Noam Chomsky
Mark Kingwell Charles Tayler
Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy
Evelyn Lau
Stephen Lewis
Robert Fisk
Margaret Somerville
Mona Eltahawy
Michael Moore
Julius Grey
Irshad Manji
Richard Rodriguez Navi Pillay
Ernesto Zedillo
Pico Iyer
Edward Said
Jean Baudrillard
Bill Moyers
Barbara Ehrenreich
Leon Wieseltier
Nayan Chanda
Charles Lewis
John Lavery
Tariq Ali
Michael Albert
Rochelle Gurstein
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
In Pride
and Prejudice, the nefarious George Wickham enthralled
the coquettish ladies of Meryton, including the otherwise
discerning Lizzy Bennet. Wickham wasn’t Jane Austen’s
only solicitous charmer slowly revealed to be a blackhearted
lothario. There was also Willoughby, the dashing but poisonous
hunk in Sense and Sensibility who does poor
Marianne Dashwood dirt.
Duplicitous
sweet talkers sweeping love-blind women off their feet,
a category of the ‘woman in peril’ genre,
is a tale as old as time. As a TV addict, I’ve always
enjoyed these female-victimization rituals. The high-water
mark is a BBC Austen adaptation, but for lowbrow tastes,
there’s the guilty pleasure of a Lifetime “Movie
of the Week,” tailor-made for suburban stay-at-home
moms, their daughters and yours truly. A middlebrow option
is Dirty John, the LA Times feature
turned podcast turned Bravo miniseries.
You
can trace this plotline back to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Instead of an apple as the object of temptation, it’s
a sugary donut with an arsenic filling. It also describes
the messianic rise and abject decline of Canada’s
head of government, Justin Trudeau.
Forget
‘woman in peril.’ Ours is a country in peril.
Canada,
the oldest democracy in the Americas with 40 million people
and boundless resources, lags behind all other advanced
G7 economies in productivity and has plummeted from 9th
to 33rd in global quality of life rankings. People—especially
Zoomers—feel crushed under the weight of a sluggish
and authoritarian bureaucracy, now 70 percent more expensive
than it was in 2015. A civil service that barely shows
up in person twice a week still manages to stifle progress
with excessive taxes, debt and regulation, all in a misguided
pursuit of ‘fairness’ and changing the weather.
The capital gains hike in the last Federal Budget has
alarmed top innovators, fearing it will drive talent away
and renew the brain drain. Little wonder 70 percent of
Canadians agree “Canada is broken,” a sentiment
regularly trending on X.
We
are the romantic patsies of a woman-in-peril melodrama,
paying the price for our naivete. Worse, we’re late
in the third act, when the imperiled woman is tied up
in the basement, sawing away at the zap straps binding
her wrists with a smuggled chard of glass, while the sinister
roué is upstairs siphoning away her life savings.
How
did we get here?
Cast
your minds back to 2015 when Canada harboured a malaise
for Stephen Harper we never knew we had. Unadventurous
yet reliable, Harper’s steady leadership delivered
balanced budgets, secure borders and falling crime rates.
All well and good but also . . . snoozers!
From
this miasma of ennui rose a heartthrob princeling with
David Cassidy hair, six-pack abs, name recognition and
eccentric socks. His message was about hope, including
but not limited to ‘beating fear with hope,’
as well as change–in particular, “real
change.”
This
hopey-changey platform beat the yesteryear squaresville
candidate hands down. Who wants grey flannel and a high-school-principal
haircut when this is on the table?
One glance and Canada’s pupils formed two perfect
hearts that bugged out of its eyesockets, cartoon style.
We were besotted.
Well,
some of us were. True to ‘woman in peril’
form, there were doubters. Often, in the Lifetime/Hallmark
universe, it’s the less attractive best friend who
asks: “Are you sure you’re not rushing into
things?” In the Dirty John version, it’s
the victim’s spoiled Orange County ‘mean girl’
daughter who takes one look at her mom’s new boyfriend
and says, in not so many words, that dude is
suss AF and I’d like to throat punch him. In Pride
and Prejudice, it’s Mr. Bennet who observes
how Wickham “simpers and smirks and makes love to
us all.”
In
the real world, it was 31.91 percent of voters, some of
whom were experiencing acute déjà vu. It
was, after all, Trudeau’s father—former leader
of Cuba this great nation—who also rode
to power on a wave of adulation, distributed in higher
proportion among women, only to leave behind a sea of
broken hearts, regret and self-recriminations. Lone voices
worried about his thin resume and mysterious departure
from a teaching job at West Point Grey Academy.
