What changed? Nearly every other question at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's end-of-session news conference came out as some version of that query. It somehow reflected that creeping sense that, while Mr. Trudeau's government remains relatively popular, it is not quite what was advertised.
Those news-conference questions were about broken or bent promises. The answers were a mixed bag: Some were understandable, others unanswered, and one was total bull.
The Liberals are still doing okay in polls, but have slid gradually since the fall. In 2015, Mr. Trudeau never stopped talking as if his Liberal government would do a thousand complicated things. Now, he is accounting for things being complicated. It is his mid-term question: What has changed?
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On one big turnaround, Mr. Trudeau acquitted himself pretty well. He promised deficits of no more than $10-billion, and posted shortfalls almost three times that size; Finance Minister Bill Morneau was supposed to balance the budget by 2020. So, a reporter asked, when will he?
That is a broken promise. But Mr. Trudeau's response was essentially that his real promise in the 2015 election campaign was to put balancing the budget second to easing the economic uncertainty of the middle class by loosening the government's belt. And, he argued, the Liberals promised to add about $10-billion in spending and did – the deficit slid by another $18-billion because of a softening economy.
You can quibble a little with the figures – Mr. Trudeau's government is responsible for spending a couple of billion more – but it is not wrong for Mr. Trudeau to argue that he stuck to the same direction when the economy softened. Opinion polls suggest most Canadians accept that shift. Mr. Trudeau did not answer the real question about how long he will let deficits go on – but he did address what changed.
Yet, he could not explain what has changed in his attitude to military missions. Remember the pre-2015 Justin Trudeau, who promised to pull out of combat against Islamic State in Iraq? In opposition, he said the involvement of Canadian troops in firefights constituted participation in combat, and demanded clarity. This week, after it was reported that a Canadian sniper killed an Islamic State fighter with a record 3.5-kilometre shot, Mr. Trudeau said that is not combat but the defence of allies in an advise-and-assist mission.
Sometimes, there is too much debate about those semantics. Few Canadians really object to soldiers shooting at Islamic State fighters. But what changed?
Peacekeeping? Mr. Trudeau might as well have mumbled through his explanation of why his government has not followed through on a pledge to deploy soldiers to a UN peacekeeping mission. He talked about "various factors" such as the recently completed defence-policy review (which Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had insisted had no potential impact on a peacekeeping mission) and the "international context." Maybe that means Donald Trump, who does not care about peacekeeping. Maybe it is just coming to grips with a complex world.
Then there is electoral reform, and the broken promise to change the voting system. One might sympathize with some of his explanations: he wanted change, but not a referendum; the NDP wanted proportional representation, but he felt that would create political factionalism; the Liberals wanted a preferential ballot, but the NDP would consider only proportional representation.
Of course, it is self-serving to blame the other party for failing to compromise. But the real shock was Mr. Trudeau's claim that he had been "consistent and crystal clear from the beginning of [his] political career" that proportional representation was "bad for our country."
That is just false. As a third-party leader, Mr. Trudeau often told young people who asked about electoral reform that he favoured a preferential ballot but was keeping an open mind about proportional representation. He floated the hopeful notion he would work it out. Now, it sounds like that was a ruse. What a revelation. Electoral reform is not a central political issue for most, but that kind of answer will not help dispel the kind of little questions Mr. Trudeau is meeting at mid-term about whether he is living up to expectations.
Campbell Clark