Conrad Black: Time’s up for Trudeau’s thin policy gruel

His entire policy record has been a green terror

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Published Dec 21, 2024  •  Last updated 4 hours ago  •  5 minute read

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leaves Parliament Hill after attending a cabinet meeting in Ottawa, Canada on December 20, 2024. (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Once again, a Canadian federal government has floundered to the end of its acceptable term. If Justin Trudeau manages to hang onto the leadership of the Liberal party, he will try to be the first Canadian prime minister to win four consecutive terms since Wilfrid Laurier in 1906. The two men are scarcely comparable; through his handling of the Manitoba Schools controversy and in other ways, as the first French Canadian prime minister Laurier became the personification of national unity. Justin Trudeau has twiddled his thumbs while Quebec has attempted to suppress the English language. Laurier had become the leading statesman in the British Empire while Justin Trudeau has declared Canada a genocidal power, in the same category as Nazi Germany, the Ottoman Turks massacring Armenians and Bulgarians, Pol Pot killing a quarter of the population of Cambodia, and the Rwandans who murdered over a third of their countrymen.

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Mackenzie King won five terms but lost two elections between and he led us very successfully through the Second World War. Pierre Trudeau was barely reelected and when he ran for a fourth term was defeated (briefly) by Joe Clark. Jean Chrétien, who had a reasonably competent government, when he wanted a fourth term against a severely divided opposition, became the first elected prime minister in Canadian history to be evicted by his own party. Stephen Harper, who was a capable prime minister, when he sought a fourth term, his campaign was absurdly long and was based on a ridiculous argument about women’s headgear and his rather superfluous promise not to allow the sudden entry into Canada of tens of thousands of Syrians. Justin Trudeau’s government has not been remotely as successful as any of those.

Like most politicians, but more than most, Justin Trudeau is an affable and companionable person and my unenthused critique of his government does not imply any lack of appreciation for him personally. But after nine years of government, his entire policy record has been a green terror that has constituted an economic war on the oil and gas and other resources industries, without which, Canada would not have fallen steadily down the ladder of the world’s most prosperous states per capita. Nor would we have suffered a steady loss of capital as the amount of money earned in Canada and invested elsewhere has consistently exceeded by a wide margin the amount of capital invested in this country from outside for many years. The prime minister has endlessly proclaimed his nonsensical belief that Canada’s greatest challenge is climate change. This is bunk and every Canadian with an IQ in at least double figures knows it. Next to green zealotry, his greatest policy flourish is called “reconciliation” (with the aboriginal peoples). It is a misnomer, as it really means that the country is milked by the leaders of the native victimhood industry who creep closer each year claiming that the Europeans robbed the country from Indigenous people, have practiced various forms of genocide against them, and have generally conducted themselves these 500 years in a manner almost morally indistinguishable from the partition of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. There were about 200,000 natives in Canada 500 years ago, almost all of them nomads.

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The principal additional policy initiative of these nine Trudeau years has been an absurd preoccupation with gender issues. There are only two sexes and it is up to all individuals to work out their own sexuality as they wish and with complete freedom and toleration provided they do not affront reasonable standards public decency or engage in any form of coercion, especially with minors. This is pretty thin policy gruel for nine years and it has been accompanied by acute financial incontinence and swaddled in the jargon and posturing of oppressive political correctness, affirmative action, faddish wokeness, authoritarian imposition of diversity, purported equity, and inclusiveness. It was all nauseating when it was fashionable and it is rancid now that the civilized world has finally sickened of all of it. The government of Canada is an uproarious joke in the world, a favorite butt of the sophomoric attempts at witticisms by late-night American comics, in a world that had been accustomed to thinking of Canada as a sensible if not an overly exciting place. Trudeau leads a government that is in office but not really in power.

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The government is showing the sloppiness of a regime that has been too long in place and is badly in need of a severe beating at the polls to facilitate its complete renovation and eventual return to relevance, with new ideas and new people. This is how democracy works, and it is why it works. Last week the prime minister advised the now former deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland that he wanted her to retire as finance minister but she could do something else. She presumably spent the weekend consulting with colleagues in the government and Liberal parliamentary party and released a letter declining to be demoted and accusing the chief whom she has served with apparently serene fidelity these nine years of prioritizing ”political gimmicks” over responding to the incoming U.S. president’s stated intention of imposing 25 per cent tariffs on Canada because of Canada’s alleged laxity in allowing terrorists to come to this country and transit to the United States.

The way to deal with that threat, since it is not based on allegations of unfair trading but complaints about the unrelated field of admission of undesirables to this continent, is to agree on joint norms for guarding against the admission of undesirables to this continent, including the incoming administration’s promise to close the Mexican border and deport millions of migrants who’ve entered the United States illegally. Trade matters should be discussed separately and we should make it clear that any such draconian measure as the president-elect envisions will be replied to by equivalent measures in this country, which will significantly increase the cost-of-living in the United States and a proposal that action on tariffs be deferred until the new administration and the government of Canada have a chance to go over precise trade differences in a discrete forum of trade specialists. The ”political gimmicks” were not a response to the Americans but to catastrophic polls and Freeland will not succeed in separating herself from the failed economic policies that she now renounces. The best course for the Liberal MPs would be to dispense with both of them as members of the government, elevate the person who commands most support within their party, make 90 to 180 degree changes of course in virtually every policy field, and give it their best shot in the next election, unpromising though their prospects are and deserve to be.

National Post

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