Good Riddance

On Sunday, 9 March, the Liberal Party chose a new leader.  That Mark Carney will be His Majesty’s next Prime Minister in the Dominion of Canada is no cause for celebration because he is as bad, if not worse, than his predecessor.  Mercifully, his premiership should be very short.  There is a Dominion election coming up this year.  Despite the legacy media’s treatment of the Liberal leadership campaign as if it were a Dominion election it was not.  When the next session of Parliament begins on the eve of Lady Day, it will still be the forty-fourth Parliament that sits. 

 

While some polls have been indicating a resurgence of support for the Liberals after their previous leader drove it to an all-time low those in the legacy media who have been translating this into a prediction of a Liberal victory, even a majority government, come the actual election, are being a bit premature.  Carney is in the same situation that Kim Campbell was in in 1993 and John Turner in 1984. In both of these instances a prime minister resigned and turned the leadership of his party over to someone else who briefly became prime minister before the next Dominion election in which the party suffered a major defeat.  After the first Trudeau handed over the Liberal Party to Turner in 1984, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to a historical victory, winning 211 seats, the largest majority government in Canadian history by seat count.[1]  In 1993, Mulroney stepped down from the leadership of the Conservatives who were hemorrhaging support to the Western populist Reform Party, and Kim Campbell led the party to the humiliating defeat in which it was reduced to 2 seats, and John Chretien’s Liberals won a majority government.

 

Historical precedent, therefore, does not favour a Liberal victory in the upcoming Dominion election.  Nor does the fact that Carney lacks the charisma of his predecessor while sharing all of the points that eventually made him the most hated prime minister in the history of the Dominion.  Nevertheless, I am not going to imitate the legacy media in counting chickens before they are hatched.

 

The preceding is all by way of introduction to an essay which, as you have probably gathered from the title, is about the outgoing Liberal leader, Captain Airhead, or, as he is sometimes called, Justin Trudeau.  While I am not pleased to see Carney step into the Dominion premiership I am very happy to see Captain Airhead leave it.  He has been by far the worst prime minister in the history of Canada and probably of the entire British Commonwealth. 

 

Last week, in a farewell address, Captain Airhead said “On a personal level, I made sure that every single day in this office, I put Canadians first, and I have people’s backs, and that’s why I’m here to tell you all that we got you.”  He could not say this with a straight face, although laughter would have been more appropriate than the tears that broke his composure.  Perhaps he thought the qualifying phrase “on a personal level” made what is otherwise a bald-faced lie somehow true.  For in his public actions, he did the very opposite of put Canadians first.

 

To demonstrate this I am now going to switch to the second person and address Captain Airhead directly.

 

How exactly, Captain Airhead, were you putting Canadians first, when you raised foreign aid spending to approximately $7-8 billion annually?  Since the only money the Canadian government can spend is money that it has either a) obtained by taxing Canadians, b) borrowed and which will have to be paid back with interest by taxing Canadians in the future or c) printed, thus reducing the spending power of Canadian currency per unit and indirectly taxing Canadians now and in the future, you were taxing Canadians, either in the present or in the future, to spend in other countries.  That is not putting Canadians first.  Since you made a spectacle of tying foreign aid to spreading feminism and climate change alarmism around the world it looks more like you were putting your personal agenda first.

 

Related to the previous paragraph is the fact that in these years that you were so generous with the money of other Canadians, present and future, you never once came close to balancing a budget.  Granted, you gave us advance warning that you would be like that when you infamously said “the budget will balance itself.”  Each year you ran a deficit this added to the debt burden that Canadians will have to pay in the future.   How is that putting Canadians first?

 

Then there was your immigration policy.  Over the course of the last year you gradually admitted that immigration levels were too high.  In spring of last year you said that “Whether it’s temporary foreign workers or whether it’s international students in particular, that have grown at a rate far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb.”  Later in the fall, after your immigration minister, Marc Miller, announced that the number of permanent immigrants to be admitted this year would be reduced by about 20% while the number of temporary immigrants admitted would be almost halved, you admitted that permanent immigration levels were also a problem.  In your typical, “everybody else is to blame but me” fashion, you said “Increasingly bad actors like fake colleges and big chain corporations have been exploiting our immigration system for their own interests.”  This came after years of you dismissing those of us who pointed out that immigration was too high for the country to absorb as “racists”, an accusation you continued to shamelessly fling at others despite what the blackface scandal of 2019 revealed about yourself.  That you acknowledged this at all was only because everyone else in the country had long recognized that it is insane to be bringing in record numbers of immigrants at a time we are experiencing a major housing crisis.  Bringing in large numbers of newcomers when we are having trouble housing Canadians is not putting Canadians first. The problem is not “fake colleges” or “big chain corporations” exploiting what would otherwise be good policy.  Very early in your premiership you showed your contempt for Canadians when you said that you are “jealous” of new immigrants and addressing immigrants said “this is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted, we default into this place.”

