Trudeau the Fraud

 

In the 2015 federal elections, Justin Trudeau won a majority government after convincing Canadian voters that he was different from other politicians, and that he was offering genuine change. But has Trudeau the younger ushered in real change in Canada and in Canadian politics? Not by a long shot.

Most of the change that Trudeau has brought to Canada is simply a change back to old Liberal policies. In fact, most of what the Trudeau Liberals have done has all had to do with reversing the policy decisions of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Easing requirements for Canadian citizenship, increased environmental regulations, a return to the long-form census, more emphasis on multilateralism in Canadian foreign policy, you name it, it’s all just been about changing back, not moving forward. Whatever actual changes Trudeau’s Liberal government has made are either cosmetic or consist of policies stolen from other parties.

 

For example, Prime Minister Trudeau has always made a big deal about having gender parity in his cabinet, “because it’s 2015,” he said, shortly after winning the elections that year. He is supposed to be a feminist, after all. Yet he has no problem keeping the centuries-old first-past-the-post electoral system, even though he promised that the elections of 2015 would be the last to take place using the unfair and outdated method. I’m sure he is also well-aware that countries with systems of proportional representation tend to elect more women and minorities. But of course, why do away with the system that has made his Liberal Party the natural governing party of Canada? Yes, a cabinet with gender parity makes for good optics, but it doesn’t ensure that more women will have a greater chance of being elected to political office in the long term.

 

In fact, Trudeau has been an impediment to women’s success in politics. Just ask former Liberal Jody Wilson-Raybould. She was Trudeau’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice until early 2019, when allegations surfaced that the prime minister tried to pressure her into granting construction and engineering giant, SNC Lavalin, a deal that would have saved it from prosecution for suspected bribery. Wilson-Raybould wouldn’t give in to Trudeau’s wishes, and so was demoted to the Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs. But soon after, she resigned from cabinet and bravely spoke out against Trudeau’s handling of the SNC Lavalin case. For this, she was ultimately expelled from the Liberal Party caucus. So much for Trudeau’s supposed love of strong female leaders. So much for Trudeau’s feminism. The fact is that Justin Trudeau has the ability to be just as arrogant and corrupt as any other person who has ever sat in the Prime Minister’s Office.

 

Fortunately for Trudeau, the SNC Lavalin scandal and his poor treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould, did not cost him his job as Prime Minister. He won re-election last year, albeit with a minority government. During the campaign, and even before it, Trudeau always delighted in mentioning how the Canada Child Benefit, which his government introduced in 2016, was lifting many Canadian children out of poverty. He wasn’t lying, for a change. According to Statistics Canada, there were 278,000 fewer children living below the poverty line in 2017, compared to 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals were first elected. This is good news that Prime Minister Trudeau and his Liberals have repeatedly taken credit for. They are not deserving of any credit for it, however, because the program was never their idea in the first place. It was, in fact, an idea stolen from the Conservative Party.

 

In 2006, Stephen Harper and his Conservatives won a minority government. Among the promises in Harper’s platform was to give each Canadian family with children a direct payment that would allow them to pay for whatever daycare they deemed appropriate. Ironically, this was an idea opposed by the then Paul Martin-led Liberals, who instead, wanted to create a federal government-run daycare program. To make a long story short, the idea of giving government funds directly to parents for their children was originally a Conservative idea, not a Liberal one. In other words, the Trudeau Liberals are plagiarists. They rip off ideas from other parties and present them as their own. Plagiarizing in university can get you expelled, but apparently in Canadian politics, it gets you elected.

 

And don’t think for a second that the Liberals only rip off ideas from the Conservatives. When Trudeau was first elected in 2015, his whole campaign might as well have been taken straight out of the NDP playbook. The Trudeau Liberals positioned themselves the furthest to the left out of all three major federal parties. So much so, in fact, that they managed to siphon off most of the votes that had once gone to the NDP, thereby getting elected with a majority government and relegating the real placeholders of the left to third party status, once again.

 

The Trudeau Liberals have been riding high based on the fact that Canada has not been as adversely affected by COVID-19 as some other countries, most notably our neighbours to the south. Actually, the fact that the closest world leader that Canadians can compare Trudeau to is none other than U.S. President Donald Trump, makes the Prime Minister look a lot better than he should be given credit for. The reality is, however, that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is neither a harbinger of genuine change, nor is he any different than other politicians. His policies are recycled from the Liberals of the past, or ideas stolen from others, and not one thing he has done has led to fundamental change for the better in Canada.

Up yours, Trump! Up yours, Trudeau!

I really enjoyed hearing about the two biggest assholes on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, getting torn apart by people who used to be their allies.

