Trudeau's acceptance speech - And Promises



Canada's Liberal leader Justin Trudeau rode a late surge to a stunning majority election victory on Monday, toppling Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives with a promise of change and returning a touch of glamor, youth and charisma to Ottawa.

Harper conceded defeat and the Conservative party announced his resignation, ending a nine-year run in power and the 56-year-old's brand of fiscal and cultural conservatism that voters appeared to sour on.

The Liberals seized a Parliamentary majority, a turn in political fortunes that smashed the record for the number of seats gained from one election to the next. The center-left Liberals had been a distant third place party before this election.

"My friends, we beat fear with hope. We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together," Trudeau, 43, told a crowd of cheering supporters in Montreal.

"This is what positive politics can do."

The photogenic son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to run a C$10 billion annual budget deficit for three years to invest in infrastructure and help stimulate Canada's anemic economic growth.

This rattled financial markets ahead of the vote and the Canadian dollar weakened on news of his victory.

Trudeau thanked his two closest friends and advisers for shaping his campaign to show "that you can appeal to the better angels of our nature. And you can win doing it."

Trudeau has said he will repair Canada's cool relations with the Obama administration, withdraw Canada from the combat mission against Islamic State militants in favor of humanitarian aid and training, and tackle climate change.   

Trudeau vaulted from third place to lead the polls in the final days of the campaign, and will now return to the Prime Minister's residence in Ottawa where he grew up as a child.

"When the time for change strikes, it's lethal," former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said in a television interview. "I ran and was successful because I wasn't Pierre Trudeau. Justin is successful because he isn't Stephen Harper."

Liberal supporters at the party's campaign headquarters broke into cheers and whistles when television projected that Trudeau would be the next prime minister.

The Conservatives become the official opposition in Parliament, with the left-leaning New Democratic Party in third.  
The NDP's fall was highlighted in Quebec, where it had the majority of its seats, while the separatist Bloc Quebecois won 10 seats, up from just two previously. BQ leader Gilles Duceppe, however, failed to win a seat.

The Liberals' win marks a swing toward a more multilateral approach in global politics by the Canadian government, which has distanced itself from the United Nations in recent years.

The former teacher took charge of the party just two years ago and guided it out of the political wilderness with a pledge of economic stimulus and stirring appeals for a return to social liberalism.

TRUDEAUMANIA AGAIN?

Born to a sitting prime minister who came to power in 1968 on a wave of popular support dubbed "Trudeaumania," Trudeau will become the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history and brings an appeal more common in movie stars than statesmen.

Pierre once jumped from a trampoline into the crowd. With boyish good looks, Justin thrusts himself into throngs and puts his hand to his heart when listening to someone.

Selfie requests are so common he happily takes the camera and snaps the photo himself, often cheek to cheek. He is the married father of three young children.

Criticized for being more style than substance, Trudeau has used attacks on his good looks and privileged upbringing to win over voters, who recalled his father's rock-star presence and an era when Canada had some sizzle on the world stage.

Pierre Trudeau, who died in 2000, was in power for 15 years - with a brief interruption - and remains one of the few Canadian leaders to be known abroad.

Single when he took power, the elder Trudeau dated movie stars and models before marrying. He had three boys while prime minister, the eldest of whom now succeeds him in the nation's top office.

Financial market players had praised the Conservative government for its steady hand in economic management, which had spared Canada the worst of the global financial malaise. Trudeau has also promised to raise taxes on high-income Canadians and reduce them for the middle class.

Political pundits have already began to speculate on the makeup of a Trudeau government while pondering what caused the downfall of Harper, 56, who has been criticized for his aloof personality but won credit for economic management in a decade of global fiscal uncertainty.

A SAMPLE OF TRUDEAU PROMISES:

