Trudeau deserves criticism, but some praise, too

By Letter to the Editor on March 9, 2019.

Sort of nice to see that someone other than President Donald Trump is getting into the news on a daily basis.

The main (only?) reason that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants a sweetheart deal for SNC-Lavalin is to protect jobs in Canada. Gerald Butts says the number is 7,000. I personally don’t remember believing anything that man has ever said, but whatever the actual number it is pretty significant. But, not pertinent. When the next airport, hospital, major whatever gets built, just because SNC-Lavalin loses the contract, it just means that another Canadian company will put the same number of workers on the payroll.

There are no jobs lost – just a Calgary, Vancouver or Toronto company, and not a Quebec company, that employs a few thousand workers and hopefully makes a bit of a profit.

And now onto pipeline stuff. I thought that it was a great move on Trudeau’s part to have the feds get some skin in the game when Kinder Morgan couldn’t stomach the lack of resolution on twinning the pipeline.

Wouldn’t it benefit all Canadians to have a safer and much more cost efficient method of getting the product to tidewater? Didn’t quite work out that well. Maybe because there still are naysayers out there who are struggling in a reality based world?

Finally, Invest 2018 has spread lots of praise around for the huge investment and hundreds of jobs that Aurora Cannabis is bestowing on Medicine Hat. I seem to have missed any acknowledgement that if Trudeau hadn’t pushed hard and taken a lot of flak over the legalization of pot in Canada there wouldn’t be a new business coming to The Hat.

For all the years that the Tories were running Canada they talked a good game but were missing in action on the pipeline/oilpatch stuff.

Finally, I think that we should dump on Trudeau over his political bad judgment but praise him for at least trying hard to get the Canadian economy going ahead.

Keith Pearce

Medicine Hat

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