Up here in the Great White North, we may be seeing the demise of our arrogant, selfie-loving, virtue-signalling fraud of a prime minister thanks to his former justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, someone who represents two of the groups he has always claimed to want to help: women and aboriginal people.

Down south, President Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, summed up the wannabe dictator perfectly, saying, "He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat."

One would assume that Trump and Trudeau are completely different because they're on opposite ends of the political spectrum. But they're more similar than you might think. They're both frauds, they're both liars and they're both hypocrites. And I would like nothing better than to see both of these two idiots go down in flames.

Ideology is a prison

The political world is so polarized nowadays. There seems to be no middle ground. Now of course, ideologies have existed for centuries. The difference now is that more and more people are parking themselves firmly on the right or the left of the political spectrum. Political centrism is on the retreat. Too bad, because I think that when you adhere strictly to any particular ideology, it's like you're putting yourself in prison. A prison that prevents you from considering any ideas from the other side of the political spectrum that might actually make sense and may be part of a solution to whatever problem you're trying to address.

For example, the topic of immigration is now a very hot-button issue here in Canada now. Unfortunately, the discourse about it is now dominated by those who think we should throw our doors wide open to anyone seeking refuge from some form of hardship or persecution and those that want to slam the doors shut and not let anyone into this country simply because they're from the "wrong" part of the world or don't embrace a rigid, Westernized mindset. What happened to the days when we could be tolerant and welcome people from all over the world, but still keep are borders secure from potential threats?

I can of course cite many other cases where ideology has ruined the discourse on most issues at hand. For instance, people on the left tend to automatically equate private enterprise with greed and inequality, but consider anything controlled by government to be in the public's interest and always the best way forward. In contrast, folks on the rigid right automatically equate anything that is controlled by government as inefficient, bloated and wasteful, while assuming that the private sector always does the job better and more efficiently.

I like to think outside the box that ideology can put people in. So for instance, I am strongly in favour of school choice and some sort of private sector involvement in Canada's health care system. At the same time, however, I don't want American-style two-tier health care, nor do I want to gut public education. I don't want to shut the door on people trying to get into this country, but I don't want people pouring across the border without going through customs and security screenings. And while I don't think public transit runs very well in Toronto and would like the TTC's monopoly to end, I certainly do not support privatizing the TTC and leaving mass transit entirely in the hands of profit-seeking private interests.

Someone once told me that politics is about compromise. But nowadays, people all over the world seem a lot less willing to budge on any given issue. There is less and less room for constructive dialogue. I think this needs to change, otherwise we're in for much more savage times.

Why I can't pursue my passion for politics

Since I was fourteen years old, my number one passion has been politics. Too bad, I sometimes think, because if I had some other interest, I probably wouldn't be as angry and frustrated as I've been for most of my life. I've been frustrated by the fact that although I'm obsessed with politics and would like nothing better than to be someone who affects change, I've been stifled by a Canadian political system that is rigged to prevent people like me from ever having a voice for change in this country.

It's not like I haven't tried. For example, I used to be part of a political party, but I found out that when you're the member of the party, you're just expected to follow the party leader like a well-trained dog follows its master. Just tow the party line. Oh yeah, and give them your money. Not a month went by without someone from the party calling me asking for a donation. Here in Canada, the party leader is everything. He or she rules the party like an absolute monarch. And if you stray away from the party's script, you will inevitably be kicked out. Now, I won't have anything to do with any political party in this country. Quite frankly, I spit on all of them. 

I still do vote. Well, sort of. In provincial elections, I show up at the polling station and decline my ballot, because I can't bring myself to support any of the incompetents we call leaders in Ontario. I would probably do the same federally too, but one doesn't have the option of declining their ballot in federal elections. So I just vote for the folks who I think will support Israel the most, since none of the main parties offer the kind of substantive changes I'm looking for, which include proportional representation, an end to excessive party discipline, an elected or abolished senate, and a freer economy. 

I was once told that if I didn't like this country's pitiful excuse for leaders, I should run for office myself. But of course, to do that, I'd have to join one of the parties I hate. Then, if I was elected, I'd have to vote in lockstep with my party and not say anything that contradicts the party line, or be kicked out of caucus. Well, there's always municipal politics. Oh, wait. Unseating an incumbent councillor is virtually impossible, and I don't think I'd have a chance in hell running for mayor, because you need to be a household name to do that and have a realistic chance of winning. 

So for those of you who accuse me of just complaining and doing nothing to affect change, I ask you, in light of everything I just said, what the hell am I supposed to do!?

