By Justin Bourne, CBC News | September 22, 2018 | 4:17:13I’ve been doing this long enough to know when a Liberal is going to make a big mistake.
In the past week, that mistake was a huge one.
The Liberals were riding high in Quebec and the province was gearing up to hold a general election.
When the polls closed on Sept. 25, the Liberals were in power for the first time in 25 years.
As the polls rolled in, the party’s leader, Justin Trudeau, was under fire from his own MPs and the public.
The Liberals lost their majority in the House of Commons in the fall election.
The party’s political future was in the balance.
The new Liberal leader, Ralph Goodale, was seen as a leader who would stand up to Stephen Harper and make the Liberals a stronger, more inclusive party.
But, for the past few months, things have been going sideways for the Liberals in the province.
The first question I asked Goodale after his first week in office was whether he had spoken to anyone who was hurt by the government’s cuts to public health and social services, the elimination of the provincial child benefit, the changes to Quebec’s child care system, and the elimination or slow-down of mandatory contributions to health plans.
He responded, “Well, there is no harm done, there are no cuts in anything.”
What that means is that, in the eyes of the Liberal Party of Canada, the government did not cut any services and was not doing anything to make things better.
It wasn’t until late October that Goodale made a surprise announcement that he would not be returning to the Liberal caucus after the fall elections.
The announcement was met with widespread backlash and anger from his party, which accused him of pandering to the far-right wing of the party.
In the wake of the backlash, the Liberal party held a news conference to address what it called the “deeply troubling” decision.
But the party was only the beginning.
Two months later, on Oct. 31, the Conservatives were elected to a majority in both the House and Senate.
In that election, the New Democrats swept into power in Quebec.
They had been riding high for the Liberal leadership.
On Oct. 29, a new Conservative government announced that it was cutting public health, social services and child care benefits by $10 billion.
This cut, dubbed “the biggest in Canadian history,” had already been approved by the Liberal government, which had been led by Trudeau.
The cuts came just weeks after the Liberals came under attack from the far right in the wake the party decided to eliminate mandatory contributions in the health care system.
It was widely seen as another attempt by the Liberals to curry favour with the far left.
“I’m not going to defend the cuts, but it was absolutely an opportunity for the government to come in and say, ‘Look, we’re cutting services, we don’t care about the people that need it.
We’re cutting benefits for the working poor,’ ” says Chris Loy, a political science professor at the University of Guelph.
“And the Liberals, they took advantage of that.”
The cuts, which have since been replaced by new measures, have left the Liberals with a deficit of $10.3 billion.
They have also raised taxes, which they had previously avoided by shifting the money into a new, revenue-neutral account, known as the Quebec Child Benefit.
The Conservatives have also introduced a tax on medical devices, which the Liberals have also avoided by moving the money to a separate account.
Loy says the Liberals’ strategy to deflect criticism was not to try to address the cuts but to deflect from the government and Trudeau.
“He’s not trying to go on a national tour.
He’s not going on a tour of the country and say we’re going to bring back the child benefits, we’ve changed the formula for the child benefit.
That’s not his message,” Loy said.
In an effort to deflect attention from the cuts and the fact that the Conservatives had taken the same approach to the child welfare and social security funds as the Liberals had, Trudeau was forced to say in the Senate on Oct, 31, that he was “not going to take credit for” the cuts to health care and social programs.
On Monday, Goodale released a statement in which he defended the cuts as a matter of principle and said they were necessary to ensure the safety of the vulnerable in Quebec, a province he has campaigned heavily on as a way to fight poverty and poverty-related issues.
“The government has made no cuts to social programs that are in place in Quebec,” he said.
“The Liberals have made clear to the people of Quebec that the Liberal platform will protect and strengthen the social safety net.”
But the cuts have not just affected Quebec.
Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia are also facing cuts.
And it seems the Conservatives are just as focused on the
