Commentary
How much confidence do we have in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? No, stop with the heckling, or cheers, because I’m asking in a technical sense. Apparently we’re all supposed to have the self-help-staple psychological confidence in ourselves, and arguably many politicians do to excess. But I mean the kind where a ministry looks at a legislature then hums a happy tune or lunges for the Help Wanted ads. And if you have the good fortune to live in a functioning parliamentary system you should take confidence more seriously than we in Canada seem to.
We’ve been looking at technical confidence, with varying degrees of anxiety and distaste, for much of the time Justin Trudeau has held office. His Liberals won a majority of House of Commons seats in 2015, which those who mistake ours for a presidential system wrongly think means he was elected prime minister for a four-year term. But in 2019 the Liberals only won a Commons plurality, as in the 2021 snap COVID election, so some say he’s been propped up ever since 2019 by our officially socialist New Democratic Party….