TrudeauMetre tracks election promises

A website is promising to keep track of every single one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s election promises.

TrudeauMetre breaks down which promises the Liberal government makes good on and which it has yet to accomplish, as well as the number of days in office.

“The TrudeauMetre is a non-partisan collaborative citizen initiative that tracks his performance with regards to his electoral platform,” the website states.

The pledges are broken down into separate categories: Culture, Economy, Environment, Government, Immigration, Indigenous Peoples and Security. Each has a variety of subheadings with a list of specific promises.

Beside every one of the 184 promises is an icon to illustrate how far along each has come: not yet started, in progress, achieved and broken.

So far, in the two days Trudeau has been in office, two promises have been achieved — restoring the mandatory long-form census and including an equal number of women and men in the Cabinet. Two promises are currently in progress — reverting the plan to end Canada Post door-to-door mail delivery and ending End Operation IMPACT, which are the airstrikes against ISIS targets by Canadian CF-18s in Syria and Iraq.

The website is flooded with comments, with many people weighing in on whether certain promises will be kept as well as interjecting their own opinions on the political promises. The site’s Facebook Page has over 5.600 followers.

The website’s co-creator Dom Bernard explains on the site that he uses the thermometer analogy to gauge kept promise, because “we can complain about it, be happy about it, or joke about it — but the thermometer doesn’t care. The temperature is what it is.”

However, it goes on to say that the analogy stops there, because “the temperature cannot be changed, but what our government accomplishes actually depends on us.”

The site was inspired by Morsi Meter, an Egyptian website started by activists in 2012, after the country had chosen its first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. (He achieved 10 of his overall 64 promises, according to the tracker.)

“What struck me at the time was that no Western country that I know of had ever done something similar — simple, collaborative, unbiased, and user-friendly,” Bernard goes on to say. “Maybe it’s because we take our democracy for granted — maybe it’s because we don’t care — but whatever the reason was, I felt we were missing a great opportunity to come back to the roots of what living in a democratic society means.”