advisory board to recommend Senate appointments.
The Senate’s increasing independence has provided a new dynamic rarely seen in past Parliaments: amendments to government bills. What was once seen as a rare and dramatic occurrence happened 30 times this Parliament. There were 38 pieces of government legislation that the Senate sent back to the House with changes, and in 35 of those the government accepted some of the suggested alterations, according to the facilitator of the ISG, Yuen Pau Woo.
- The Canada Child Tax Benefit provides thousands of dollars more to 9 out of 10 Canadians families, lifting many families out of poverty;
- Tax cuts for middle class families, not the wealthy, have benefited 9 million Canadian families each year for the past four years;
- Unmuzzled government scientists. By unmuzzling government scientists and allowing them to share their expertise, the Liberal government worked to restore science’s important role in national policy.
After 16 years of the British Columbia Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark provincial administrations, and 10 years of Stephen Harper muzzling scientists in the Environment and Fisheries and Oceans departments, while catering to the interests of the salmon farming industry, the Trudeau administration reversed Harper dictum (as did John Horgan’s government provincially, reversing Campbell and Clark policy). Federally, over the past four years, Trudeau administration Fisheries and Ocean Ministers Dominic LeBlanc and Jonathan Wilkinson have worked within the Trudeau government to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into restoring British Columbia’s west coast fisheries, and the environment — for instance, by the hiring of 135 new aquatic scientists and new research partnerships, an important part of protecting Canada’s oceans, waterways, and fisheries.
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New and increased funding for women’s shelters;
- An historic $120 billion investment in infrastructure over 10 years;
- Launching the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, to put an end to this national tragedy;
- Through the introduction of Bill C-14, introducing legalized medical assistance in dying, offering Canadians the choice to die with dignity to patients who are suffering intolerably;
Re-opening the Kitsilano Coast Guard base; helping m
ore than 350,000 students by increasing Canada Student Grants by 50%; reopening and staffing 9 Veterans Affairs service offices across the country — and all of the above is just for a start.
Canadians are being fed a line of malarkey that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not a progressive Prime Minister — a statement which couldn’t be further from the truth.
According to the latest polls, Canadians are on the verge of electing a regressive Andrew Scheer-led federal government that will undo all of the myriad progressive accomplishments of the Justin Trudeau-led federal administration over the past four years. Don’t let that happen!
October 15, 2019. Angus Reid Poll. Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party currently leading in every province across Canada, except Québec, where the Bloc Québécois is leading.