 

How was it putting Canadians first to constantly denigrate the founders and historical leaders of our country?  Over the last couple of months it has been heartwarming to see Canadians come forward to show their love of Canada in the face of insults and threats coming the megalomaniacal president of the United States.  That Canadian patriotism is alive today, however, is despite you, Captain Airhead, not because of you.  The way the memory of the foremost Father of Confederation, our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald has been treated during your premiership has been a disgrace.  You have made countless apologies for the acts of previous Canadian governments, acts of which you show little to no historical comprehension.  Since you were not the one who committed the acts for which you were apologizing and for the most part those to whom you were apologizing were not the ones who were on the receiving end of those acts, these were absolutely devoid of worth as apologies and would be so even if the historical incidents were as shameful as you think they are which in most cases they were not.

 On 18 May, 2016, for example, a little over halfway into the first year of your premiership, you apologized in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru incident.  The incident took place in 1914, before your father, let alone yourself, had even been born.  Nobody alive today or in 2016 had been on board the Japanese ship when it was turned away from Vancouver.  Furthermore, we were not in the wrong to turn them away.  The man who had chartered the cargo ship to carry 376 mostly-Sikh, Punjabis to Canada, Gundit Singh, was well aware that he was defying Canadian immigration rules.  He had bragged that he would successfully challenge the rules in court and that he would bring another 25 000 Punjabis over.  Singh was a supporter of the revolutionary nationalist Ghadarite movement as were many of those on board the Komagata Maru.  The violent actions of these during the incident more than justified the decision not to allow them to disembark.  If anyone is owed an apology in connection to this incident it Canadian Sikhs who owe Canada an apology for honouring as a martyr Mewa Singh, who in the aftermath of the incident murdered Canadian immigration inspector William C. Hopkinson and was justly executed for his capital crime.

 

Moreover you have actively embraced blood libel against Canada.  In 2021 when ground disturbances were discovered by sonar on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the media dishonestly distorted this into a claim that evidence of genocide having been committed in the Indian Residential Schools had been discovered.  This claim has since been thoroughly rebutted.  It was patently absurd even at the time. You, however, lowered the Canadian flag on Parliament Hill and kept the flag at half-mast for almost half a year.  By embracing this blood libel, you encouraged that summer’s wave of statue toppling and other “Year Zero” attacks on Canadian history.  You also encouraged the biggest wave of hate crimes Canada has ever seen as 112 church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized.  As this was going on you held conferences about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, about both of which you are known to wax eloquent in your indignant condemnation of these prejudices as un-Canadian, but were notably silent on the subject of the Christophobia that you helped stoke, directed against what is still the majority religion in Canada, until pressed to comment, at which point you gave a weak statement that the church burnings were “unacceptable and wrong” while adding that you thought the anger behind them was “fully understandable”, a qualification you have never used about bigotry against any other religion.  How exactly was this putting Canadians first?

 

Early in your premiership you cancelled the Northern Gateway pipeline and placed so many roadblocks in the way of the Energy East pipeline that the company that owned it, then called TransCanada, cancelled it themselves.  The Trans Mountain pipeline had been approved for an expansion project that would twin the pipeline but was facing protests from environmentalists and Indians, or at least from professional protesters claiming to be environmentalists and Indians.  This and the uncooperative behaviour of the BC provincial government at the time led the company that owned Trans Mountain to wash its hands of the project. You bought the pipeline from them for $4.5 billion and the TMX was finally completed last year.  Those other pipelines should have been built too.  Your Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne said in the light of the current trade war with the United States “That may mean you need pipelines that go west-east.”  In other words, precisely the pipelines you got in the way of being built.  It should not have taken threats and tariffs from an unhinged American president to realize that we need east-west pipelines.  If we had these we would not have to import oil from OPEC and would not have to sell most of our oil to the Americans at a rate far below the world market value.  If, instead of removing Sir John A. Macdonald from our currency and allowing his reputation to be besmirched you had paid attention to his example you would have realized this.  The most important infrastructure project of his premiership was the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.  It was first conceived as part of Macdonald’s National Policy in 1873 and was completed in 1885.  The purpose of the project was to build national unity, political and economic, by facilitating east-west trade, and in pushing the project through to completion Macdonald had to successfully fight several attempts by American interests to defeat the purpose of the project by having the route changed so that east-west trade could be diverted in a southern direction.  The need for east-west pipelines is basically an application of the same principle.  You were hardly putting Canadians and our country first when you let your idiotic climate ideology get in the way of building such pipelines.

