I'll say this as a lefty.
>How did he get elected?
If you don't think Harper hadn't let everyone down by this point, you're in an echo chamber. Even if you think the free rides plenty of big businesses were getting were fine, A first world country can't be so reliable on one single resource like that without it blowing up in your face.
As for why he won over Mulcair? I personally think the general honesty about the need for a deficit was something that did push things quite a bit in his favor. I personally prefer the NDP platform, but holy shit you could never accomplish it without Keynes-ing it up.
>Is he good or bad for Canada?
Still better than the austerity emphasis of the Harper government, but his job creation plan heavily favors big businesses rather than small ones. He's acted as if he's operating from the left of the NDP at time (I'll get to that later), and with their push to the center it's not hard to do, but really it's still a very pro-corporate agenda with a little more stimulus on the side.
TPP is a shit-show, obviously, but his hesitance to say anything on the campaign trail suggests the desire for some kind of reform. Definitely not enough though.
I could not give less of a fuck about the refugee issue, and people going off about kebabs don't get that a whole bunch of them are probably going to get dumped out in Chibougamou or some fucking place where A) it's cheap to live, B) even if somebody with ill intent slipped through the stringent screening, there would be fucking nothing around them to bomb.
Harper had his head way up Israel's ass, and though I'm sure Trudeau's taken up something too moderate to do anything one way or the other, I'm fatigued from Harper's hawkish stance.
>Thoughts on Justin?
It's basically the Clinton doctrine: a nice social-justicey seasoning over a pro-corporate operation, and in all likelihood the people who voted with that as their crux won't even get what they wanted, just like when gay people got the vote out for Clinton, and got the shitty compromise of DADT in return.
/pol/acks have really only cared about him because of weed and that they consider him really PC over "2015," which really just plays into his base further, and does nothing either way. As far as the cabinet choices and the gender balances go, there's really only two feasible ways this goes on behind the scenes. A) People talk about how he already stated that he's have gender equity before he made official selection. That really only meant that selection was made ahead of time, not that there was selection made around that tenet. Cabinet ministers made to run in the most liberal-loyal ridings to ensure that they'll never lose an important member. B) If he ever actually did make a cabinet that just looked good for political purposes, effectively it would mean that their input would have been irrelevant from the start, so it wouldn't even matter how good or bad they are.
What I'm more mad about this election is that now I don't have a genuine "left" choice any-more, I'm stuck with either mini-clinton or a guy who was once offered a job for the conservatives and has been working to move his party away from nasty, scary socialism since he got the job.