Martin C. Barry

Laval-Les Îles Conservative candidate Tom Pentefountas unleashed a blistering attack on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the incumbent Liberals during a campaign launch in Chomedey last Wednesday night.

This is Pentefountas’ first foray into federal politics. He previously made two attempts to win a seat in the Quebec National Assembly, running for the defunct Action démocratique du Québec.

Former CRTC vice-chair

From 2011 to 2015, he was vice-chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, having been appointed by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Addressing the guests in fluent English and French, Pentefountas said that while campaigning door-to-door, an issue that kept being raised by those he met was immigration.

“Somebody who’s been here for many years was telling me their father worked for 50 years, he is retired, but there are people arriving by taxi with suitcases at Roxham who make more money than their father and their mother,” he said, referring to the Canada/U.S. border crossing where refugees have been streaming into Quebec.

Shots at Justin Trudeau

Explaining his party’s views on the current refugee system, Pentefountas said a Conservative government would place more emphasis on regular immigration applicants, such as families seeking reunification, who’ve followed the rules. At the same time, he took a jab at the current leader of the Liberal government.

“True asylum seekers that are leaving areas of war and destruction and bloodshed that truly need our help are being delayed because of Justin Trudeau sending out a tweet to maintain his status as an international rock star,” he said. “Well, we’re paying for that rock star image he wants to protect. And we’re tired of doing that.”

Pentefountas said the second issue he’s hearing most often about is the Trudeau government’s decriminalization of marijuana.

Attacks legalized marijuana

“It’s unbelievable – the only institution that can lose money selling drugs is the Canadian government,” he said, referring to the Liberal government’s efforts in the last four years to decriminalize and regularize the sale of pot.

“People can’t get over the fact that consuming of marijuana is being encouraged,” he said. “A psychotropic substance. This is not alcohol. This is serious business that will have unbelievable damaging effects on young people. The science is clear: in developing minds, those who are under 25 or 30, the damage caused long-term short and medium is overwhelming. We have no idea what the medical bills will be for our young people going forward.”

Pentefountas suggested the Liberal government’s marijuana decriminalization efforts have been a failure since the non-regulated marijuana sector is flourishing. “There isn’t one pusher that’s out of business,” he said.

Pushers prospering, he said

“You want to know why? His product is exceptional, his prices are better than the government’s because they’re not unionized workers, and his service is overwhelming. He’ll bring it to your house if you want. So no one is leaving their pusher to start buying pot from the government. The only people buying pot from the government are people who didn’t try it, didn’t want to try it or were worried about going to the local pusher to buy it. Ergo we have an increase in the consumption of pot in this country.”

Pentefountas said one of several reasons Justin Trudeau decided to decriminalize marijuana “was to get the youth vote. And he was successful. He got the youth vote. More young people voted in the last election than at any other time in the history of Canada.”

‘Apologizer in chief’ Trudeau

Referring to Justin Trudeau as “the apologizer in chief,” Pentefountas said, “This guy will cry and apologize for everything and anything except things of his doing. It’s time that we had honesty and integrity in government.”

Pentefountas predicted that if re-elected, the Trudeau Liberal government will end up making drastic budget cuts to compensate for the spending spree it went on since 2015. “When you create these massive debts for no reason, two things have to happen thereafter,” he said.

“One, we increase taxes. Or two, we decrease services, Or even worse, both: decrease services and increase taxes. And that’s what’s coming under Justin Trudeau in a second mandate.”

For his part, Vince Guzzo waded into the fray, criticizing the Liberal Prime Minister for his stance on Quebec’s legislation that imposed a partial ban on religious symbols – Bill 21.

“Let’s be honest: Bill 21 is a provincial jurisdiction,” he said. “All of a sudden we have a Prime Minister who’s telling us ‘I don’t want to get too many Quebecers against me, so I’m not really going to tell you that I’m going to contest it.’

“But while contesting that law would be an attack to Quebec’s sovereignty over dictating its own law, you know what it really is? It is what he’s done for the last four years: it is wasting our tax dollars.”

Senator Housakos called Justin Trudeau “the master of the photo-op” while adding that “it’s time to get to work and that’s the bottom line. It’s time to stop with the selfies, the handshakes and the parades. Unfortunately for Justin Trudeau he’s running out of time on October 21.”

