Now wait and see how this government will perform.
I agree that we should closely monitor how the new Canadian government performs. In this regard, here is the list of the promises made by the Liberals during the election campaign. Let's see how they do:
1. To end Canada's participation in bombing raids on Iraq and Syria.
2. To sign the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which covers conventional weaponry.
3. To bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of this year.
4. To reinstitute family reunification in immigration.
5. To name an equal number of women and men to the cabinet.
6. To immediately launch a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada.
7. To restore home delivery of mail.
8. To legalize and regulate access to marijuana.
9. To restore healthcare for refugees
10. To restore funding for CBC/Radio-Canada.
11. To restore the compulsory long form census.
12. To repeal the problematic elements of Bill C-51.
13. To repeal Bill C-36.
14. To scrap Harper's plan to increase the eligibility age for Old Age Security to 67 by 2023 from the current 65.
15. To create a special, all-party parliamentary committee to study alternatives to the current first-past-the-post electoral system, and, within 18 months, introduce legislation to replace first-past-the-post, based on the committee's recommendations
16. To repeal the anti-democratic elements in Stephen Harper's Fair Elections Act.
17. To restore the voter identification card as an acceptable form of identification.
18. To give Elections Canada the resources it needs to investigate voter fraud and vote suppression.
19. To encourage more Canadians to vote, by removing restrictions on the ways in which the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada can communicate with voters.
20. To restore the independence of the Commissioner of Canada Elections, so that they are accountable to Parliament and not the government of the day.
21. To change the rules to allow people to dip into their RRSPs more than once to buy a home.
22. To reduce EI premiums to $1.65 per $100 earned from $1.88. That's less than the $1.49 rate that the Tories committed to in the 2015 budget, but the Liberals say the extra money would be reinvested, with $500 million going to the provinces for skills training.
23. To reduce wait times for a first EI payment to one week from two at a cost of $710 million.
24. To kill a planned toll system on a rebuilt Champlain Bridge in Montreal.
25. To help fund a Montreal rapid transit expansion, as well as a light-rail project on the Champlain Bridge linking Montreal to the suburban South Shore.
26. To bring in a merit-based appointment process for the Senate.
27. To get the Canada Revenue Agency to pro-actively inform Canadians who have failed to apply for benefits of their right to do so.
28. To end the Harper government's politically motivated harassment of charities.
29. To extend the federal access to information law to the Prime Minister’s and cabinet ministers' offices.
30. To institute parliamentary oversight, involving all parties in the House, of Canada's security agencies.
31. To appoint a commissioner to assure that all government advertising is non-partisan.
32. To end the odious and anti-parliamentary practice of stuffing disparate pieces of legislation into massive omnibus bills.
33. To have all Parliamentary committee chairs elected by the full House, by secret ballot. Currently committee chairs are purely partisan appointments of the Prime Minister.
34. To end Stephen Harper’s war on science
35. To make a major investment in on-reserve First Nations education, without imposing Harper's humiliating and draconian conditions on First Nations communities, all in the context of a renewed nation-to-nation relationship with Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis people.
36. To find a consensus with the provinces to achieve real progress on greenhouse gas reductions.
37. To enact all the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations.
38. To ban oil tanker traffic off the British Columbia coast, which would effectively kill the Northern Gateway pipeline project.
39. To protect the Great Lakes.
40. To fund the federal portion of the construction of 'Freedom Road' for the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation
41. To ensure that foreign workers have a realistic prospect of citizenship
42. To re-open the Kitsilano Coast Guard base.
43. To repeal the anti-union legislation C-377 and C-525.
44. To increase Canada Student Grants by 50 per cent to $3,000 a year. Allow students to wait until they're earning at least $25,000 a year before requiring them to start repaying student loans.
45. To impose new restrictions on marketing unhealthy food and drinks to children.
46. To spend $3 billion over four years on home care
47. To improve access to and reduce the cost of prescription medications through bulk purchasing.
48. To establish a pan-Canadian Expert Advisory Council on Mental Health.
49. To put up $200 million a year for three years to help research facilities, small business incubators and exporters
50. To invest $100 million a year for an industrial research assistance program.
51. To provide $380 million in additional funding for the arts.
52. To scrap the purchase of the F-35 fighter jet and instead buy cheaper planes to replace the aging CF-18s and use the savings to pay for offshore Arctic patrol vessels for the navy being built in Halifax.
53. To provide $1.5 billion for public transit in Calgary as well as unspecified financing for flood control measures in the city.
54. To give $500 million to the provinces for skilled trades training, and devote $200 million for federal training programs.
55. To set aside $50 million to help aboriginal people improve their skills and job prospects.
56. To spend about $1.5 billion over four years on a youth job strategy to help 125,000 young people find a job.
57. To reinstate $40 million cut from the ocean science and monitoring program at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Increase protected marine and coastal areas to five per cent from 1.3 per cent by 2017, and to 10 per cent by 2020.
58. To increase federal infrastructure investment to almost $125 billion, from the current $65 billion, over the next decade. Provide new, dedicated funding to provinces, territories and municipalities for public transit, social infrastructure and green infrastructure.
59. To provide a refundable tax benefit of up to $150 for teachers who spend their own money on school supplies.
60. To spend $300 million a year to reform veterans' benefits and delivery of services to vets.
61. To make employment insurance compassionate care benefits available to anyone caring for a seriously ill family member and make the program more flexible by allowing the six-month benefit to be claimed in blocks of time over a year-long period.
62. To change labour laws to ensure that employees in federally regulated industries have the right to ask their bosses for flexible work hours.
63. To invest $200 million a year to develop clean technologies in forestry, fisheries, mining, energy and farming. Put another $100 million into organizations that promote clean technology
64. To lower the federal income tax rate to 20.5 per cent on incomes between $44,700 and $89,401, paying for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest one per cent.
65. To bring in a new, tax-free child benefit to replace the Conservative universal child benefit.
66. To add $515 million a year to funding for First Nations education, rising through the mandate to a total of $2.6 billion. Add another $500 million over three years for education infrastructure and $50 million more a year for a program that helps aboriginals in post-secondary education.
P.S. Please feel free to update the list if there are any promises that I missed.
