Tom Mulcair: Super Trudeau's pre-budget firework show is already starting to fizzle

Before Justin Trudeau entered 'costume rehab,' he used to get dressed up pretty often. From his brown- and blackface episodes during his teaching and high school years, to the traditional apparel his whole family wore on a botched trip to India in 2018, our prime minister had a hankering to wow us with his disguises.

He even had a second campaign plane during the 2019 federal election to carry cargo, and then Conservative leader Andrew Scheer didn’t miss the chance to ridicule Trudeau for needing another plane to carry all his “props and costumes.”

Over the last two weeks, Trudeau seems to have returned to one of his Halloween costume classics: Superman.

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Look up in the sky…it’s a bird, it's a plane, no, it’s…Super Justin.

Trudeau launched a one-party election campaign in the lead-up to next week’s budget. Trudeau hasn’t had to worry out opponents. He hasn’t even had to think about the Liberals’ empty coffers: he’s spending taxpayers' money.

He’s going to build tall apartment buildings that he can leap in a single bound. He’s got one program to fix your teeth and another one to buy you contraceptives. And, if that doesn’t work, he’ll provide early childhood education to the kids and serve them breakfast!

Not willing to rest even on weekends, he took care of artificial intelligence on Sunday and world peace on Monday. That’s devotion.

Politics is about seeking hope but Trudeau has broken so many key promises, it's no surprise that few Canadians are listening to, never mind  believing, Trudeau’s frenetic flurry of pre-budget announcements.

Of course the one promise he did keep was to never have a balanced budget! That’s not about to change as Chrystia Freeland is going to have to do her own reveal next Tuesday: a whopping deficit number.

So why is Trudeau doing this dance of the seven veils prior to this federal budget?

Because he has learned that you promise whatever you want to get a bump in the polls and when you don’t deliver, most people have already forgotten what you said.

Trudeau is being Trudeau. He’s virtue signaling: ‘Here’s a list of all the stuff that I’d like to do if I were Prime Minister of Canada.’ But he is prime minister. In fact he’s in his ninth year as prime minister and, of course, he’s not likely to do these things any more than he’s kept his past promises.

Remember the two billion trees he announced during the 2019 campaign? That was supposed to be done by 2030. It's become a bit of a joke and Canada’s Environment and Sustainable Development Commissioner has estimated that only a tiny fraction of that number will ever be planted.

Justin Trudeau plants a tree with sons Xavier and Hadrien, left, during a campaign event in Plainfield, Ont., Oct. 6, 2019 (Frank Gunn / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Trudeau masters the art of the campaign whopper and knows what will stay in peoples’ minds long enough to create a positive impression but won’t come back to haunt him. That may be about to change.

Trudeau has been attempting to apply those lessons in his pre-budget Wonderland. He’s promising things that he hopes identify him and the Liberals positively with more progressive voters.

If he does stick around until the next campaign, he wants it to be about all the goodies he’s promised Canadians but that the evil Polievre would want to take away.

As Trudeau’s polling numbers spiralled down, it would have surprised no one if he’d decided to take a “walk in the snow” and announced he was packing it in. Instead, he’s giving it one last and totally implausible “Hurrah”: ‘Here’s all the stuff I’ll give you if you’ll let me stick around..please!’

Early in the New Year we learned that he was hiring some new communications top guns. He’d apparently decided the problem couldn’t be him. It had to be lousy staff.

We were told to expect a new push to convince Canadians that Trudeau was still their man. If this series of announcements is what they’ve produced, they should all go take a walk in the snow.

Canadians are collectively worried. We’ve got a government that is careening out of control. It’s abjectly failed to plan on immigration, there’s a real housing crisis, our health system remains underfunded, unemployment is up, productivity is down and Trudeau won’t allow Freeland to do anything to control his spending.

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The one measurable change since senior Liberals I know started hinting to Trudeau that he should consider this his ‘legacy mandate’ (i.e., ‘please leave now’) is that no one seems to want to become the next Kim Campbell.

Sure, Chrystia Freeland, Mark Carney, Anita Anand and Francois-Philippe Champagne would likely give it a shot if he were to pack it in, but the longer Trudeau stalls, the more likely they are to simply decide to wait their turn and watch their captain go down with the Liberal ship.

The pre-budget fireworks which Trudeau had hoped would dazzle have already started to fizzle. The only thing people are likely to remember from this budget is the number: how big a deficit it’s going to leave to future generations.

They say that desperate times call for desperate measures. Trudeau has hinted that only the middle class will be spared tax hikes. When he was first elected he increased income taxes. He milked his “tax on the 1%” for all it was worth, bragging that he was making the rich pay. That may be one way he and Freeland try to reduce the big deficit all of these promises would normally create: raise taxes!

Rather than endear Trudeau to those voters who are spared, any tax increases would simply remind voters, all voters, what an extraordinarily bad manager Trudeau has been. He’s increased the size of the federal bureaucracy by 40% with nothing to show for it and now he’s increasing taxes to pay for that.

Trudeau has never paid any attention to good public administration. He’s never understood its importance. He wanted to be Prime Minister and he got his wish. In his mind, the role was all about him.

Canadians appear anxious to send him the message that it was supposed to be about them.

Tom Mulcair is a lawyer and university professor who served as environment minister of Quebec and leader of the federal NDP