This election is hollow. It is without centre. It is without national purpose. It is idle, contrived, opportunistic, premature and cynical. It is just a Liberal game.
Everyone knows it is. The public, the press, the politicians, and if a pandemic could be said to have a personality, the pandemic knows it, too.
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Consider. Justin Trudeau perspires with sincerity about his concern for Canada’s native peoples and the feminist cause and, effectively, chases one of his top female colleagues, Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister (buy her book next week) out of his cabinet for the benefit of a Quebec-based company, SNC-Lavalin. The cake not quite devoured, he loses another top female, another first-class achiever, a proven humanitarian and a doctor (could be helpful in a pandemic), Jane Philpott. The “equity” principle, female-empowerment strutting, was always just a banner for this bunch.
Trudeau and his family have a working relationship with two charity impresarios and real estate entrepreneurs, Craig and Marc Kielburger of WE Charity. They get the attendance of the mother, wife and brother of the prime minister at their carnival rallies, and of course the prime minister himself. Then in a unique moment of “monetary policy,” WE is hired to splash around close to a billion taxpayers’ dollars on behalf of their PM friend, and to top it off, are offered a $43-million fee for the pleasure of playing political Santa Claus.
It blows up. But the Liberals close down any real investigation. They filibuster the committees. They prorogue Parliament. WE becomes THEM.
The pandemic gives Trudeau the chance to gut the functioning of Parliament and he eagerly grabs it. He has, under what deals we do not know, the supine obeisance of the NDP or the Bloc for what issues he cares about. He retires hermit-like for a whole year and more into his retreat cottage, from which he emerges every morning to the tent-huddled, compliant press to splash billions and billions of dollars on the project of the day. “I’m spending your money so you don’t have to spend your money.” No real accountability. The auditor general is left pleading for resources to deal with the spending. And is denied.
In the meantime, there is sexual scandal in the top ranks of our military. The male-feminist-led administration plays with it for years, slights it, drags it out. Even in the moment of this useless campaign they have a candidate under multiple allegations, but he is allowed to stay until the hypocrisy for this feminist-first party becomes too much. He then “resigns.”
This catalogue could be grossly extended. But let us look to where it has brought the Liberals and their leader.
All the shine is gone. All of it. No one, except the deepest partisans, buys the male-feminist gig anymore. That special, moral relationship Trudeau so fulsomely embraced with our First Nations people has evaporated — forgive a cruel pun — with the boil-water advisories he pledged to end. All show, all talk; no action.
Most of all, the whole persona is dead. The progressive, woke prime minister has lost all glitter and glow. Vogue is no longer calling. He is a politician, and only a politician, just like all the other politicians he once so angrily denounced and looked down upon. He who once was sunny is now, according to the best sources, calling up his “ferocity.” (That’s a really good one.)
The style that wore so well at first grows cloying. The drama-speak hesitations. That urgent, breathless “sincerity-tone” — called upon for all those sensitivity-displaying apologies — grinds on the nerves. What once attracted, repels. And with the loss of the “style” is the loss of Trudeau’s chief gift. It was never the looks, which are special. Nor even the name, though that gave him an elevator ride to the top. It was always the style.
That was the clincher. It was the Care Bear woke persona, the champion of every stylish cause and the exhibitionist-in-chief of every progressive virtue. Now in this election he himself called, he is out there like any other drowning politician grabbing at any river-bank straw — abortion, assault rifles, Stephen Harper, vaccination mandates — that might slow his drop at the polls.
No talk of Afghanistan though. No talk to the Canadian soldiers about what this says about Canada’s costly mission, the lives and limbs lost. Ten-dollar daycare, yes. One-time $500 to seniors over 75, yes. Of course a ritual invocation of Stephen Harper every second day. Afghanistan? Not even in the debate.
But: Why did you have to call this election? Why, in pandemic Canada, are we having this election?
For that no answer — because there is none that is not shameful — can be offered.
