RUTHFULLY YOURS

To adapt a phrase from Matt Margolis, Justin Trudeau is the worst Prime Minister in Canadian history. Like his American counterpart Barack Obama, he is both a know-nothing and a do-nothing leader, and an unmitigated disaster to the well-being of his country. For example, Trudeau’s unconscionably late and incomplete response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the “19” tells us it has been known for quite some time — much like Obama’s delayed response to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and his determination to keep an illegal border crossing open, are only the latest of his ill-gotten political escapades.   

Indeed, like the Obama of 57 states and the Austrian language, Justin Trudeau is a full-blown ignoramus masking as an intellectual prodigy. Former National Post and Walrus editor Jonathan Kay, who acted as an “editorial assistant” for Trudeau’s memoir Common Ground, swooned over his book-lined shelves. “Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know,” Kay fawned, even if his “boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated.” Trudeau is indeed intellectually unsophisticated — not that there is anything wrong with that, but there is something wrong with pretending to know more than one does.

He likes to present himself as erudite. Anyone who refers to mankind as “peoplekind,” confuses Japan with China on more than one occasion, believes that terrorism “happen[s] because someone feels excluded,” or proudly states regarding the review of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia that “we take…the breaking of contracts very seriously in this country” cannot be considered an intellectual giant. In 2016, he attempted to demonstrate his putatively brilliant insight into quantum field theory. Instead, he revealed himself a shallow dilettante at play, as if little more than an ethereal quantum fluctuation himself, whose antics could fool only an equally ignorant media and frivolous electorate. Trudeau studied environmental geography at McGill University and engineering at the Université de Montréal, but few people know that he failed to complete degrees in either faculty.

His major accomplishments prior to being elected to the highest office in the land were instructing snowboarding, practicing yoga, and substitute teaching high school drama classes. His pre-political achievements, impressive as they are — I neglected to mention white water rafting and blackface partying — have little to do with the savvy needed to govern a G8 nation.

As for my second charge, his acolytes would protest that he is by no means a do-nothing Prime Minister. Of course, he is active in ways certain to damage the welfare of the nation, signing on to the Global Warming boondoggle and imposing, like a dutiful “Climate Barbie,” an unnecessary carbon tax on an already tax-burdened people; working against Western Canada’s economic interests by shutting down pipelines; unleashing his legal attack dogs against journalist and author Ezra Levant for publishing a book unfavorable to his regime while he had no qualms apologizing to and gifting convicted war criminal Omar Khadr with $10.5 million; entertaining a “soft spot for tyrants” like Fidel Castro and Xi Jinping, a deeply ingrained family tradition; announcing that budgets balance themselves; bribing newspapers; engaging in acts of demonstrable corruption; using taxpayer money for private vacations; wasting millions of dollars in foreign subsidies on debatable pretexts such as funding “reproductive rights” (aka abortion clinics) in Africa and Latin America; endorsing the destructive agenda of radical feminists; admitting unvetted immigrants in great numbers, primarily from dysfunctional and terror-sponsoring nations, while continuing to politicize the refugee question; hiking the national debt by billions of dollars, thus indebting future generations in perpetuity; and disgracing the country in puerile cosplay forays into the realm of farce, such as his excellent adventure in India.

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True, this is “doing” in a sense, but it is really a form of “not doing” anything of benefit to a nation whose prosperity is fast ebbing away. Trudeau seems indifferent to the dire consequences of his tenure. His adolescent mocking of the American President at a Buckingham Palace reception may have earned him the plaudits of his European confrères but put the country in a less than optimal position with our powerful neighbor. Every major economic undertaking is stymied at the highest levels. Plants are closing. People are out of work. Capital gains tax is skewed and punitive, as Herbert Grubel shows in Unlocking Canadian Capital: The case for capital gains tax reform. As Spencer Fernando asks in Lake Superior News, “Why would anyone invest in Canada now?”

It goes on. As I have written elsewhere,  “No decisive action had been taken to combat the COVID-19 epidemic until just recently, two and a half months after it was blatantly obvious we had a highly contagious new virus loose in the world. As of this writing, our borders have finally been closed to non-Canadian citizens — but with exceptions: permanent residents, diplomats, air crews, and U.S. citizens.” Not much of a closure.  The illegal blockade of the country’s transportation system mounted by indigenous bands and plutocratic leftist foundations protesting oil pipelines remained in place for weeks, interrupting domestic supply chains and leading to shortages across the board — fuel, foodstuffs, medications, pharmaceuticals and sundry imports. Trudeau did nothing until the shelves were almost empty and the crucial grain industry had lost $300 million. The barricades have only now been dismantled. The threat of Wexit — the Alberta-inspired separation movement — is not taken seriously and, indeed, is being provoked and exacerbated by a Liberal administration that believes Canada has “no core identity” and that the West is flyover country, just as the Democrats view the Midwest and its resident “deplorables.”  And as noted, his tardy and partial response to the Coronavirus has put the country in severe peril.

Thanks to Trudeau, Canada is a country going nowhere but down, fulfilling a displaced version of Obama’s dream for America. The puts and calls, so to speak, are completely out of whack in Trudeau’s administrative behavior. He sells low and buys high, placing the country at a disadvantage all across the board — in health, immigration, trade, climate, economics, foreign policy and intellectual prestige, effectively giving the country away. He wouldn’t last a day on Wall Street.

If Trudeau had a shred of decency in his nature, he would resign on the instant, as reputable judges recuse themselves in cases of potential conflict of interest. He is simply not up to the task of governing a country. I cannot see how he differs substantially from agents of ruination like Obama or Biden or Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg. If I were asked to cameo the state of affairs in Canada today, I would say, “Canada currently suffers from a triple whammy: the Coronavirus, the rail blockade whose effects are still being felt, and Justin Trudeau. God help us.

David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House Publishing, 2019, London. A CD of his original songs, Partial to Cain, appeared in 2019.