The shallowest man in Canada had quite the day on Monday when Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland launched her volley of Molotov cocktails on the way out the door. Years of hypocrisy, pandering, and spinelessness laid bare for all the world to see as now former minister Freeland apparently decided she had had quite enough of bilking Canadians and subjecting them to ludicrous policies for the sole purpose of political expediency. What will this poor man do now? I refer, of course, to Jagmeet Singh.
Jagmeet Singh has made a specialty of failing upwards. Since his election to the head of the NDP, he has been hailed as a new type of leader which would pull the Dippers forward and towards power. He has, however, never done anything of the sort, despite the Liberals doing their best to hand him votes.
Let’s all cast our minds back to the 2019 election when, following Justin Trudeau’s apparent over-enthusiasm for dress-up parties and makeup, we were assured that the NDP would make large gains in marginal ridings around the country. Nothing ever materialized, even in British Columbia where, at the time, the Trans Mountain pipeline was a hot button issue the NDP were salivating over. Singh’s own riding of Burnaby South covers half of the city in which the TMX pipeline terminates, yet he could do nothing to carry the message. This is, of course, partly because Singh never actually spends any time in Burnaby, but has the added feature of also being nationally embarrassing.
The story was largely the same in 2021, when Canadians returned an essentially unchanged parliament following Trudeau’s COVID-19 election. The NDP still languished a distant third, unable to convince Canada they had anything to offer. Now, with the Liberals in freefall, polls all have the NDP stagnant while Canadians, especially younger ones, flock to the Conservatives. It’s a stunning indictment of NDP appeal under Singh.
In all of this, the only time the NDP seat count changed significantly was when it went from 44 to 24 seats in 2019. Yet, fate decided that the Liberals would need NDP support to keep their government going, and so the country has been subjected to five years of Jagmeet Singh’s caterwauling.
Caterwauling, it should of course be noted, that is assiduously never, ever followed by any type of action. If a new piece of jargon is to enter the Canadian political lexicon it should be the verb “to Jagmeet Singh.” Definition: to support a political party you claim is taking advantage of Canadians every day and can’t be trusted, while simultaneously saying that something must be done and then doing absolutely nothing. (Facultative: Instagram post about a rocking chair good for new mothers. If a free chair is to be had, Singh springs into action and becomes an influencer extraordinaire).
The apogee of this shameful and fraudulent behaviour was on display Monday in a fashion that would have made Charles Ponzi blush. Jagmeet Singh stood before a room of journalists to declare that “Justin Trudeau has to go, he has to resign. And because of that, all options are on the table.”
Paul Wells attempted to explain to Singh, as patiently as he could, how a parliament works and asked if Singh would bring down the government, seeing as he had no say in who the leader of the Liberal Party was. Singh answered resolutely that “All options are the table.”
Well, knock me down with a feather, Jagmeet Singh won’t commit to anything.
Does this, perchance, in any way, resemble his refusal to support a Conservative non-confidence motion using his very own words as the text for said non-confidence motion? Why yes it does. Does it also sound like when he proudly announced that he had “ripped up the supply and confidence agreement” he had with the Liberals and then steadfastly supported them? Imagine that, it does. Scientists will one day study Singh’s musculoskeletal structure for evidence of how humans can remain upright without a backbone.
Jagmeet Singh seems to view parliament as a game or a club to drive his Maserati to, rather than the central institution in our democracy. He has, for half a decade now, preened in front the cameras while offering nothing of substance to the country or his riding. The last shred of hope Canadians can perhaps cling to is that he will be eligible for his pension in February. Maybe then we will finally be allowed to go to the polls.
National Post
Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.