2024-10-08 Sen Plett speaks on PM Trudeau Legacy of Failure (Episode #4)

I spoke about PM Trudeau's legacy: a tenure marked by a complete loss of command due to ideology without deviation or constraint.
Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, I would like to continue with the response to the Speech from the Throne. I’m sure there are many of you who now wish we still had the two-hour supper break we used to instead of only one hour. Nevertheless, I want to speak a little bit. As I said the last time, I’m not doing it for the benefit of the people in the Senate; I am doing it for the benefit of the 750,000 people who viewed one of my recent speeches in which I talked about the failures of this government. I am doing this on behalf of the thousands who have asked me to continue with this. I am making this speech on behalf of my chiropractor, who, just this week on Monday, asked me, “When are you speaking again? I look forward to hearing from you.”
Today, I want to speak about the failed experiments of the “woke sorcerer’s apprentice.”
As I said, I’m rising to continue my response to the Speech from the Throne, focusing on Justin Trudeau’s legacy.
As many of my honourable colleagues know, or maybe don’t, a German poem from 1797 written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Der Zauberlehrling” - in English, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” - told the tale of an old sorcerer departing his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform.
Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic in which he is not fully trained. The floor is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the magic required to do so. The apprentice then splits the broom in two with an axe, but each of the two pieces becomes a broom of its own, taking up pails and continuing to fetch water, now at twice the speed. With this increased pace, the entire room quickly begins to flood.
When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell. The poem concludes with the old sorcerer stating that only a master should invoke powerful spirits.
In the poem, the sorcerer’s apprentice uses magic to lighten his workload, but because his knowledge and understanding are limited, his spell creates more problems than it solves. The poem illustrates the dangers of power over wisdom and the risk of human creations getting out of control. Likewise, I argue that Justin Trudeau, with all of the power and none of the required wisdom, has rolled out an ideology without deviation or constraint, making its pillars the law of the land, and has entirely lost control of his own creation.
Our Prime Minister has touted Canada as one of the world’s most progressive nations, leading the way on a variety of social issues. Yet, in reality, without the possession of foresight or the ability to demonstrate flexibility or nuance, he has lost control of the monster he has created with respect to almost every major policy file.
Allow me to highlight a few of the key policy areas in which our “apprentice” has hastily opened the floodgates, resulting in a complete loss of command for the government, often beyond recall. I’ll start at the beginning, with a promise Trudeau made before even becoming Prime Minister: that 2015 would be the last election under the first-past-the-post system. This was a pledge he made more than 2,000 times on the campaign trail. He committed to engage in consultations and to strike up a representative committee to determine the best path forward.
(2020)
Quickly, however, it became very clear that the special committee, the town halls and the nationwide consultations were nothing more than excessively costly smoke and mirrors. He knew that a referendum would not deliver the results he was looking for, so he opted for a cloaked rubber stamp instead.
Immediately after taking office, the Trudeau government promised that regardless of how the consultations unfolded, they would be ending the voting system that had been in use in Canada since the beginning of our democracy. Additionally, the government’s “all-party committee” on electoral reform was unsurprisingly stacked with Liberals. Furthermore, the Green Party and Bloc Québécois were not even given voting rights. Then the committee was given an implausibly short deadline of six months to produce a report with recommendations. For Trudeau, everything was falling into place, and his dream of changing the electoral system to ensure Liberal governments forever was quickly becoming a reality.
The problem for the Prime Minister was that, while he was publicly stating that the government was wide open to reform options, he had - in reality - one specific electoral system in mind and was not open to any alternative.