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Former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall on working with (or against) Justin Trudeau

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From a FaceBook post by former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall

Your Mom likely told you what mine told me – if you can’t say something nice ..don’t say anything at all. So maybe that’s why it has taken me a day to offer a few thoughts on Trudeau’s resignation announcement yesterday. I miss my Mom everyday but I’m not sure I will be able to follow her advice for this post. (On the other hand.. remembering some of her comments during the Trudeau years – she might be fine with this!)
I truly believe that those who put their name forward for public office, no matter how much I might disagree with them personally and politically should be thanked for their willingness to wade into the increasingly toxic waters of politics. But the undeniable truth is that Canada would be better off today had he decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps.
His Prime Ministership was manifestly the most divisive and economically damaging of any in our history…including the record of the elder Trudeau ..who generationally knee-capped the economy of western Canada with the National Energy Program.
I dealt with this particular Trudeau in my old job at First Ministers’ Conferences, in bilateral relations and one on one discussions. He struck me as someone who was the product of an abiding central Canadian/Quebec world view with a focus on progressive trends rather than policy development or political and economic thought. That was my impression anyway.
Somewhere along the way he found and then clung to wokeism and an obsession with man-made climate change. They were very trendy things for those on the left. Shiny buttons that permanently distracted Trudeau.
His government continues to risk our economy, our trade competitiveness and exacerbate affordability issues for all Canadians with his forced march to a carbon tax that in 4 years will be a debilitating $170.00 per tonne. All in the name of reducing Canada’s emissions that account for less than 2% of global emissions. Imagine – stubbornly pursuing a policy like his carbon tax that is that damaging – in the name of maybe, possibly reducing emissions by a quantum that will make no impact..no change on this thing you’ve sworn us all to fight – climate change. A leader shoving his citizens ahead of him into a winless fight, forcing them to pay for the costs of that fight and risking the competitiveness of the entire economy (at a time when we are now facing the threat of Trump’s tariffs).
The carbon tax is just one policy on a laundry list of damaging and often feckless policies that Trudeau has introduced in his 10 years as Prime Minister. He all but declared his disdain for the western Canadian resource sector. He never much liked how we made a living in the west; how we live by and rely on fossil fuels in rural Canada. He never respected the values that a majority of western or rural Canadians hold dear.
He, more than any PM in contemporary Canadian political history, was found wanting in ethics and third party investigations. He chose to fire or force out strong female Ministers rather than be held accountable for things he very much said…and very much did. All this from a self-proclaimed feminist who would regularly lecture Canadians on the importance of his ‘feminist’ view.
He offered the same when it came to Reconcilation yet he failed to fulfill his promise for clean drinking water on First Nations reserves.
He demonized millions of Canadians who were represented by the Freedom Convoy or who had concerns about lock- downs and vaccine mandates – dismissing them as un-Canadian and fringe and ..much worse.
His fiscal record and tendencies were so bad that even the big spending, big government advocating Chrystia Freeland quit his cabinet.
People will observe that Canada has never had an NDP Prime Minister. I beg to differ.
He was unserious. He said things and believed things like “The budget will balance itself” and “I don’t think too much about monetary policy “
Incredible.
I recall when I was the lone Premier and Saskatchewan was the lone province opposing his carbon tax. I know the kinds of things he and his Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said about us…about Saskatchewan..behind closed doors and to some whom they believed had assured discretion.
And yet despite all of this – I did not feel as gratified as some did when the news broke yesterday. You see yesterday was a good day for the Liberal Party of Canada. Or at least a better day than they have had in a long while. Granted the Liberals have huge hole from which to dig out but the digging could not begin until Trudeau quit.
I’d rather he had decided to lead his party into the next election. We would be much more assured of much needed change had that been the case.
Because make no mistake – with him or without him – this is a new Justin Trudeau-shaped leftwing, woke, anti-resource development Liberal party of Canada. Long gone is the pragmatism of the Chretien/Martin era. Trudeau policies for the most part will continue to be front and centre with the Liberal party long after he is gone.
I hope the Conservative Party of Canada keeps it head down, humbly asking Canadians to be their agents of much needed change.. and running like they are 10 points behind – not 20 points ahead.
I believe that Canada as we have known it- hangs in the balance of the next election. If somehow, we continue to have a federal government with the ghost-vestigial policies of the man who announced his departure plans yesterday… well that would very bad for the west and not much better for the rest of the country.

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Do Minimum Wage Laws Accomplish Anything?

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The Audit

David Clinton

All the smart people tell us that, one way or another, increasing the minimum wage will change society. Proponents claim raising pay at the low end of the economy will help low-income working families survive in hyper-expensive communities. Opponents claim that artificially increasing employment costs will either drive employers towards adopting innovative automation integrations or to shut down their businesses altogether. Either way, goes the anti-intervention narrative, there will be fewer jobs available.

Well, what’ll it be? Canadian provinces have been experimenting with minimum wage laws for many years. And since 2021, the federal government has imposed its own rate for employees of all federally regulated industries. There should be plenty of good data out there by now indicating who was right.