Status Quo Toronto

Another municipal election in Toronto has come and gone. What's changed? Basically nothing. Toronto will continue to be governed by the same cabal that have been dragging the city on the road to ruin for decades. The only difference is that there will be less of them after our illustrious premier, Doug Ford, decided to downsize the city council. In fact, there were only three wards out of a total of 25 in which voters chose candidates that weren't running for re-election. Actually, only two of these wards, Beaches-East York and Scarborough-Rouge River, will be represented by people who can truthfully say that they are new to politics. The third ward, Eglinton-Lawrence will be represented by Mike Colle, who lost his seat in the provincial legislature earlier this year, but couldn't bring it upon himself to give up the politicians' pig trough.

People in Toronto complain left, right and centre about things in this city that don't work. Bad roads, bad transit, bad municipal services and so forth. Yet, when we have the opportunity to make changes. we flock like sheep to the same idiots who have been screwing up this city. Then again, I can't say this about all Toronto voters, particularly the ones who failed to show up to the polling station, which was roughly 60% of the electorate. Well Torontonians, the next time you complain about something in this city that doesn't work, just remember how you voted yesterday, or how you didn't vote.

Statue of Sir John A. Macdonald should not have been removed

A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald no longer stands at City Hall in Victoria, British Columbia. Some people are happy about it, some are not. On one hand, it is true that Macdonald was an architect of Canada's residential school system; a system that was responsible for what was no less than a cultural genocide against Canada's native peoples, not to mention the scene of other heinous crimes. But on the other hand, he was Canada's first prime minister and a principal architect of the country itself. We certainly shouldn't honour someone who was an orchestrator of genocide, but at the same time, should we not honour those who were instrumental in creating this great country we call Canada? The problem with Sir John A. Macdonald is that he falls into both categories. So how to decide?

I think the simplest solution to such a problem lies in weighing the positives and negatives of the historical figure in question. So in the case of Sir John A. Macdonald, we should ask ourselves, does his contribution to Canada's founding outweigh his involvement in the cultural genocide of native Canadians, or vice versa? I honestly would not have removed the statue, because although Canada's first prime minister was complicit in cultural genocide against this country's aboriginal population, his role as a founding father of the country cannot simply be overlooked. And there are other ways to promote reconciliation without removing homages to Canada's founders. How about, for example, restoring aboriginal names to places in Canada now named after various figures of the country's colonial past. Maybe before Victoria's city council thought about removing the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, they should instead have pondered changing the city's name so that it honours the city's original inhabitants rather than some long dead British monarch. This kind of thing has been done before. In fact, not too far from Victoria are the Haida Gwaii islands. They used to be known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, but in 2010, B.C.'s provincial government graciously decided to change the name of the archipelago to honour its original inhabitants of the Haida First Nation.

Actually, what I think would count for real reconciliation is improving the lives of aboriginal people in this country. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I'm wagering that most native Canadians place more importance on having decent housing and clean water to drink than on whether or not a statue of Canada's first prime minister stands somewhere. Just a thought.  

Beggars are annoying. But poverty is a lot more annoying

If you live in a big city, chances are you've run into panhandlers on the street asking you for money. Toronto is no exception. Whenever I walk my dog in the morning, I come across beggars on pretty much every block. But I don't just encounter them walking down the street. I've been approached by them when I'm driving. They sometimes approach my car while I'm waiting for a traffic light. Some of them will even block traffic and force drivers to swerve to avoid them. There's no avoiding them on the TTC either. I've often seen panhandlers just sitting on the ground and asking for spare change just as they would if they were on a street corner. Sometimes, they will approach you directly asking for money. Some panhandlers will even come inside of restaurants or cafes to ask people for spare change.

If I'm making this sound like it bothers me, it does. Like a lot of people, I don't appreciate being approached by strangers begging for money, especially while I'm doing something like eating or driving. But of course, the folks who do this probably don't appreciate being poor and having to resort to begging in order to survive. I seldom give money to panhandlers. Not because I'm insensitive to their situation, but because I don't know their situation. They could very well be genuine cases of poverty. People who have no home, no job and no one to help them. But they could also be people trying to feed an addiction, whether that addiction involves booze or drugs. This is the reason that whenever I have given anything to panhandlers, it's always in the form of food or offering to buy them something to eat. In general, however, if I want to be charitable, I will donate to reputable organizations rather than giving money to random people on the street.

Yes, panhandlers can be a nuisance. But poverty is a much bigger nuisance. So it would help if governments at all levels would do something to help these people instead of simply perpetuating their poverty. I'm talking about things like permanent, affordable housing, skills training and better addiction and mental health services, not band-aids like shelter beds and temporary respite centres.