Trudeau II: A Loathsome Lightweight's Lame Legacy

The unbearable incompetence and corruption of Justin Trudeau, actor turned politician

A man I know was diagnosed recently with ADHD, a condition that, coupled with his narcissistic tendencies, makes him impulsive, with very low empathy and limited self awareness. He is socially isolated, but sees no connection between his behaviour and his loneliness.

I thought of that guy last week, as I watched Justin Trudeau promising to resign… eventually.

Trudeau blamed voters, opponents and his caucus colleagues for his decision to step aside, some day. He is clearly bitter that Chrystia Freeland, his totally unqualified finance minister, who he wanted to demote, declined that demotion, after he had raised her expectations by over-promoting her.

Junior Trudeau has always mostly been an actor: in love with his own image, playing dress up even as an adult and chasing the spotlight. Like most actors, he sounds much better when someone else writes the words, but some actors who turn to politics actually achieve something.

Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. As Bill Burr points out, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a great man who overcame huge odds to succeed in several fields.

Trudeau, on the other hand, is as unaccomplished as Derek Zoolander, whose main achievement was being really, really good looking.

(Image: Wiki Fandom)

Unlike a comic improviser, Justin Trudeau verbally short circuits when he has to think on his feet. Even his government subsidized CBC noticed, years ago, that Trudeau speaks in nonsensical word salads.

As he tap dances toward an exit, obviously Stage Left, Trudeau has granted himself unchecked power and is depriving Canada of parliament, our democratic forum, at a time when Donald Trump is verbally threatening Canada’s sovereignty. Trudeau is giving his Liberal leader successor very little time to organize, before that person will be plunged into an election that may see the Liberal party decimated. Dare to dream.

Trudeau has made it clear that he is looking out mainly for himself and secondly for his party, with Canadians a distant third priority.

Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, Canada’s supposedly sophisticated major cities, elected Dressup d’Artagnan as our Prime Minister in 2015. Many outside Canada’s cosmopolitan clusters have never been impressed with this preening mimbo.

Preferring his cherished diversity to be expressed only in the most superficial, identity based terms, Trudeau chose his cabinet by gender quota, but has attacked those who practice the much more important diversity of opinion.

It is the open debate about ideas that fuels successful democracies. Democracy is and should be messy.

Autocrats don’t just encourage unity of opinion. They insist on it. Although politicians like Trudeau call for unity, the most unified countries are dictatorships, including several that the Trudeau family has always openly admired: the USSR and Cuba for Pierre and China for Justin.

Justin Trudeau, like his imperious, War Measures Act- imposing father, Pierre, is no democrat. Some Canadians forget that, just before the pandemic, Trudeau allowed Canada’s entire railway system to be paralyzed by pipeline protestors, with whom he agreed, but when frustrated truckers later occupied Ottawa, Canada’s Capital and least productive city, he attacked the truckers with slurs, declared a state of emergency, arrested their leaders and even froze bank accounts. Trudeau’s heavy handedness was later deemed unconstitutional by a Federal Court.

The Liberals passed an online harms law, which will enable suppression of views his government dislikes. Trudeau promised electoral reform, but dropped the idea when the public supported a different plan than his preferred one.

Far from actually caring about the country, Trudeau’s only priority is to win elections. With that singular focus, he makes absolutely every issue partisan, even during mass shootings. That partisan approach means Trudeau’s perceived enemies and friends face very different rules. This is what corruption looks like:

• Trudeau claims his carbon tax was needed to save the planet from Canada’s less than 2% of global carbon emissions. Yet he let the Liberal-voting maritime provinces, who use heating oil, the dirtiest form of fuel, off the hook from paying it, because his MPs there risked losing their seats over the inflation his policies caused in the region.

• His government imposed a tanker ban on oil off Canada’s Pacific coast, which undermines Alberta’s oil export ambitions but does not apply to foreign oil travelling up the Saint Lawrence to supply Quebec refineries.

• Trudeau ignored serial corruption involving Quebec engineering firm SNC/Lavalin and the greasy WE foundation, which was his Liberal Party’s youth recruitment wing. Either not knowing or not caring that independent courts are crucial in a democracy, he sought to corrupt Canada’s justice system, to help Quebec based SNC escape punishment. He also tried to help WE dodge bankruptcy by offering it a $900 Million taxpayer bailout.

• Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Trudeau's anti oil and gas laws chased over $150 billion of private investment away from Canada’s oil and gas industry, which produces the country’s number one export. He put tens of thousands of Albertans out of work, but then shovelled $45 Billion, which is over twice Canada’s anemic national defence budget, into battery plant subsidies for Ontario and Quebec, just as demand for electric cars went limp, battery companies failed and battery technology risks changing.

• During trade negotiations, Donald Trump attempted to introduce more US competition into the protected Canadian dairy market, where Canada imposes tariffs of over 200%, which by reducing competition needlessly raises Canadians’ already daunting food costs. Trudeau fiercely defended Quebec’s anti-competitive, inflationary dairy cartel at the expense of all Canadians, whose interests he is supposed to protect.

When he won his first majority, Trudeau claimed he would run small deficits, but instead ran unnecessarily large ones that became huge during the pandemic. He just keeps raising our cost of living and burning borrowed money, which we will have to repay with interest:

• Trudeau and Alberta Premier Notley emboldened green activists with their bogus concept of “social license”, which suggests that even after ten years of regulatory approvals, protestors can block approved pipelines. The TransMountain pipeline expansion could have been funded privately, but he ginned up so much protest and made the regulatory process so onerous that the proponent, Kinder Morgan, walked away. Trudeau's government ended up buying the project at massively higher cost. Self inflicted, wasteful and totally unnecessary.

• As part of his “green” crusade, Trudeau’s government imposed mandates to electrify Canada’s fleet of cars and trucks, but he also imposed 100% tariffs on the most affordable electric cars, from China, ostensibly to protect manufacturing jobs in Ontario. So reducing Canadians’ cost of living isn't really as important to him as pandering.

• Having sprayed Canadians with borrowed money during the pandemic, with no means tests, Trudeau’s government later aggressively pursued some young recipients and forgave grants made to others.

• He asserts that most Canadians are making money from his carbon tax, which is preposterous because the tax requires permanently hiring many bureaucrats to administer it and because it increases the cost of everything, from crucial food imports to unavoidable lighting and heating. It’s just a revenue grab and wealth transfer.

Trudeau has sabotaged Canada’s economy by creating endless regulatory hurdles for some industries, while throwing taxpayer money at others. No other industrial democracy, (although Germany might say “Hold mein Bier”) is stupid enough to damage its own interests to this extent.

After ten years and $1 Billion of compliance costs invested by Enbridge, Trudeau cancelled a pipeline that had already been approved (Northern Gateway), then politicized what was already the world’s longest pipeline approval process and changed the rules.

For pipelines, his restructured regulator added unprecedented end use restrictions which were not imposed on Ontario’s auto industry, nor on Quebec’s skidoos and cement plants. He even added bizarre gender obstacles to the pipeline approval process. As he hoped, TC Energy cancelled the Energy East pipeline, also after ten years and another billion dollars of regulatory hoop jumping.

This is the kind of hostile climate that drives investment away and it has done. Foreign investment in Canada as a share of GDP has been cut almost in half under Trudeau. The Canadian dollar is no longer correlated to the price of oil, because global markets know his government is embarrassed by Canada’s oil and gas wealth and wants to keep it in the ground. So the Loonie is very weak compared to the US dollar, as any Canadian who plans travel to the USA can attest.

Capital investment from the private sector is what drives our employment, standard of living and tax revenue, but the actor who thought budgets would balance themselves doesn’t grasp that and anyway, thinks he knows better. He does not know better.

As for inflation, Trudeau has not only introduced visibly inflationary measures like the carbon tax, but has also overheated the Canadian economy with colossal deficits, as he scrambles to buy votes. Although Trudeau outrageously suggested during the pandemic that he is borrowing so we don’t have to, Canadians must repay all his government’s debt, with interest. That means higher future taxes and less money in our pockets.

Although we should be dancing in the streets at the prospect of this dopey dilettante finally leaving office, Trudeau’s replacement as Liberal leader may be either a totally unqualified gnome or a suave crusader for the United Nations’ failing effort to extinguish Canada’s number one export industry.

That federal election cannot come soon enough.