Last month, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre threw down the gauntlet in declaring “most everything in Canada is broken and Justin Trudeau carries a good deal of the blame.” He was speaking at a press conference in British Columbia, where he pointed to how drug overdoses in that province have soared in recent years. Poilievre also named inflation, higher gas prices, unaffordable housing and violence and crime as phenomena worsened by the Liberal government.

The Prime Minister has now come out swinging in response though, declaring at the Liberal holiday party the other day that Poilievre was flat-out wrong.

“Mr. Poilievre might choose to undermine our democracy by amplifying conspiracy theories. He might decide to run away from journalists when they ask him tough questions. That’s how he brands himself. That’s his choice. But, when he says that Canada is broken, where’s where we draw the line,” Trudeau said.

The main evidence he pointed to that Canada was faring well is that the federal government helped the East Coast rebuild after hurricane Fiona and how his national child care plan is bringing more women into the workforce.

It’s nice spin, to try and flip it back to become an attack on Poilievre, and it’ll no doubt serve well to rally the Liberal troops, but there’s no denying the advantage in this conversation goes to Poilievre.

It’s not like the Conservative leader is crafting some sort of argument out of thin air.  He’s just pointing out what’s going on around us. And, in so many ways, Canada does feel broken. While defenders of the status quo can point to various international rankings and stats to argue that Canada is still chugging along just fine, the question then becomes whether you believe the “experts” or your own lying eyes about the state of the nation.

If you’ve needed to renew your passport this calendar year, you’ve likely experienced the systems failure that’s been going on at these offices. While we pay plenty of senior bureaucrats to effectively manage these offices, they somehow just can’t get the basics right.

Then there’s the outrageous closure of hospitals throughout Ontario in recent months, where some locations shut their ERs on evenings and weekends because management just couldn’t figure out how to staff the shifts. 

If a hospital CEO can’t keep the hospital open because of a logistics issue, that means they can’t fulfill their most basic job obligations. Heads should have rolled as a result of that. Instead, this was deemed business as usual and perhaps even a sign of things to come.

The issue that hit home the most for many parents was the shocking shortage in children’s cold and flu medicines. This past fall, drug store shelves were bare for weeks on end and the problem still hasn’t fully resolved. 

I went out multiple times to secure medicine for my sick children, only to come home empty-handed after stopping at half a dozen stores in a single evening. I was only properly stocked when a neighbour returning from the United States brought us back a couple of bottles. It was a surreal experience, to have someone bring you a basic supply across the border like you’re on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall.

When it comes to crime, people in urban areas feel that things are unspooling. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is worse than ever; people are now randomly attacked on the Toronto subway system; violence in schools is on the rise.

Meanwhile, traffic is so nuts – at least in Toronto – that people are running red lights more than ever. The little things are adding up – which was the idea behind the “broken windows” theory in the 1980s: small acts of lawlessness become commonplace, which erodes society’s standards in general.

When it comes to the soaring price of goods and scarcity issues, that there are larger macroeconomic and supply chain issues at play doesn’t change the fact that these are problems people feel in their daily lives, all of which contributes to a sense of brokenness.

We can debate who is to blame and we can debate the appropriate solutions, but as to whether or not Canada is at a breaking point, the evidence suggests we’re in big trouble.

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