Trudeau's hubris shows, once again, that Canada is a democracy manqué

gregfelton.com
(August 31, 2021)

In a democracy, citizens should look forward to elections because it is the only time they have some say in how their country is run; at least, that’s the theory. In Canada, elections are occasions for anxiety and apathy because, contrary to all appearances, Canada is not a democracy, and electoral choice is a polite fiction. Of the three main national parties––Liberal, “Conservative” and New Democratic––only the first two are theoretically capable of forming a government. Since an election has been called for September 20, less than two years after the last one, it’s worth talking a look at the undemocratic results over the last 15 years to understand why there is good reason to be anxious about this no-win election as well.

In 2006, the new so-called Conservative government of Stephen Harper showed itself to be, quite literally, fascist, and the 2015 election, which saw Liberal representation in Parliament balloon from 34 seats to 184, was a widespread voter revolt against 10 years of Harper’s frontal assault on Canadian institutions, labour, environment, civil liberties and reputation. The governor-general should have impeached him on constitutional grounds (or should not have invited him to form a government in the first place), but such integrity was not possible given their cozy relationship. At length, the electorate finally did what GG David Johnston would not do.

The purpose of the 2019 general election, then, was to keep faith with the decision of 2015, which, like it or not, meant perpetuating the Liberals in power. The Liberals won again but lost their majority, and the Harperite party even gained 22 seats. The need for negative, or “strategic”, voting to keep Canada free from reactionary social Darwinists essentially confirmed Canada as a virtual one-party state, a democracy manqué. This time, though, the old rules don't apply.

2021 election

Why Trudeau asked the governor-general to dissolve Parliament after only two years can be attributed to arrogance and opportunism: arrogance because Trudeau wants his majority back and opportunism because the Conservatives are in a right mess and are not deemed to pose a credible threat.

Regarding the former, Trudeau knows he does not need a majority to govern since NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has promised to continue enabling the government, which is the most the NDP can ever expect to do. The party’s brief flirtation with governmental credibility after the 2011 election was mirage produced by parked anti-Liberal votes, not genuine popular support. The main purpose of the 2015, 2019 elections was to prevent the return of radical right-wing reactionaries, and it appears that Trudeau is counting on that again to give him victory while keeping the NDP in the Liberal shadow.

Regarding opportunism, Trudeau is likely trying to capitalize on the disarray within the Conservatives. New leader Erin O’Toole knows that his party has to evolve if it ever hopes to be taken seriously as a governing alternative, so he led a radical March 2021 push to have the membership finally accept the scientific fact of man-made climate change. What O’Toole does not appreciate that dogmatic, ossified parties do not evolve: they implode. This was demonstrated when the Liberals nearly obliterated the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 election. Broad-based rejection of the government of Brian Mulroney saw the Progressive Conservative Party’s representation reduced from 169 seats to 2, and out of the ashes rose two parochial parties: a Western right-wing, pro-business religious cabal (The Reform Party, the core of the current Conservative Party) and the separatist Bloc Québécois.

At the March 2021 convention, urban/suburban members (46%) endorsed O’Toole’s new climate policy, but the anti-climate, anti-environment, anti-statist, anti-intellectual, rural majority (54%) ensured it would fail. Whether O’Toole was sincerely trying to breathe credibility into an unelectable party or whether he was just blowing smoke to pander to Liberal voters does not really matter. The party is still driven by its neo-fascist core, so any effort to appear progressive, however minimally, amounts to putting lipstick on a pig.

On the face of it, then, Trudeau’s decision to ask for dissolution seemed astute. With his chief rival engaged in a doctrinal civil war a return to majority status seemed eminently possible. Note the past tense. Inasmuch as there is no viable reason to vote for the Conservatives, there most certainly are reasons to vote against the Liberals. Trudeau, in his smugness, is ignorant of the First Law of Electoral Politics––governments are voted out, not voted in––and Canadians have every reason to see this government voted out. Four reasons should suffice.

Voter anger

Since there was no compelling reason to call an election, the electorate might resent being dragged to the polls so soon and punish Trudeau for his selfishness either by not voting or by voting Conservative out of spite. If the voting trend of the last two elections continues (see table), the Liberals could wind up with an even smaller majority or possibly out of office. The key feature of the 2019 election is that disaffected Liberal voters went to the Conservatives, not to the NDP, suggesting that Trudeau’s absence of character is a major liability and that the political overlap between Liberal and NDP voters is overestimated.

