Dear Editor,
The offspring of Pierre Trudeau is a sanctimonious, vacuous, and disingenuous person who inexplicably continues to receive the support of voters in portions of Canada.
He and the Liberals have always shown disregard for Western Canada and have never been fair or sound representatives of the West.
Pierre’s boy is purportedly connected to B.C. through deep roots, but this is just another faux component of his persona deployed for political purposes.
Liberal governments and their prime ministers have been sticking it to the West for decades. Pierre Trudeau gave the West the metaphorical and literal middle finger with his energy policies and his crude gesture to protesters in B.C. in 1982. He did not need the West to form large majority governments that could be founded in Ontario and Quebec.
Jean Chretien reflected his contempt for the West in a smug comment that the West should elect more Liberal MPs if it wanted better representation in his cabinet.
Fast-forward to Justin in 2010, when he stated that Canada’s problem was that Alberta had too much control of the national agenda. He further opined that Canada is better off when more Quebecers are in charge, and that they are superior prime ministers. Justin concluded that this role belongs to Quebecers.
One can see this superiority complex reflected in his management of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which is about protecting votes in Quebec and serving the Liberal’s corporate masters.
The offspring of Pierre Trudeau has been negligent in standing up for jobs in the West impacted by various issues, not the least of which jobs in the energy industry. However, Quebec is generally opposed to pipelines, so one can see the Liberal public policy machinery in action.
This succinctly encapsulates the historical and current record of the Liberal perspective towards Western Canada, and it should warn voters going into the future.
The Conservative Party is not up to par with the Liberal political war machine, which is its best attribute. Historically, the Conservatives are merely the party the country goes to in order to cleanse itself of the inherent and inevitable Liberal scandals and arrogance.
The NDP is respectable, as it puts forth well intentioned, albeit archaic, failed policies from another time.
Beyond this, the ballots reflect the fringe of the fringe, whose policies are either naïve, ignorant, unrealistic, or fiscally absurd.
Western Canadian’s fortitude helped us prosper and evolve in spite of various Liberal federal governments’ pork, patronage, and pandering to other regions, which masquerades as public policy.
From a public policy perspective, the Liberals are at a place that they have always been. Borrowing from a multi-use analogy, the Liberals believe in everything, but stand for nothing. So much for the Choose Forward campaign slogan of the Liberal Party!
Ideally, from a national perspective, voters should decisively kick the Liberals out of power and the offspring of Pierre Trudeau on to his next hobby or self-development project. He does not deserve any more stage time performing as president of Canada.
At the very least, B.C. voters need to do their part with the rest of Western Canada to ensure that we send the Liberal Party back to the electoral winter it so justly earned and deserved under Trudeau-1.
Timothy Opper, Langley Township