Having recently posted an article in which I ask the rhetorical question “Is Joe Biden the Worst President in History,” I felt an andiron piece with regard to my own country might be appropriate. Is Justin Trudeau the worst prime minister in history? The answer is, “Well, probably.” He’s a work in accelerated progress, though it must be said that he had immense help along the way: a compliant Parliament, an appointed Senate, a complicit Judiciary, and a bought-and-paid-for media have been loyally riding shotgun. Trudeau is perhaps the most disappointing, unctuous, and injurious prime minister ever to occupy the seat of power in Canada.
Of course, there are a number of other contestants for the title. One finds a mezzanine of eccentrics, scoundrels, and dubious operators among them. To take a few examples:
Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was one of the oddest of the lot, communicating with the spirit world and holding seances to summon his dead mother. He loved dogs more than people, doting on three Irish Terriers named Pat. Silliness aside, he was an antisemite who admired Hitler and turned away a ship full of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi Germany, most of whom perished in the concentration camps. Not much to be proud of.
Nor was Jean Chrétien, who liked to style himself Le p’tit gars de Shawinigan (the Li’l guy from Shawinigan), much to celebrate. Virulently anti-American, his administration was marred by the Sponsorship Scandal (AdScam), one of the most egregious political scandals in Canadian history. To his everlasting discredit, Chrétien arranged for the release of al-Qaeda mastermind and Canadian citizen Ahmed Said Khadr from a Pakistani hospital. As CTV News reports, “Khadr was arrested in connection with the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, but was released a year later with the help of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.”
Not least among the rogue’s gallery was the current prime minister’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who enjoyed a warm relationship with communist China and, in passing the 1980 National Energy Program, severely damaged the economy of Alberta and alienated Western Canada to the present day. Under the elder Trudeau, writes Bob Plamondon in The Truth About Trudeau, “the national debt grew tenfold, unemployment soared and the country fell into stagflation.”
Trudeau created a human rights industry “that threatens some of the very rights it was meant to defend while fuelling judicial activism and putting critical national decisions in the hands of appointed judges.” During the 1970 “October Crisis,” he became the first prime minister to invoke the War Measures Act in peacetime, a decision which, according to many commentators, may not have been necessary. All told, Plamondon concludes, his tenure was a disaster for the country.
Related: FLASHBACK: Authoritarianism Is a Trudeau Family Tradition
Like father, like son, a dynastic peril. I should mention at this point that the best short article on Justin Trudeau’s unfitness for office was posted on this site by my wife Janice Fiamengo some two years back. It would be folly for me to try to outdo her writerly excellence, unflappable tact, and marksman-like precision. Here I offer an updated summing-up of why Justin Trudeau is surely unprecedented in the annals of Canada’s ideological destitution. The daily spectacle we are witnessing, the eruption of political sludge and magma from the depths of government policy, puts paid to any promotional salvage operation.
This is a prime minister who has been implicated in numerous scandals and cited for several ethics violations, all to no avail. He has imposed a needless and prohibitive carbon tax upon a groaning nation and propelled the national debt into the fiscal asteroid belt. He is soft on terrorism, having awarded a $10.5 million reparation payment to al-Qaeda terrorist, and the son of Ahmed Said Khadr, Omar Khadr, who had been imprisoned in Guantanamo for killing an American medic in Afghanistan. Trudeau also sympathized with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a Muslim immigrant from Chechnya, who killed three people and injured another 170, saying, “there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded.”
As noted, this is a prime minister who has bought the media with elaborate financial gifts, who admires the “basic dictatorship” of Communist China, and has made no secret of his fondness for Castro, waxing eloquent in his eulogy for the dead dictator, and who, like his father, has adopted an energy policy intended to phase out the western petroleum industry in the interests of a “just transition” to inefficient green renewables, and thus cripple the economic foundation of the country in perpetuity.
This is a prime minister who mandated draconian COVID-19 protocols — masks, quarantines, lockdowns, vaccines. The entire effort is now known to have been a colossal blunder whose results were ineffective at best and noxious, even lethal, at worst. Concerning the vaccines, Trudeau now claims that he did not force anyone to take them but “chose to make sure all of the incentives and all of the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated.” In other words, offer them an incentive they can’t refuse. The “incentives” amounted to interventions like losing one’s job, livelihood, social freedoms, and Charter rights. Even people who did remote work had to be vaccinated; if they were fired, they were ineligible for Employment Insurance.
