LILLEY: Trudeau's team still blames Indian government for disastrous 2018 trip
Brian Lilley
Published:
August 1, 2019
Updated:
August 1, 2019 7:57 PM EDT
In this handout photo, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (R), along with his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau (L), daughter Ella-Grace (2nd L) and son Xavier (2nd R) pose for a family photo as they pay their respects at the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar on Feb. 21, 2018.Amritsar District Public Relations Officer / HANDOUT/AFP/Getty Images
When I read the quote from Gerry Butts the other day, I thought it was fake. In no world would a top Liberal launch a full on attack on a foreign government while talking to a journalist.
But it was real, a fact I confirmed with National Post columnist John Ivison.
Ivison has a new book coming out next week, Trudeau: The Education of a Prime Minister, in which he details how Butts viewed the disastrous trip to India in February 2018.
You may recall the trip saw that Trudeau and his family dressed “too Indian for an Indian” as one media outlet in India described it. That was the same trip where Sophie Trudeau was photographed next to Jaspal Atwal, the man convicted of trying to assassinate a visiting India politician in British Columbia in the 80s.
Atwal was invited on the India trip by a Liberal MP, his name added to the list of people to get coveted invites to key dinners and receptions by the prime minister’s office.
And yet how did Butts assess the trip? He blamed the Indian government.
“We walked into a buzzsaw — (Narendra) Modi and his government were out to screw us and were throwing tacks under our tires to help Canadian conservatives, who did a good job of embarrassing us,” Butts told Ivison.
Now just to be clear, Butts made those comments to a journalist writing a book while he was still Principal Secretary to Trudeau. Ivison estimates the conversation happened last October.
It’s one thing for Butts to think those things, another to voice them in a way that he knows will be made public. It’s also the most tone-deaf assessment of the trip I’ve seen since Sophie Trudeau went on TV and blamed the staff for those outfits.
I mean think about that trip, the two things that got Trudeau in trouble were the invite of the terrorist to dinner and the outrageous outfits. Both of those amount to self-inflicted wounds.
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At least Butts admits the photos of Trudeau and his family were a problem.
“Nobody would remember any of that had it not been for the photographs. We should have known this better than anybody — in many ways we’d used this to get elected. The picture will overwhelm words. We did the count — we did forty-eight meetings and he was dressed in a suit for forty-five of them. But give people that picture and it’s the only one they’ll remember,” Butts told Ivison.
“That picture?” Try multiple photos, over and over again.
Trudeau wasn’t ridiculed for a single photo dressed like a Bollywood extra, he was ridiculed for overdoing it time and again.
As for inviting a terrorist to dinner, it’s tough to believe the Liberal attempt to blame this on the Indian government. Atwal was added to the guest list after Vancouver area MP Randeep Sarai sent a list of potential guests to the PMO. The PMO sent their full list on to the Canadian High Commission in India who then sent out the invitations.
Sophie Gregoire Trudeau at a function in India with Jaspal Atwal, a Surrey businessman, who is a one-time member of the now-banned International Sikh Youth Federation. (Handout Photo)
How the Modi government had anything to do with Atwal being invited is a mystery perhaps only Butts can understand.
The simple fact of the matter is that the trip to India was a disaster, the kind Trudeau and his team weren’t used to dealing with. So now a year and half later they are still looking to lay the blame anywhere but where it belongs.
With themselves.
blilley@postmedia.com
http://torontosun.com/opinion/column...rous-2018-trip
