Forget inflation. Justin Trudeau’s real sins in 2023 involved elections and ethics

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If you were a devoted follower of Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre’s social media feeds, you might have the impression the only thing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did wrong in 2023 was shrink your paycheque.

Mr. Poilievre hammers away at the affordability issue day in and day out. He pins every drop of bad economic news, and every related social ill, on the Liberal Leader – from increases in the Bank of Canada rate, to higher home prices, to drops in housing starts, to high personal debt, to homelessness. You name it.

It’s an effective strategy, because the cost of living is something Canadians can instantly relate to. But a sharp focus on it distracts from Mr. Trudeau’s other failings, of which there were many in 2023. The Prime Minister had a disastrous year on major issues that – in contrast to inflation, food prices and housing costs – were entirely his to fix.

The biggest one was Mr. Trudeau’s partisan stonewalling of a public inquiry into foreign election interference. He argued for months that, because the meddling didn’t affect which party formed government after the elections in 2019 and 2021, there was no need to go beyond existing parliamentary committee examinations of the issue.

He also tried the confidentiality card: His message was that there was nothing to see here, and anyway no one could say anything about it. Then his government argued that a public inquiry would be too expensive or take too long. At one point, the Liberals shamelessly libelled the Conservatives’ demand for an inquiry as “Trump-type tactics” designed to throw Canadian elections into doubt.

Mr. Trudeau refused to acknowledge the gravity of the threat of foreign meddling, or that leaving it unchecked would harm Canadians’ trust in the electoral system. He also failed to see that the fact the foreign meddling was designed to boost the Liberals’ chances meant he had to be above reproach in his handling of the situation.

In the end, after the failure of his ill-conceived “special rapporteur” ploy, his government finally gave into calls for an inquiry – months after it should have.

The Trudeau Liberals also failed to set up a badly needed foreign-agents registry in 2023. Mr. Trudeau’s dodge on that issue was to lamely try to portray a registry of agents operating in Canada at the behest of foreign governments as a racist vestige of the Chinese head tax, when it was nothing of the sort.

On the ethics front, Mr. Trudeau had a typically bad year. The nadir occurred in February when Mario Dion, the outgoing federal ethics commissioner, pilloried the Liberal Party’s record and suggested the entire caucus be sent to his office for remedial ethics and conflict-of-interest courses.

Or maybe that wasn’t the nadir. That could have actually come when two Liberal ministers who had been caught giving lucrative government contracts to close friends and family members in the previous 12 months, Mary Ng and Ahmed Hussen, remained in cabinet after a shuffle in July.

Or maybe the low point is the fact that Mr. Trudeau still hasn’t appointed a new full-time ethics commissioner. Hard to say.

Mr. Trudeau is also on the naughty list for his government’s politically motivated decision to exempt heating oil from the carbon tax, chiefly benefiting the Atlantic provinces.

The move amounted to a concession to the opposition’s critique of carbon pricing as an affordability issue, putting the entire scheme into question. Just as bad, by favouring provinces in the East that often vote Liberal, Mr. Trudeau upset western provinces that will not receive the same benefit, thereby antagonizing existing regional divisions. Last year, we urged Mr. Trudeau to abandon his divisive ways; he clearly did not take that advice.

The irony in all this is that inflation and the housing shortage – the issues that have most damaged the Liberals’ re-election chances – are not problems that can logically be laid at their feet. Yes, they continued to increase government spending and deficits in 2023, when inflationary times called on them to show real restraint, but the idea that they alone are responsible for the affordability crisis is simplistic.

But on the sanctity of our elections, government ethics and unity, the Prime Minister is the sole author of his misery. Inflation will one day be back to normal; these other things are permanent stains on Mr. Trudeau’s record.