Don Martin: Mr. Dithers is back as government slows to a crawl on Justin Time

You can set your watch by Justin Trudeau. Just take the announced time of a prime ministerial event, media availability or photo-op and add at least 45 minutes.

Insiders shrug and call it Justin Time. After all, cramming Trudeau’s brain with all those media lines, scripted quips and perfected non-answers usually runs into overtime.

But tardiness in action, or inaction, has achieved an Omicron-level contagion inside this government, which framed the fall election as a cry for action only to hit the ground running at a sloth-in-slow-motion speed.

Be it the calling together his new caucus, appointing a cabinet, setting up cabinet committees to vet legislation and parliamentary committees to examine the proposed bill or waiting until the final week of the fall Commons sitting to reveal the state of government finances, Trudeau has elevated foot-dragging to a dark political art.

And get this: He still hasn’t given his slowly-appointed cabinet ministers their marching orders, or mandate letters, which tell them which priorities are theirs to tackle.

Politico Canada is so severely vexed by this glaring oversight that its widely-read newsletter is devoting a daily feature to the number of days ministers have been denied their job descriptions. It’s now been 44 days since cabinet boxes were filled with warm lapdog bodies waiting to be told what to do.

Now, to be fair, the public release of these mandate letters was started by the Trudeau government. Until then it was an oh-so secret document, so give credit where it’s due.

But there’s a weird juxtaposition to having the finance minister about to unveil her fiscal update with a roadmap for spending to come, which requires cabinet ministers to submit funding requests in advance, when the ministers don’t know the details of their yet-to-be-funded assignments.

I quibble perhaps, because all this is all so much inside baseball. But there’s mounting evidence that when it comes to serious action on major files this prime minister has become another Mr. Dithers, the derisive label affixed to Paul Martin’s doing-everything-and-nothing government of indecision by The Economist magazine in 2005.

Take climate change. The cleanup of historic-level flooding in B.C. is just beginning and this government’s first act is to postpone the net-zero accountability deadline for a comprehensive climate change game plan by three months. How’s that for an emergency response?

Then there’s the long-overdue release of residential school documents, the non-resolution to multiple human right tribunal rulings on compensating children for underfunded social services on First Nations, a see-no-evil approach to China and attempts to sweep the Afghanistan evacuation debacle under the rug.

A frustrated Conservative leader Erin O’Toole led off question period this week huffing and puffing at the years-long delay in deciding Huawei’s fate in Canada’s 5G telecom rollout. “On the international stage, why is this prime minister always the last to show up?” Trudeau’s answer didn’t even try to reflect what was a legitimate question.

Of course, the flip side to inaction is overreaction. This government is guilty of that too, such as the instant travel ban on flights from some African countries without Omicron cases and its kneejerk testing requirement for returning travellers before airport authorities were ready to handle the task.

Either way, it’s a strange behaviour for a third-term prime minister, whose staff should’ve figured out how to fire up the engines of government and hit the accelerator by now without months of pointless pondering and delay.

It was, after all, Trudeau who framed this mandate as vital to resolving key files such as Indigenous reconciliation, climate change, pandemic readiness and restoring Canada’s place on the world stage.

But the prime minister’s excessively controlling staff, who are apparently loath to delegate action beyond their tiny circle of love, have logjammed the entire government inside a decision-making funnel, which is clearly many sizes too small.

It’s been five months since Justin Trudeau declared the fall election to be a critical referendum on new political directions for Canada at “a pivotal moment in our history.”

But since that unconvincing win, the only discernable pivot has been to dither on Justin Time.

That’s the bottom line.