It's said a promise made is a debt unpaid.
And prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau made an awful lot of promises on the long and winding road to a majority government.
Enter a new website — TrudeauMetre.ca — to help Canadians keep track of every last one of them.
The website, launched Wednesday, is the brainchild of Calgary-based developer Dom Bernard. It features 167 different pledges made by Trudeau's Liberals during the marathon campaign, mostly taken directly from their platform.
Each promise is categorized by themes, including culture, economy, environment, government, immigration, indigenous peoples, and security.
They run the gauntlet from Trudeau's pledge to invest $150 million in new annual funding for the CBC/Radio Canada to legalizing marijuana to amending the Access to Information Act to make government more transparent.
Every vow but one is currently listed as "not yet started," since Grits don't form government until Nov. 4. Trudeau's commitment to end Canada's airstrikes against ISIS was tagged as "in progress" after he said he informed U.S. President Barack Obama of his plans.
The site — billed as a "non-partisan collaborative citizen initiative" — isn't really about the Liberals, Bernard said in an interview with The Huffington Post Canada. He would have done much the same if the New Democrats or Conservatives had won.
The goal is really about raising awareness and engagement now that the marathon campaign has ended, he explained.
"In every election campaign… so many promises are made," he said. "Often times, we've all been there before… once the election campaign is over and we have a new government, it's kind of business as usual. Things go back the way they were."
Bernard said he doesn't necessarily think it's a bad thing if some vows end up being abandoned in the long run.
"Things change with the times and if some promises cannot be kept, that's fair game," he said. "But I feel it's important for us as citizens to be able to hold politicians accountable for what they said. And also just to know how they want to shape the country."
To help him out, Bernard is hoping to recruit some "promise keepers" — basically, site moderators who highlight news articles or government documents that show the progress (or lack thereof) made by the new government.
"I feel it's nice for people to have a place where we can come together, we can look at where the country is headed or where we are supposed to be heading now with a new government, and just have our say," he said.
Bernard says he's most interested to see how Trudeau moves on his promise of electoral reform, something that could change the political landscape.
"We've had the Westminster-style system for more than a century," he said. "Justin Trudeau specifically said he wanted to look at alternative options."
In fact, back in June, Trudeau said the 2015 federal election would be the last conducted under the first-past-the-post electoral system — the very system that rewarded him with a 184-seat majority despite 39.5 per cent of the popular vote.
Talk about a debt unpaid.
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