New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, who isn’t running again and was the first sitting Liberal to call for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign back in June after the party’s disastrous by-election loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s, put it best about this week’s gong show in Ottawa.
Recommended Videos
“The prime minister is living in a false reality,” he told reporters.
“He’s delusional if he thinks we can continue like this. It’s unfair to us MPs, it’s unfair to the ministers and most importantly it’s unfair to the country. We need to move on with a new direction and we need to reboot.”
Indeed, Trudeau’s non-response to his self-inflicted wound of telling his loyal lieutenant, Chrystia Freeland, on Friday on Zoom that he was dumping her as finance minster after she delivered the government’s mini-budget on Monday in favour of Mark Carney — which didn’t happen — has been simply inexplicable.
Trudeau hasn’t addressed Freeland’s scathing criticism of him in her letter of resignation, that he isn’t taking U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s threat of imposing a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods entering the U.S, after he’s inaugurated on Jan. 20 seriously, favouring instead “costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”
Indeed, it is the height of arrogance, to say nothing of tone-deafness, that Trudeau has yet to explain to Canadians what he was thinking when he set off the current dumpster fire by dumping his finance minister and deputy PM.
Trudeau’s only public comments this week were at two Liberal Christmas parties, the first for Liberal fundraisers and donors, the second for Liberal staffers on Monday and Tuesday evening, where he really did sound “delusional” and, as Long described it, “living in a false reality.”
He jokingly compared the ongoing implosion of the Liberals under his leadership to a family fight during the holiday season, where, he said, “like most families, sometimes we have fights around the holidays” and that, “like most families, we find our way through it.”
Of course, in the real world, the Liberals haven’t found their way through anything — there is, in fact, growing consternation, fear and despair among many Liberal MPs about what’s going to happen to them in the next election if Trudeau is still their leader.
In his two remarks to Liberal partisans this week, Trudeau repeatedly, loudly and theatrically professed his love for Canadians and for the Liberal party he heads, as if most Canadians haven’t been calling for him to resign for months according to numerous opinion polls and as if Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives haven’t been ahead of the Liberals by double digits for a year.
Finally Trudeau ignored the elephant in the room — Trump’s tariff threat, which could cause a recession in Canada, even though his job as prime minister is to fight for Canada on issues of international trade.
Instead, we’re told that Trudeau is going to contemplate his political future over the Christmas/New Year holiday, with Parliament resuming on Jan. 27 a week after Trump becomes president, that is if Trudeau doesn’t prorogue parliament in order to avoid a snap election that would occur if his minority government loses a confidence motion in Parliament.
But Trudeau has been contemplating his future for months while insisting he will lead the Liberals in the next election which must be called by Oct. 20, assuming Trudeau’s government is still around by then.