1. To create a special, all-party parliamentary committee to study alternatives to the current first-past-the-post electoral system, and, within 18 months, introduce legislation to replace first-past-the-post, based on the committee's recommendations.
That is a key promise, and one that the power brokers and insiders of the Liberal party will not want the new Prime Minister to keep.
2. To get the Canada Revenue agency to "pro-actively" inform Canadians who have failed to apply for benefits of their right to do so; and, more important, to end the Harper government's politically motivated harassment of charities.
3. To restore home delivery of mail.
4. To extend the federal access to information law to the Prime Minster's and cabinet ministers' offices.
5. To institute parliamentary oversight, involving all parties in the House, of Canada's security agencies.
6. To appoint a commissioner to assure that all government advertising is non-partisan.
7. To end the odious and anti-parliamentary practice of stuffing disparate pieces of legislation into massive omnibus bills. This was a trademark of the Stephen Harper regime.
8. To have all Parliamentary committee chairs elected by the full House, by secret ballot. Currently committee chairs are purely partisan appointments of the Prime Minister.
9. To end Stephen Harper’s war on science and restore the compulsory long form census.
10. To name an equal number of women and men to the cabinet.
Those are just some of the many Liberal promises that relate to democratic reform. Justin Trudeau announced those reform commitments, and a number of others -- with much fanfare -- this past June.
Trudeau’s newly elected Liberal party has also promised:
11. To restore healthcare for refugees and reinstitute family reunification in immigration. They would allow, for instance, elderly parents to join their families in Canada as permanent residents, entitled to health care and other services. The Harper government has consigned such folks to precarious status on annually renewable visitor’s visas.
12. To make a major investment in on-reserve First Nations education, without imposing Harper's humiliating and draconian conditions on First Nations communities, all in the context of a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis people
13. To find a consensus with the provinces to achieve real progress on greenhouse gas reductions. It is notable that Trudeau has not yet set any emission reduction targets for Canada. But he has long described himself as an environmentalist, and says he is committed to seeing Canada take a leadership role in the fight against climate change. Canadians who worry about global warming might want to watch carefully how the new government performs on this file. The UN Conference of the Parties on climate change will start in barely more than a month, in Paris.
14. To restore funding for public broadcasting. The Liberal record on this -- going back to the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin days -- is not encouraging.  And one hopes the new government will recognize that federal support for public broadcasting must also include the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada and the full range of federal funding mechanisms for the production and distribution of programs and films that tell Canada’s story.
15. To end Canada's participation in bombing raids on Iraq and Syria.
And finally:
16. To bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of this year.
It is a big and ambitious agenda. And, of course, the list is far from exhaustive.
During the campaign, the Liberals released an 88-page plan to boost support for post-secondary students, clean up the environment and lower the tax burden for middle-class families. He also pledged to run three years of deficits to invest in infrastructure and bolster the economy.

WHAT TRUDEAU PLANS TO TACKLE FIRST: 

1. Tax cuts, tax hikes

Trudeau says the first bill of a Liberal government would include changes to income tax rates and tax credits for families.

The middle-class tax cut will reduce the tax rate from 22.5 per cent to 20 per cent for individuals earning between $44,700 and $89,401 a year. There was also to be a new tax bracket for people earning more than $200,000 a year; they will pay 33 per cent tax on their income.

2. New climate discussions with premiers

In an interview with CBC News's Peter Mansbridge, Trudeau said the first thing he would do for the economy is meet with the premiers to prepare for the Paris climate change conference, which runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, 2015.

3. Infrastructure money

Trudeau said he'll discuss where federal infrastructure money is going in his first meeting with the provinces. The Liberal fiscal framework says the government will spend an additional $5 billion on new infrastructure projects in its first year — split equally between public transit, green projects and "social infrastructure."

This would contribute to the first of three deficits the Liberals say they will run to stimulate the economy.

4. Call Obama

Trudeau said the first world leader he will call is U.S. President Barack Obama. 

"I look forward to speaking with President Obama," Trudeau said, "to talk about the kinds of challenges we're facing on our continent, whether it be around the environment and energy, whether it be on a border that is essential to move smoothly through for goods and services to both sides, to a relationship between friends and allies that has been tarnished over the past years."   

Aside from bilateral economic issues, Trudeau will probably have to explain that Canada is withdrawing from the American-led airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq. Trudeau said Canada will contribute humanitarian aid and military resources to training local security forces in Iraq.

5. Syrian refugees

Since January, the Liberals have promised to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2015. During the election, the party said that goal could still be reached if it won the election, and that it would cost $100 million.

The Liberals would also spend $100 million to provide humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees who are still in the region.

But they will need to get moving quickly, because they haven't provided much detail beyond the projected cost and saying they have the "political will" to get it done.

'Immediately'

The Liberal platform also includes some steps the party will take "immediately" upon forming government:

• Call an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women.
• Lift the two per cent cap on increases to First Nations education funding and establish a new financial relationship with First Nations.
• Launch a new competition to replace the CF-18 fighter jet and scrap the F-35 fighter program.
• Review defence capabilities with the aim of creating a more efficient military.
• Hire additional mental health professionals to support veterans.
• Reinstate the long-form census.
• Implement imported gun-marking legislation.
• Begin a review of environmental assessment processes.
• Double the number of immigration applications allowed for parents and grand-parents.
• Lift the visa requirement for Mexican travel to Canada.

Justin, you sure have committed yourself to an enormous agenda. Don't make promises you can't keep. It is all very well to be an idealist with visions of a wonderful future for Canada but this is the real world and sometimes it can be ugly, harsh and intractable.
Don't curb your enthusiasm but please stay in  touch with reality

Yes he is gorgeous



Hopefully, Justin will be a 'green' Prime minister in more ways than one. He seems concerned about climate change. And this subject  was sadly at the bottom of Mr Harper's priority list.