 

On a related note, neither were you putting Canadians or our country first, when you, again driven by your climate ideology, basically declared war on the petroleum industry.  Did you really think that when you shot your mouth off about how “We need to phase them [the oil sands] out” that this would not reignite the feelings of resentment and alienation in Alberta that your father lit with the National Energy Program in 1980?  With much more justification for these feelings, might I add, since your father’s NEP, hopelessly flawed as it was, was a form of economic nationalism aimed at limiting foreign ownership of the Canadian energy sector, expanding the energy industry, doing what I criticized you for not doing in the previous paragraph, and basically making sure the industry works for the national interest, whereas your remarks came across as a threat to eventually – the sentence preceding the one already quoted was “We can’t shut down the oil sands tomorrow.” – shut down the petroleum industry.  Since you surrounded yourself with anti-petroleum radicals like Gerald Butts and Stephen Guilbeault Alberta had every reason to feel threatened.  Bringing back the national unity crisis of the 1970s to mid-1990s was hardly acting in the interest of Canadians and our country.  Especially now that we are faced with threats of economic warfare and Anschluss from a power mad American president who is degenerating further into a deranged lunatic and despot every day.

 

Perhaps you think you were putting Canadians first, looking out for us, and having our backs, during the absurd paranoia from 2020 to 2022 over a new strain of respiratory disease that while having a slightly higher mortality rate than the seasonal flu was far more comparable to it than to MERS or even the original SARS to which it was related and basically posed a significant danger only to those to whom the seasonal flu also poses a significant danger.  If so, let me remind you of what actually happened.  You suspended all of the fundamental freedoms identified as such in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the addition of which to our constitutional law in 1982 when your father was prime minister is one of the few events of Canadian history of which you have spoken positively.  You arbitrarily declared some people’s jobs and businesses to be essential and others to be non-essential, shut down those unfortunate enough to be declared non-essential, and ordered everybody to stay home and paid them to do so.  You forced them to wear masks designed to prevent large particles from dropping into bodies opened up during surgery and entirely ineffective at preventing the transmission of respiratory disease when you did let them out.  Then you tried to require them in order to be readmitted to society to take injections of a type never before used on human beings involving the modification of mRNA (the messenger that brings your body the instructions from your genes) and which had been rushed to production with inadequate testing.  When you introduced new requirements of this nature at a time when every other country was removing restrictions, some Canadians said enough is enough, and supported a convey of long-distance truckers who drove to Ottawa and conducted a peaceful albeit noisy protest by basically holding a long block party celebrating Canada and freedom.  Your response was to unjustifiably invoke the Emergencies Act, a piece of legislation designed for use as a means of last resort in combatting terrorism, insurrection, and the like, to crush the protest.  Through this period of over two years, you refused to listen to anyone critical of what you were doing, accused those who stated the plain facts which contradicted what your Public Health Officer was saying of spreading “misinformation” and “disinformation”, said that those who disagreed with you held “unacceptable views” and bizarrely accused them all of being “racists” and “white supremacists.”  These are not the actions of someone who puts Canadians first and has our backs.  These are the actions of a narcissist who is in love with power.  You and the American president have a lot in common.

 

How is it putting Canadians first and having our backs to limit our access to information to sources of which you approve and restrict what we can say ourselves in public, both of which you have been obsessed with doing for the duration of your premiership?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to make medically assisted suicide widely available for pretty much any reason whatsoever and to encourage Canadians to choose it as an alternative to medical treatment, social assistance, or any other help that they actually need?

 

How is it putting Canadians first to condemn provincial governments that ban the prescription of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery to minors as if they were attacking the vulnerable rather than what they are obviously actually doing which is protecting them from making irreversible decisions that they are too young to make?  Or to accuse parents who object to their children being indoctrinated with radical gender identity politics and ideology in school of hatred and bigotry?  Is this not rather putting your own ridiculous ideological agenda first and Canadians last?  

 

I think I have sufficiently made my point.

 

While I do not look forward to the premiership of the man who will be replacing you as His Majesty’s prime minister, Captain Airhead, I hope that premiership will be very short.  In the meantime, I am very pleased to see you go.  It should have happened long before now.  You will not be missed.

 

 

 

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[1] John Diefenbaker’s 1958 victory of 208 seats is still the largest in terms of percentage of the House.  There were 265 total seats in 1958, 282 in 1984, and 338 today.