Skip to main content

Don Martin: Mr. Dithers is back as government slows to a crawl on Justin Time

Share

You can set your watch by Justin Trudeau. Just take the announced time of a prime ministerial event, media availability or photo-op and add at least 45 minutes.

Insiders shrug and call it Justin Time. After all, cramming Trudeau’s brain with all those media lines, scripted quips and perfected non-answers usually runs into overtime.

But tardiness in action, or inaction, has achieved an Omicron-level contagion inside this government, which framed the fall election as a cry for action only to hit the ground running at a sloth-in-slow-motion speed.

Be it the calling together his new caucus, appointing a cabinet, setting up cabinet committees to vet legislation and parliamentary committees to examine the proposed bill or waiting until the final week of the fall Commons sitting to reveal the state of government finances, Trudeau has elevated foot-dragging to a dark political art.

And get this: He still hasn’t given his slowly-appointed cabinet ministers their marching orders, or mandate letters, which tell them which priorities are theirs to tackle.

Politico Canada is so severely vexed by this glaring oversight that its widely-read newsletter is devoting a daily feature to the number of days ministers have been denied their job descriptions. It’s now been 44 days since cabinet boxes were filled with warm lapdog bodies waiting to be told what to do.

Now, to be fair, the public release of these mandate letters was started by the Trudeau government. Until then it was an oh-so secret document, so give credit where it’s due.

But there’s a weird juxtaposition to having the finance minister about to unveil her fiscal update with a roadmap for spending to come, which requires cabinet ministers to submit funding requests in advance, when the ministers don’t know the details of their yet-to-be-funded assignments.

I quibble perhaps, because all this is all so much inside baseball. But there’s mounting evidence that when it comes to serious action on major files this prime minister has become another Mr. Dithers, the derisive label affixed to Paul Martin’s doing-everything-and-nothing government of indecision by The Economist magazine in 2005.

Take climate change. The cleanup of historic-level flooding in B.C. is just beginning and this government’s first act is to postpone the net-zero accountability deadline for a comprehensive climate change game plan by three months. How’s that for an emergency response?

Then there’s the long-overdue release of residential school documents, the non-resolution to multiple human right tribunal rulings on compensating children for underfunded social services on First Nations, a see-no-evil approach to China and attempts to sweep the Afghanistan evacuation debacle under the rug.

A frustrated Conservative leader Erin O’Toole led off question period this week huffing and puffing at the years-long delay in deciding Huawei’s fate in Canada’s 5G telecom rollout. “On the international stage, why is this prime minister always the last to show up?” Trudeau’s answer didn’t even try to reflect what was a legitimate question.

Of course, the flip side to inaction is overreaction. This government is guilty of that too, such as the instant travel ban on flights from some African countries without Omicron cases and its kneejerk testing requirement for returning travellers before airport authorities were ready to handle the task.

Either way, it’s a strange behaviour for a third-term prime minister, whose staff should’ve figured out how to fire up the engines of government and hit the accelerator by now without months of pointless pondering and delay.

It was, after all, Trudeau who framed this mandate as vital to resolving key files such as Indigenous reconciliation, climate change, pandemic readiness and restoring Canada’s place on the world stage.

But the prime minister’s excessively controlling staff, who are apparently loath to delegate action beyond their tiny circle of love, have logjammed the entire government inside a decision-making funnel, which is clearly many sizes too small.

It’s been five months since Justin Trudeau declared the fall election to be a critical referendum on new political directions for Canada at “a pivotal moment in our history.”

But since that unconvincing win, the only discernable pivot has been to dither on Justin Time.

That’s the bottom line.

IN DEPTH

Who is supporting, opposing new online harms bill?

Now that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's sweeping online harms legislation is before Parliament, allowing key stakeholders, major platforms, and Canadians with direct personal experience with abuse to dig in and see what's being proposed, reaction is streaming in. CTVNews.ca has rounded up reaction, and here's how Bill C-63 is going over.

Opinion

opinion

opinion Don Martin: How a beer break may have doomed the carbon tax hike

When the Liberal government chopped a planned beer excise tax hike to two per cent from 4.5 per cent and froze future increases until after the next election, says political columnist Don Martin, it almost guaranteed a similar carbon tax move in the offing.

opinion

opinion Don Martin: ArriveCan debacle may be even worse than we know from auditor's report

It's been 22 years since a former auditor general blasted the Chretien government after it 'broke just about every rule in the book' in handing out private sector contracts in the sponsorship scandal. In his column for CTVNews.ca, Don Martin says the book has been broken anew with everything that went on behind the scenes of the 'dreaded' ArriveCan app.

CTVNews.ca Top Stories

Local Spotlight

N.B. man wins $64 million from Lotto 6/49

A New Brunswicker will go to bed Thursday night much richer than he was Wednesday after collecting on a winning lottery ticket he let sit on his bedroom dresser for nearly a year.

Record-setting pop tab collection for Ontario boy

It started small with a little pop tab collection to simply raise some money for charity and help someone — but it didn’t take long for word to get out that 10-year-old Jace Weber from Mildmay, Ont. was quickly building up a large supply of aluminum pop tabs.

Stay Connected