The funeral rites for Justin Trudeau’s political career could begin Monday but it is left to the Liberal party and the country to wear sackcloth and ashes, not in mourning but in penitence. We all have a lot to be sorrowful about.
The prime minister has had three weeks since Chrystia Freeland resigned as finance minister to “reflect.” If speculation is correct, he may well announce plans to resign this week, possibly as early as Monday. Or will he prorogue Parliament? And if so will it be allowed? Will there be a court challenge? Will he remain as interim leader while a replacement is found? Will the opposition parties who have vowed to bring him down ever get a chance to put forward a non-confidence motion? Does any interim leader have a mandate to continue? Do the people get a voice?
What an unmitigated mess, what a rolling disaster, what an unholy, odious, contemptible way to treat a country.
For three weeks, Trudeau has been in hiding with only the occasional smile and smirk for the cameras. For all the false bonhomie there has been something louche in the glimpses of the prime minister, one wouldn’t be surprised if he suddenly slipped on a trench coat, turned up his collar and offered to sell you the Ambassador Bridge.
Perhaps he was a mountebank all along, a flim-flam “medical man” who told us he had all the answers, all the expertise to cure all our ills. We bought the medicine but it turned out to be worse than the illness.
After nine years we are left with a country in an affordability crisis where food banks are being used in record numbers (two million people in March 2024) and scurvy, thought banished with 18th century sailors, is affecting malnourished Canadians.
The federal government’s own 2024 report of the National Advisory Council on Poverty describes how rising numbers of the poor have put almost four million Canadians in “survival mode.”
The cost of housing has risen so high that 59 per cent of Canadians are sacrificing food, clothing and other essentials to get by, according to Habitat for Humanity. Belatedly, the Liberals are promising to tackle a housing shortage but for many it’s too late, their hopes of owning a home crushed. For every five people entering the workforce today only one new home is being built (the historical average is one new home for about every two people starting a job.)
The immigration file has been an absolute disaster. Early in his mandate, Trudeau accused anyone who questioned his higher immigration levels with indulging in fearmongering, intolerance and misinformation. Now he admits the levels are too high but his plan to reduce immigration is basically hoping millions leave.
Government policy is down to the wishing stage.
A 2015 pledge to end boil-water advisories on First Nations reserves within five years was never met despite Trudeau spending $3.5 billion. As of November 2024, 31 long-term warnings were in operation and in that year new advisories were being added faster then they could be eliminated.
Addressing the advisories, Trudeau in 2015 said “it’s not right in a country like Canada. This has gone on for far too long.” But last year, federal government lawyers were arguing in court that Canada had no legal duty to provide clean drinking water, it was merely a discretionary political decision.
From it’s “not right” to it’s “not a right” is one small word but one huge betrayal.
And speaking of betrayal, the Liberal’s anti-Israel stance against its ally has provoked loathsome antisemitic street protests across the country since the horror of Oct. 7.
In a podcast interview with the New York Times this weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken could have been talking directly to Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, when he said, “I do have to question how it is we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.”
But the Liberal government’s betrayal isn’t just confined to other democratic countries, it has also behaved unfaithfully with its own citizens.
Only with “reluctance” did Commissioner Paul Rouleau come to the conclusion that the government was reasonable to use the Emergencies Act to shut down the Freedom Convoy protests. Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley had a different view. He found its use was unjustified, unreasonable and violated the Charter.
Trudeau always seemed ashamed of his country. He led the way for the intellectuals, the elites and academia to pour scorn on Canadian identity when he told the New York Times in 2015, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” We were the “first post-national state,” he said.
Patriotism seemed anathema to Trudeau who chose to use the symbols of the nation for his own ends whether it was flying the flag at half staff for six months to induce guilt over residential schools or removing Terry Fox and the Vimy Memorial from passports.
A prime minister unable to identify what it means to be Canadian is a politician who has lost touch with the people.
Of late it has become necessary to quote George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 to describe a bizarre world where Canadian lawmakers consider legislating some thoughts as hate crimes; where the cult of the leader is the party, and where how you say something is far more important than what you say.
However, Orwell’s essay The Lion and the Unicorn is more apt today: “And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness.”
The Liberal party isn’t just decaying, it’s moribund, but it has no right to drag Canada into the grave with it.
With president-elect Donald Trump breathing down our neck what is needed is a prime minister willing to do the right thing. But will he?
Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been credited with saying, “Experience is the best schoolmaster, but the school fees are heavy.”
After nine years, we are all a lot sadder and more experienced, and the price has been very, very heavy.
National Post