Jake's View | Promises, promises as Canada’s handsome prince takes the throne
What anaemic growth? Justin Trudeau wants to fix something that ain’t broke
The photogenic son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to run a C$10 billion (HK$59.8 billion) annual budget deficit for three years to invest in infrastructure and help stimulate Canada’s anaemic economic growth.
SCMP, October 21
How the world loves the royal practice of inheritance to power through birth. You pick your prime minister because his daddy was PM.
We have it throughout Asia. South Korea’s president Park Geun-hye’s father was president. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s father was Japan’s longest-serving foreign minister, his mother the daughter of a prime minister. In the Philippines, Benigno Aquino followed his mother to the presidency. Lee Hsien-loong, the sultan of Singapore, inherited from his father and the Asian list goes on longer than I shall let this paragraph do.
It is beginning to catch on in the United States, too. One leading presidential contender is prominent because his father and brother held the job, another because her husband did.
And now we have it in Canada. I recall an occasion in which Justin Trudeau’s short-fused father mouthed an earthy Anglo-Saxon expression at an opposition party tormentor in the Canadian parliament.
