FALK: Frustration with Trudeau rises to new levels

Disclosure: Ted Falk is a Canadian politician, who currently represents the electoral district of Provencher in the House of Commons of Canada, for the Conservative Party.

2018 marked another year of Liberal failures both here at home and abroad.

The year started off with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau embarking on a cross Canada town hall tour where he told a seriously wounded veteran that he and his fellow veterans were asking for too much in the way of compensation. This after he gave convicted a terrorist and murderer Omar Khadr $10.5 million.

As the year went on, many serious missteps followed.

Who could forget his disastrous trip to India, the discriminatory Canada Summer Jobs attestation, the $4.5 billion taxpayer dollars used to buy a pipeline or the new free trade deal with the United States and Mexico which is actually worse for Canada than NAFTA was?

Late in the year, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals signed Canada onto the UN Migration Compact, which could have serious implications for Canada’s sovereignty and future immigration policy. And to top of the year,  Justin Trudeau maligned male construction workers across Canada when he stated, “You might say, “What does a gender lens have to do with building this new highway or this new pipeline?”

Well, there are impacts when you bring construction workers into a rural area — there are social impacts because they are mostly male construction workers. How are you adjusting or adapting to those [impacts]?

It was a seriously bad year for our very un-serious Prime Minister, but the ramifications from his dreadful decisions made it an even worse year for Canadians. And they have taken notice.

It takes a lot to get Canadians riled up - and regular Canadians aren’t specifically known for taking to the streets to protest in great numbers. But that’s exactly what’s happening as we enter 2019.

Large protests have sprung up in several Canadian cities, including Winnipeg, Calgary, Toronto, Halifax, Edmonton and Saskatoon. The protesters are angry with the Liberal Carbon Tax, illegal migration, and Justin Trudeau’s handling of our resource sector.

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer attended one of these events in December and criticized the federal government’s $1.6 billion aid package to the energy sector saying that that oil and gas workers don’t need handouts, they need a new pipeline. He correctly stated, “Give a province $1.6 billion you might feed them for a couple of weeks, but let them build a pipeline to get our energy to market and you can feed them for a generation.”

And now, we see that these public gatherings have spawned a new form of protest where massive truck convoys have sprung up in places such as Grande Prairie, Edmonton, Medicine Hat, and Brandon.

The largest one so far, in Nisku Alberta, attracted more than 1400 trucks.

Organizers were so caught off guard by the turnout that they were concerned their 22 km planned route could actually be too short to hold all the trucks.

And now, as we approach February, we are hearing of other even larger truck convoys that will travel from Western Canada to the steps of Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

There, they will be met in Ottawa by convoys from the Maritimes as well – making the ensuing demonstration an event that will likely not soon be forgotten.

Rarely have we seen such an organic uprising among regular working-class Canadians. However, Justin Trudeau has somehow managed to galvanize these frustrated Canadians together in opposition to his reckless policies.

In fact, not only has he galvanized those on the right and center, he has left many on the left of the political spectrum completely disillusioned as well.

Should this level of frustration continue unabated, this election year promises to be one to remember - and one that Justin Trudeau will likely want to forget.