Housing - They put 82 billion dollars towards building new homes. It’s a process that takes years, if not decades. Even though, housing is generally, something that should be handled at the municipal/provincial level.

They pretty much took the smouldering fire of housing unaffordability, poured gasoline on it, and then watched for two years as it burned. I’ll credit that the provinces largely did fuck-all to help, but this is the same government that increased immigration when we have nowhere to house people, and is still steadfastly refusing to do anything with the tax code to disincentive property hoarding and investment/speculation because they’re still terrified of offending the rich.

I also love the idea of looking into the war time housing measures to mass produce houses

Liberals love “looking into things”. Not actually doing anything, but boy does “looking into” sounds enough like “doing something” that it might fool some people. I’m sure they’ll be done “looking at it” just in time for the next election, too.

Are they “looking into” telling the CMHC to directly build public housing? How about nationalizing a developer like how they bought a pipeline to nowhere for Alberta? That 30 billion spent on TMX would sure come in handy right about now, and boy howdy did they jump on TMX real fast, at least compared to housing.

Groceries - Inflation and a war in the bread basket of Europe have caused an issue everywhere. I’m not entirely sure I want the government mandating prices… Have we seen a plausible alternative from any of the other parties?

They could raise corporate taxes. I mean, we used to do that to control profiteering and force businesses to reinvest, instead of hoarding cash.

National $10 a day daycare. That is an absolute game changer, especially for our lowest earners and young families. (Talk to any parent about how crazy expensive day care is. For a parent on minimum wage it makes almost no sense to work.)

Left to the provinces to screw up, subject to the same crippling under-staffing that’s currently killing healthcare. Wait lists are still monstrous, and staff are still overworked and underpaid.

Dental care for low income folks. Teeth are super important and I’ve had low earning friends have serious trouble because they couldn’t afford check ups which caused real problems down the road.

Again, I’ll believe it when I see it. Right now, it’s going to be open to people over 85 and phased in slowly, and even then I suspect the provinces will find ways to nickle-and-dime it into uselessness, as they’ve managed to do with healthcare in general.

And of course, I would say that rolling out the covid relief plan in a coherent targeted way was nothing short of impressive. Compare that to our southern neighbours who gave less money and poorly targeted, a colossal waste of money.

I’ll give you this one, they did this pretty well. What they didn’t do well was getting early control of inflation once the economy started to recover. Housing was probably the worst-run aspect of this, and we recognize that governments move slowly, and that the Canadian government is hardly the only one at fault, but it doesn’t excuse the government from steadfastly refusing to take corrective action on the housing portfolio eight years ago.

Do I think the CPC would have done better? Heck, no–they’d have made larger versions of the same mistakes and added a soupcon of social conservatism–but “better than the CPC” does indeed seem to be the Liberal modus operandi.

No one’s being naive, but we’re also seeing that “sunny ways” really meant eight more years of the same neoliberal bullshit that’s been degrading western nations since at least 1992.