How Justin Trudeau (and Canada) Differ From Joe Biden (and the U.S.) By David Solway
Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has been much in the news of late, vying for attention with the American president. Although both have earned widespread disrespect, Biden for his costly gaffes and Trudeau for his native hypocrisy, a blunderer like Biden is obviously a far more significant figure on the world stage than a dandiprat like Trudeau. But there are disproportionate differences in their national effectiveness that favor Trudeau.
Biden is a loose cannon; Trudeau is a Black Ops sniper. Biden is doddering and obviously cognitively impaired; Trudeau is relatively young and fit and knows what he is doing. Biden’s tenure as president is increasingly shaky as the specter of the 25th Amendment hovers over his political longevity. After signing a concordat with the NDP’s conniving Jagmeet Singh to create a coalition government, Trudeau has guaranteed his ascendancy until at least 2025.
Biden’s legislative initiatives are vigorously contested by Republican states and innumerable court filings. Trudeau’s forays into totalitarian territory are regularly approved in the Commons and meet with only sporadic resistance by patriot organizations and individuals. Biden is addicted to the incontinent deployment of Executive Privilege, which cannot feasibly go on forever without serious pushback. Trudeau can with impunity invoke the Emergencies Act (aka the War Measures Act), arrest people at will, suspend professional licenses, and exert centralized control over people’s lives by freezing personal assets and bank accounts.
The U.S. has its share of corrupt and suborned judges, but Trudeau has thoroughly politicized the Canadian courts. A recent case in point—one among several including the unlawful incarceration of anti-mandate Pastor Artur Pawlowski and Trucker Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich—involves MPP Randy Hillier, a staunch and eloquent supporter of the Truckers, who was arraigned and held in custody for holding what Trudeau calls “unacceptable views.” As Hillier has written, “These charges have no merit, but represent our disturbing new reality, where political opposition to the regime will be punished with the full power of the state. I have been released on bail, and must abide by significant conditions imposed by the court. These conditions preclude me from freely expressing myself on social media, preventing me from commenting on public policy.” All of Trudeau’s detainees have been effectively bound and gagged.
Unlike the U.S., Canada has no First Amendment. Any expression of dissent against the Trudeau regime will be discouraged, suppressed, and criminalized. Biden must deal with a robust opposition, both in Congress (including some Democrats) and among the citizenry; Trudeau, like any brutal and unaccountable dictator, can do as he wishes, given a compliant parliament and a docile and uninformed electorate. Biden is in trouble; Trudeau has plain sailing. America may still be saved. Canada is lost.
The November mid-term elections and 2024 presidential contest may still go some way to healing a riven Republic. There is no conceivable repair for a broken and degraded Confederation headed, in the words of Brad Salzberg of the Cultural Action Party of Canada, “for what one may call a destiny imbued with pink fascism.” As Federalist author Michael Young writes, Trudeau’s tyranny is real, “and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government.” And as political thinker William Gairdner laments in a provocative essay, “Canada is no longer the country it was.” Neither, of course, is the U.S., but powerful figures like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, among others, may be able to put the country at least partially back on track.
As an ostensibly free Canadian citizen and a registered voter, I would assert that Justin Trudeau is not a lone actor. Rather, he is emblematic of everything that is wrong with this country at both the parliamentary and the bedrock popular level. The majority of American citizens strongly oppose the flooding of the southern border with illegals. Canadians by and large have no problem with an influx of refugees, asylum seekers, and unskilled immigrants from third-world sinkholes. Both situations are dire, but were Trudeau president of the United States, it would be far worse off than it is at present. Trudeau would be Biden with a clear head.
The only solution to our national disaster, so far as I can see and however implausible, entails the breakup of the country, with Quebec going its own way as the sovereign entity that it is and always has been, and the energy-rich provinces Alberta and Saskatchewan seceding together from a ruptured and dysfunctional Confederation. A nation that can willingly empower an undoubted autocrat like Trudeau, one who believes that Canada as the world’s first “post-national state” has “no core identity,” and who has no compunction invoking whatever tyrannical measures facilitate his agenda of demagogic authority, does not deserve to exist, nor can it, as a cohesive polity. The remaining pieces of a once-unified but no longer viable country will have to decide for themselves how to negotiate the partition.
Secession remains a theoretical option for several American states, Texas in particular, but a Republican patriot surge in 2022 and 2024 would avoid so grievous a misfortune. No such patriotic surge seems even remotely probable for Canada, a country that has betrayed its founding conservative principles and traditions.
Political critic Grant Brown writes that “Canadians need to detoxify society of malignant politicians like Trudeau, along with the unreliable media voices he pays to be his mouthpieces” (personal communication). Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen; only a handful of provincial electorates may alter the nation’s trajectory—as Quebec nearly did in two referenda—should they ever awaken to the political and economic debacle that lies in wait for them.
Failing a national divorce, the Canadian ship of state will continue sailing toward its inevitable destination, epitomized by countries like Cuba and Venezuela, and with a petty and vindictive captain at the helm. Judging from the national leftist temperament, buttressed by the massive and predictable urban vote, I suspect the majority would not mind much—until, that is, it is too late to reverse course.
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