Tom Mulcair: Recent Liberal decisions point to a whole-of-government incompetence

Global Affairs decided it would be a good idea to send a senior representative to the Russian Embassy to celebrate Russia Day last week.

They defended the decision, despite Canada’s official position that Russia has committed genocide during its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

When all hell broke loose, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly promptly apologized, but it was too late. It was such a deplorable decision that there was no possible rationalization.

Canadians, including many Liberals, have been witnessing and lamenting months of abject failure in the most basic administrative and decision-making processes in government.

It’s a whole-of-government approach to incompetence.

WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE

Everybody, all at once, has been doing everything possible to show how weak the federal government and its innumerable ministries and agencies have become in terms of simple public management.

This isn’t an accident in one place or an exception, it’s generalized. Red lights are blinking across the Privy Council Office dashboard, but no one is in charge. The PCO is the "ministry" of the Prime Minister, but actually managing things has never been Justin Trudeau’s strong suit.

We now have a two million person backlog at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, up a whopping 35 per cent in one year. Think about that for a second: two million cases.

It’s impossible to clear that backlog and it will only continue to grow unless bold decisions are made. For example, there are thousands of claimants already in Canada. Starting with those who’ve been here the longest (as long as they’ve never had a criminal record), we have to begin looking at an amnesty to help unclog the system. The endless checks and revisions have made a bad situation even worse, and Minister Fraser doesn’t have a clue how to fix it.

People are being paid $50 per hour to wait all night in line to get a number at the passport office so travellers can get their passport because, apparently, we have forgotten how to issue them. This has never happened in the history of the country. Why is it happening now?

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It’s probably just as well because the calamity at Pearson means you’re not going anywhere soon if your travel plans involve Canada’s largest airport. The mess there is also unprecedented. Wait times have shot up, flights are being cancelled and the full summer tourism season hasn’t even begun.

Listening to Minister Alghabra theorize that it must be the fault of travellers, who’ve forgotten how to take out their laptops for airport screenings, you have to ask yourself why he still has a job. Blaming the victims? Really?

Oddly enough, the same minister has just decided that he has to hire hundreds of new screeners. Gee, I thought it was the fault of travellers.

It was entirely predictable that as we came out of the pandemic, people would want to travel again. It was equally easy to foresee that many people would need passport renewals after two years of being cooped up with no place to go. It may have been obvious, but the Canadian government seems to have been caught with its pants down. Why?

The hasty decision to allow planes to be filled with the unvaccinated was not the object of any serious study, it’s the result of panic. What are the predictable consequences? Shorter lineups? That’s the hope. More COVID-19 outbreaks? In all likelihood.

The day Trudeau signed his deal with Singh, essentially getting the majority that Canadian voters had denied him, the writing was on the wall.

One of Trudeau’s first decisions after putting the NDP in lockstep was to approve a mammoth new offshore oil project. No one was going to be holding him to account.

It was a complete betrayal of Trudeau’s signature of the Paris Climate Accord, but who cares?

The United Nations had just issued its most alarming report ever and the Secretary General had begged the nations of the world not to approve any new fossil fuel projects. Trudeau couldn’t have cared less. Canada already had the worst record in the G7 since we signed the accord and he still got re-elected.

Why hold back when there’s no accountability in Ottawa? The Conservatives are in a leadership race, and otherwise occupied. The Bloc has become irrelevant and the NDP is sharing the lower bunk bed with the Liberals. Drill baby drill!

Attorney-General David Lametti won’t lift his little finger to defend the Canadian Charter of Rights, even as the equality of French and English before the courts is unilaterally removed by Quebec’s Bill 96.

His job is to defend the constitution. Instead, he’s protecting Legault’s sensitivities, at Trudeau’s request.

Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino repeatedly prevaricates about the invocation of the Emergencies Act, claiming that it had been done at the request of police. That was false. He tried to wiggle out of it by sending in an underling to give his excuses, and looked even worse.

Our whole system is supposed to be based on ministerial responsibility. You’re answerable to Parliament and the public for your decisions and your performance. Why is it that none of these ministers is ever responsible?

The answer is in the PMO. Jet-setting with the Aga Khan in flagrant violation of ethics laws? So what? Break the law again by sticking your nose in the prosecution of a major company with deep Liberal connections? Nobody’s perfect!

When he first ran and won as Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau made candid observations about his Father’s tendency to centralize the power of government in the PMO. He promised to be more open and respectful of our institutions.

As journalist Elizabeth Thompson discovered, Trudeau is actually more secretive than Stephen Harper. Trudeau’s cabinet has adopted dozens of secret orders since coming to power and refuses to even reveal the subjects covered.

The U.S. is one of the most successful and enduring democracies in the world yet, 18 months ago, a mendacious megalomaniac came close to upending its constitutional order. Thoughtful Americans have taken away one major lesson from the events of Jan. 6, 2021: Don’t take your democratic institutions for granted.

So too here in Canada. Eroding our institutions, undermining the rule of law and ignoring the bedrock principle of ministerial responsibility comes at a very heavy cost.

We might not have armed hoodlums scaling the walls of Parliament, but our democratic institutions are indeed fragile and must be cherished and defended.

When there are no checks and balances on power (and on incompetence), mediocrity rules the roost.

The Prime Minister pleads that they’re "working nonstop" to fix the myriad problems they’ve created. Canadians, who actually do work nonstop, deserve better.

Tom Mulcair was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017.