The Audit is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Historical records on provincial rates going back decades is available from Statistics Canada. For this research, I used data starting in 2011. Since new rates often come into effect mid-year, I only applied a year’s latest rate to the start of the following year. 2022 itself, for simplicity, was measured by the new federal rate, with the exception of British Columbia who’s rate was $0.10 higher than the federal rate.

My goal was to look for evidence that increasing statutory wage rates impacted these areas:

  • Earnings among workers in full-service restaurants
  • Operating profit margins for full-service restaurants
  • Total numbers of active businesses in the accommodation and food services industries

I chose to focus on the food service industry because it’s particularly dependent on low-wage workers and particularly sensitive to labour costs. Outcomes here should tell us a lot about the impact such government policies are having.

Restaurant worker income is reported as total numbers. In other words, we can see how much all of, say, Manitoba’s workers combined took home in a given year. For those numbers to make sense, I adjusted them using overall provincial populations.

Income in British Columbia and PEI showed a strong correlation to increasing minimum wages. Interestingly, BC has consistently had the highest of all provinces’ minimum wage while PEI’s has mostly hung around the middle of the pack. Besides a weak negative correlation in Saskatchewan, there was no indication that income in other provinces either dropped or grew in sync with increases to the minimum wage.

Nation-wide, by weighting results by population numbers, we got a Pearson coefficient 0.30. That means it’s unlikely that wage rate changes had any impact on take-home income.

Did increases harm restaurants? It doesn’t look like it. I used data measuring active employer businesses in the accommodation and food services industries. No provinces showed any impact on business startups and exits that could be connected to minimum wage laws. Overall, Canada’s coefficient value was 0.29 – again a very weak positive relationship.

So restaurants haven’t been collapsing at epic, extinction-level rates. But do government minimums cause a reduction in their operating profit margins? Apparently not. If anything, they’ve become more profitable!

The nation-wide coefficient between minimum wages and restaurant profitability was 0.88 – suggesting a strong correlation. But how could that be happening? Don’t labour costs make up a major chunk of food service operating expenses? Here are a few possible explanations:

  • Perhaps many restaurants respond to rising costs by increasing their menu prices. This can work out well if market demand turns out to be relatively inelastic and people continue eating out despite higher prices.
  • Higher wages might lead to lower employee turnover, reducing hiring and training costs.
  • A higher minimum wage boosts worker incomes, leading to more disposable income in the economy. Although the flip-side is that we can’t see strong evidence of higher worker income.
  • Higher wages can force unprofitable, inefficient restaurants to close, leaving stronger businesses with higher market share.

In any case, my big-picture verdict on government intervention into private sector wage rates is: thanks but don’t bother. All that effort doesn’t seem to have improved actual incomes on a population scale. At the same time, it also hasn’t driven industries with workers at the low-end of the pay scale to devastating collapse.

But I’m sure it has taken up enormous amounts of public service time and resources that could undoubtedly have been more gainfully spent elsewhere. More important, as the economist Alex Tabarrok recently pointed out, minimum wage laws have been shown to reduce employment for the disabled and measurably increase both consumer prices and workplace injuries.

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Trudeau Liberals pledge $41.5 million for over 100 pro-2SLGBTQI+ projects

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier blasted the funding, noting how spending money while the country is in a “major economic crisis” shows how “Liberal nutcases” are “wasting” taxpayer money on “woke activists.” 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is using its final days to promise $41.5 million in taxpayer funds to advance 106 pro-LGBT projects “across Canada.”

On January 31, Lisa Hepfner, Trudeau’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Youth, announced “$41.5 million for 106 projects across four different 2SLGBTQI+ funds.” 

“This funding will advance equality for 2SLGBTQI+ communities across Canada and address the rise in hate,” claimed the government in a press release. 

The government said the money will help “build and sustain resilience of 2SLGBTQI+ communities against hate and discrimination,” with the funds coming as part of Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate, which was launched in the fall of 2024, and follows Trudeau’s Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan, which is in its third year of operation.

Leader of the People’s Party of Canada Maxime Bernier blasted the funding, noting how spending money while the country is in a “major economic crisis” shows how “Liberal nutcases” are “wasting” taxpayer money on “woke activists.” 

“As Canada is on the verge of a major economic crisis, these Liberal nutcases are wasting another $41M on woke activists and mentally ill people who identify as one of the 52 genders. Unbelievable,” wrote Bernier on X Saturday in response to Hepfner’s X post about the funding. 

As reported by investigative blogger Pat Maloney, Canada spent $108,594,964 on LGBT ideology in 2022, a number that swelled to a whopping $665,454,357 in 2023.

Since taking office in 2015, the Trudeau government has consistently pushed an anti-life, anti-family narrative on Canadians.

In addition to supporting effectively unlimited abortion, Trudeau and his government have stood behind even the most extreme aspects of gender ideology, such as the chemical and surgical “transition” of minors.

Trudeau announced in early January that he plans to step down as Liberal Party leader once a new leader has been chosen, which is set to take place on March 9. Parliament has been prorogued until March 24 as a result, although Trudeau could resume it at any time. 

Thus far, the two main candidates in the running to replace Trudeau are former central banker Mark Carney and Trudeau’s former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. 

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