In
response to all these objections, mainstream media had
this to say…
A chorus of moonstruck reporters around the world sang
the new PM’s praises. Geraldo Rivera tweeted out:
“Congrats to @JustinTrudeau #Canada now has a stud
prime minister who’s going to inject passion &
energy into nation’s staid, safe policies.” E
online declared him “a beautiful, sticky-sweet
specimen,” adding, “Call us thirsty, call
us cray, we’d write love poems for Justin Trudeau
all day.” The Guardian declared
him “literally born into the role,” while
the Mirror asked, “Is Justin Trudeau the
sexiest politician in the world?”
Included
in all this Tiger Beat-level adulation was Rolling
Stone magazine, which declared itself, like,
totally jelly!
The media swoonfest went so overboard that Jo Abi
at Mamamia demanded less swooning! “The only thing
swoon-worthy about [Justin Trudeau] is his politics. Swoon
away over the brilliantly progressive example he is setting
for other world leaders.”
Early
in Act Two—IE sometime around 2018—red flags
began to appear. This was the year of “peoplekind”
and the slow-moving trainwreck critics called his “Eat,
Pray, Love spiritquest” across India, an excursion
that mortified even his handlers.
Still,
at the time, most considered him no more harmless than
a nerd waiter you get stuck with at a chain restaurant
(Hi, I’m Justin Trudeau and I’ll be your prime
minister for the next several months). Hence, in 2019,
hoping to inject some of that old 2015 magic into the
relationship, Team Trudeau called an election.
What
followed was a classic case of the writers raising the
stakes by presenting ever more complex obstacles in the
heroine’s path. This was the year Trudeau, the soi-disant
feminist, kicked Jody Rabould Wilson under the bus over
the SNC Lavalin affair. Oh, and there was this…
Despite three separate blackface incidents, along with
a groping allegation at the height of #MeToo, the media
that had bathed him in fawning lubrications responded
by tiptoeing quietly out of the room.
By
2020, the cringe-fest of 2018 began to look like a warmup.
If you’re familiar with the Hero’s Journey,
this was “the Ordeal” stage, when the most
harrowing challenges arise, leading to a central life-or-death
crisis.
When
the Virus threw the world off its axis, few leaders of
the free world managed to escape without embarrassing
the dignity of their high office. Trudeau upped the ante
with a list of scandals too long to list here that began
with ArriveCan—AKA “ArriveCan’t”—the
Boeing MAX of smartphone application design. Originally
budgeted at $80,000, its cost ballooned to $54 million.
In
2021, on assurances from his advisors that he could restore
his 2015 majority, he called a pointless snap election which,
at a cost of $600 million, returned the electoral status
quo. The only change being a supply and confidence deal
with the NDP, which would be in cinematic terms, the equivalent
of introducing the villain’s accomplice as a new
character.
When
the truckers descended on Ottawa, Trudeau had an opportunity
to quell widespread anger and broker a compromise. Instead,
he called them homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist
members of a “small fringe minority” with
“unacceptable views.” In response to a protest
of bouncy castles, hot tubs and conga lines, he invoked
the Emergencies Act, seized donations and froze donor
bank accounts.
More
than two years later, the scales completely fallen from
our eyes, we see not a Disney princeling but a trust-fund
nepo-tyrant, living in the moral equivalent of his father’s
basement; jeered at every whistlestop and described by
his own brother, Kyle Kemper, as a psychological hot mess.
Now
at least 10 points behind the CPC, the desperate hail
marys have begun. Housing crisis? He’ll build four
million homes by 2031! That’s 1528 a day, 64 homes
per hour for the next seven years, without breaks. We’re
already 50,000 homes behind schedule. Also, free birth
control, because what better way for a WEF global leader
to finally realize the Davos dystopian nightmare of a
country socially engineering itself into nonexistence?
With
at least a year to go before the next election, the question
is… what happens when he leaves office? Sinecure
at SNC or Power Corp? Montecito mansion with a Netflix
special and podcast? High-status trophy gig at the UN?
Maybe he’ll officially join the ranks of the morbidly
self-admiring global elite plutocracy—that class
unto itself, made up of billionaires, loitering around
Davos and convinced they know how we should run our lives.
Regardless
of where he lands, sooner will be better than later.