CBC- A new book arriving on the eve of the federal election campaign is offering policy geeks a comprehensive take on whether Justin Trudeau lived up to his 2015 vows.

At the heart of the 237-page publication — the product of work from two dozen Canadian academics — is an analysis of 353 Liberal pre-election promises and an evaluation of how many have actually been fulfilled since Trudeau’s team took office.

In short, the experts found that by March of this year Trudeau’s government had entirely followed through on about 50 per cent of its pledges, partially delivered on about 40 per cent and had broken roughly 10 per cent.

The authors say the book — which also features a deep plunge into the weeds of about a dozen key policy areas — will not only interest wonks, like scholars and journalists, but can serve as a primer for all voters ahead of October’s election.

“In an era of ‘fake news,’ negative advertising campaigns and conventional and social media overload, voters face a daunting challenge in providing a neutral and objective assessment of the past four years under the Liberal government,” they write in the book, published by les Presses de l’Universite Laval.

“This book provides them with tools based on real facts to enlighten their evaluation of Justin Trudeau’s government’s record.”

The English edition, titled “Assessing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Government,” is scheduled for release Monday. The authors say their mission was to create a non-partisan, transparent source of information about pledge fulfilment.

For those looking to keep score, the book also provides a historical dimension. Researchers have retroactively examined pledge fulfilment by federal governments dating back to Brian Mulroney’s first majority mandate in 1984.

The Trudeau government’s result is based on a platform-monitoring tool called the “Polimetre,” which is managed by Universite Laval’s Centre for Public Policy Analysis.

The gauge’s latest reading — updated since March — shows the Liberals have entirely fulfilled 53.5 per cent of their 2015 vows, partially lived up to 38.5 per cent and broken eight per cent.

The researchers also created a Polimetre for Stephen Harper’s last majority government that stretched from 2011 to 2015. The Harper government, they found, completely met 77 per cent of its election pledges, delivered in part on seven per cent and broke 16 per cent of their promises.

The Harper Polimetre was the group’s first at the federal level — and the Trudeau version was the first to be made into a book.

There are two ways to draw a conclusion on Trudeau and Harper’s promise-keeping records, said book co-editor Francois Petry, a political science professor from Universite Laval.

One is to combine pledges fully met with those partially kept — which gives Trudeau a score of 92 per cent and 85 per cent for the final four years of Harper’s run. Or, Petry said, one can simply compare vows fully realized — Trudeau gets 53.5 per cent and Harper 77 per cent.

However, not all pledges are created equally, he noted.

Trudeau entered the 2015 campaign having made a lot of “transformative” promises, he said, in part because the Liberals wrote their more ambitious pledges while they were a third-place party.

In contrast, Harper made a lot of “transactional” promises, which Petry described as those targeted at sub-populations like parents, for instance.

The writers also stress that efforts by all governments to deliver on promises often converge with conditions outside their control. Circumstances could include the fulfilment-hampering effects of an economic downturn or a boost from strong growth, which the Liberals have seen in recent years.

In the end, however, the researchers found the Trudeau and the last Harper government had the highest rates of follow-through on their campaign promises of any Canadian government over the last 35 years.

Overall, governments in Canada have good records when it comes to keeping promises, Petry said. Polls, on the other hand, have long shown that most Canadians think politicians are liars, even though voters have generally done a poor job keeping tabs on party pledges.

“There is a sort of negative bias in the Canadian population,” said Petry, who co-edited the book with Centre for Public Policy Analysis executive director Lisa Birch.

“We are trying, therefore, to sort of change the view of the public on this particular topic.”

The book also explores the effectiveness of Liberal policies and decisions over the last four years in a range of areas — from the party’s vows to support the middle class, address climate change and deliver on electoral reform.

For example, the research notes how the Trudeau government abandoned its 2015 campaign vow to run annual deficits of no more than $10 billion and to balance the books by 2019.

It also noted how the Liberals broke their promises to introduce legislation on electoral reform within 18 months of forming government and to end the first-past-the-post voting system.

Asked about potential criticism of the research, Petry said the authors make no claims their method is foolproof, nor do they argue the results are as airtight as a controlled lab experiment.

He said the Polimetre has been applied to recent provincial governments in Quebec. The group, Petry added, is considering a project that will scrutinize the pledges of Ontario’s Doug Ford government.