Since Liberal posters did not like my pointing out the Liberal's failures on a number of issues in Middle's thread on NDP problems I thought it was only fair to start a thread on Liberal problems because of their failure to deal with issues over their time in office. They obviously have problems because they have lost the lead in the polls and polls continue to mostly show them losing votes. I'll start it off with what I posted in the other thread. Liberals how is your party going to deal with this issues? Notice the question is about issues, not polls. There are other issues the Liberals need to face and in time there will be more comments in that regard, but this will get it started.
The Liberals have already spent $4.5 billion buying the pipeline, overpaying in the process according to most experts, and promoted the hell out of the purchase, especially in BC in the hopes of building support for it. They have also spent a considerable amount trying to get it approved. The purchase looks horrendous from any point of view, including the estimated construction costs rising from $7.4 to $9.3 billion (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kinder-morgan-trans-mountain-pipe...).
The Liberals are in tough on the pipeline. Even the Financial Post and Bloomberg Business News, hardly tree hugging environmentalists, admit that.
The promise of shipping more Canadian crude to fast-growing importers like China and India — and relying less on the U.S. — drew Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government into shelling out US$3.5 billion for a pipeline project that was facing abandonment. Whether that gamble will pay off is anything but certain.
With U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade wars showing no sign of abating and pipeline bottlenecks damping prices for Canadian crude, the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion may seem like a godsend for the northern nation. But lost in the debate over the government’s purchase from Kinder Morgan Inc. is the fact that very few of the 300,000 barrels of oil and refined fuels a day the existing Trans Mountain line ships from Alberta to Canada’s Pacific coast are making their way to Asia.
In the past year, only two of the 48 tankers that entered the Westridge Dock or Parkland Burnaby terminals have departed directly for Asia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. One of those vessels left for South Korea in April, and the other departed for China earlier this month. Both were carrying an estimated 550,000 barrels of crude. The result is that essentially all of Canada’s crude oil exports for the first four months of the year have gone to the U.S., according to National Energy Board statistics. Some doubt that the Trans Mountain expansion will change that trend.
The idea that Trans Mountain will help Canadian producers get better prices in Asia is “fiction,” said Jeff Rubin, an independent economist who previously served as chief economist of CIBC World Markets. “The highest prices for heavy oil are in the U.S. Gulf, and that’s because that’s where the greatest amount of heavy-oil refinery capacity is.”
https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/amid-trump-trade-w...
The Liberals are looking like terrible economic managers.
It was the Chretien-Martin Liberals who did away with a wide range of social programs, including on housing, that the Trudeau Liberals have failed to deal with.
Not only did this mean that Canada became one of the few developed nations without a national housing strategy, but it also meant that many vulnerable people would be at risk of inadequate housing and homelessness.
http://www.cwp-csp.ca/2014/01/20-years-ago-canada-had-a-housing-plan/
And the Trudeau Liberals continue following this approach. Promising to do something worked in 2015 in terms of winning the election. What we get is a lot of fine sounding words. The problem this time is their track record says they are not going to deal effectively with either the staggering social or environmental problems facing this nation.
"Ottawa has put not forth a housing strategy ... Yet the report mentions the middle class only twice. The document provides no assessment of Canada's housing system, what ... The word affordable is mentioned about 70 times, with nodefinition of affordable housing.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no...national-housing.../article37173057/
At the same time that they have spent next nothing on social housing, something even the middle class now needs, especially in Toronto and Vancouver where prices have gone through the roof, they have failed to deal with the money laundering issue that has helped drive housing prices so high. This primarily rests on their and the Cons heads since they have jurisdiction over criminal law. It is only NDP BC Justice Minister David Eby's report on the situation that has forced Trudeau to admit that something (what?) needs to be done about it.
Some $7.4 billion overall was laundered in B.C. in 2018, out of an estimated total of $47 billion in Canada, concluded the report by an expert panel led by former B.C. deputy attorney general Maureen Maloney.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/5-billion-laundered-through-b-c-real-estat...
Admitting throwing billions down the drain by now canceling Trans Mountain when there are so many other urgent problems that need attending, of which social housing and money laundering are only two, will open the Liberals up to criticism from both the left and the right.