Giving Trudeau’s protestations the lie, in a Sept. 16, 2021 interview aired on the French-language program “La semaine des 4 Julie,” he referred to unvaccinated Canadians as “extremists,” as people who “don’t believe in science or progress and are very often misogynistic and racist.” “A leader who expresses such detestation for his own people,” Janice writes, “and encourages frightened followers to participate in their dehumanization should not be trusted with the reins of government.” It’s hard to disagree.
We should never forget that this is a prime minister who in February 2022 invoked the dictatorial powers of the Emergencies Act — a Trudeau habit — to crush a peaceful, legitimate, and justifiable protest against the vaccine mandates by a brave and patriotic cohort of the country’s truckers and who authorized the banks to freeze protesters’ accounts, reminiscent of the Nazi 1938 Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property issued by Hitler’s government. The mind boggles.
This is a prime minister who has passed legislation curtailing the Charter freedoms of Canadians, including such Bills as C-18 (Online News Act) blocking access to online news, C-11 (Online Streaming Act) giving government control over “unacceptable views,” and the impending Online Harms Act, allowing for government-regulated expression and unlimited surveillance over Canadian online platforms — the policy of an administration we might call communo-fascist.
Former slave Frederick Douglas knew whereof he spoke when he told his audience that “Liberty is meaningless where the fight to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.” It is one of the nodes where communism and fascism meet as totalitarian siblings.
Moreover, Trudeau seems poised to sign away Canada’s independent office respecting public health to the World Health Organization (WHO) via the International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response. We recall that the WHO is directed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian Marxist who served as a minister in the despotic Ethiopian political party Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which, in the words of the Family Research Council “has been connected to human rights violations and to contributing to Ethiopia’s famine in the 1980s.”
Though Ghebreyesus is predictably lauded by the usual suspects in the mainstream media and leftwing organizations, his track record is truly despicable. He is not someone we want to be rubbing shoulders with, and the WHO should be avoided like the plague it pretends to combat. It does not have, as it were, a clean bill of health. According to the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE), the bureaucrats at the WHO pursue a hidden agenda that “would readily place control of every person’s earnings and every patient’s care into a few powerful hands.”
As Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis warns, the proposed WHO Treaty “has very serious implications for our national health sovereignty. Under this treaty, Canada would essentially be surrendering our national health sovereignty to the WHO when it comes to responding to pandemics.” In approving of such an agenda, Trudeau gives no indication that he is a man who loves his country more than he loves authoritarian power and his peers among the Davos set of globalists and oligarchs.
Ironically, Trudeau famously announced his intention to bring “sunny ways” to Canada, and in his Open Letter to Canadians, pledged “to serve all Canadians,” to build “a strong and growing middle class” and “to invest in growing our economy.” He concludes by promising to lead “an open, honest government that is accountable to Canadians, lives up to the highest ethical standards, brings our country together, and applies the utmost care and prudence in the handling of public funds.” As we’ve seen, he has violated that commitment on every count without exception.
It is clear with which constituencies his sympathies lie. During the recent wave of arson attacks on Christian religious institutions as a form of anachronistic retribution for indigenous suffering in long-closed Residential Schools, Trudeau opined that the destruction of churches was “unacceptable and wrong” but qualified his pro forma tut-tutting by avowing that it was “understandable.” He is far more forgiving when it comes to the 2SLGBTQI+ crowd, his government issuing a travel advisory for the United States including “a cautionary message for those who consider themselves two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning or intersex.” One sees that a man who wears rainbow socks to a Pride parade will park his sympathies with the deviant rather than the devout, the radical rather than the customary.
As I’ve said before, Justin is all fries and no burger. He remains a poorly educated sorcerer’s apprentice with a demagogic sensibility. In following the WEF/CCP paradigm of digital surveillance and centralized command, he is ushering the country into an ever-tightening loop of statist control from which it may never wholly emerge. A man who took a prosperous, largely peaceful, resource-rich, free market, industrial and agriculturally blessed country and within just a few years turned it into a socialist, debt-ridden, polarized, autocratically governed, inflation-racked, leftist Third-World lookalike must be recognized as a paragon of unrivaled ineptitude and destructiveness.
“It is essential for Canadians to understand that poor governance and ideological extremism,” writes Spencer Fernando for the National Citizens Coalition, “could destroy everything Canadians have built throughout the history of our country.” The prospect of another once-favored but misgoverned, corrupt, and impoverished Venezuela looms on the political horizon.
One may reasonably conclude that Justin Trudeau is earnestly in the race to become the worst prime minister in Canadian history. Indeed, he may have already crossed the finish line.
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