Last 3 Election Results (Major National Parties)
Party	2011	% change	2015	% change	2019
Conservative	166	–40	99	+22.2	121
Liberal	34	+441.2	184	–15.8	155
NDP	103	–57.3	44	–45.5	24
The 2015 Liberal landslide was a widespread voter revolt against 10 years of neo-fascist rule. However, the reduction of Liberal seats four years later, which turned a majority government into a minority, showed that a return to Conservative misrule was possible. The 2015 and 2019 results also showed the great NDP breakthrough was a mirage.

Pipeline Politics

The amount of political capital Trudeau has spent, and continues to spend, on forcing the TransMountain Pipeline on British Columbia is out of all proportion to its value and has alienated environmentally conscious Liberal voters, especially in B.C. Not only would the pipeline add to the pollution that created this year’s infernal heat, but the risk it would pose to coastal and inland aquatic life outweighs any putative economic benefits. In fact, there is no economic need since it would merely double the capacity of an existing pipeline, and there is not enough bitumen sludge to push through both of them.

Since there is no rational, economic scenario to explain why Trudeau went to the mat to bully B.C. through the courts in defence of something indefensible, the answer must be irrational and political: assuaging Alberta’s overwrought sense of wounded entitlement and buying votes. This is the only logical explanation for his spending $4.5 billion of public money to buy the pipeline from the U.S. company Kinder Morgan after it bailed on the project because of mounting protests. Disaffected Liberal voters might decide that Trudeau is so personally invested in it that he is incapable of acting in the national interest and proceed to park their votes with the NDP as they did in 2011.

Identity Politics

Trudeau’s fixation with political symbolism and mawkish sentiment gives the distinct impression he is more concerned with ingratiating himself with sympathetic interest groups than in governing. If enough voters decide they have had enough of his conspicuous fetishizing of feminists, other sexuals and Natives, they might see the reactionary nationalism of the “Conservatives” as a needed corrective.

In 2015, Trudeau crowed about appointing the first “gender [sic] equal” cabinet as if to say to Canadians that a person’s reproductive plumbing, were a legitimate, if not the main, criterion for being given a ministry. As it turned out, Trudeau paid a high price for his pandering when he appointed neophyte Native MP Jody Wilson-Raybould to the senior posts of Attorney General and Justice Minister. Not only was such an appointment for a first-time MP highly questionable, but she proved to be woefully unqualified and politically unfit. She cared only about flogging her version of Native issues and even tried to bully another minister over control of a new Native rights framework. Wilson-Raybould also openly subverted Trudeau’s authority over the prosecution of Montreal-based engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.

On a more serious note, she permitted the de facto kidnapping of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou on Canadian soil to serve a foreign power, the U.S., which could not produce a legitimate extradition warrant. In other words, Wilson-Raybould violated the rights of a foreign national who had committed no crime against Canada, all with the tacit approval of Trudeau. Now, Canada has to deal with China’s retaliatory detention of two Canadian citizens.

The previous two major examples are a direct result of Trudeau’s immaturity, incompetence and hubris, and if enough Liberal voters decide that the boy-king needs a time-out (or that the party needs a new leader), a few swing ridings could end up going O’Toole’s way. In fact, a recent Nanos research poll (below) puts the Conservatives slightly ahead of the Liberals. It’s an early poll to be sure, and the difference is slight, but the trends speak to a pervasive lack of enthusiasm for Trudeau.

Viral Politics

Before the writ was dropped, a Global Poll stated that SARS-CoV-2 virus was not not uppermost in voters’ minds. How times have changed. Young millennial voters are disrupting Trudeau on his campaign stops furious over his insistence on mandatory “vaccinations” and insistence on “vaccine passports”, a feat of dictatorial excess that dwarfs anything Harper did. Trudeau is stunned, as he told Reuters: “I’ve never seen this intensity of anger on the campaign trail or in Canada, not when I was a kid, even with my dad visiting out West, where we did see anger."

Of course, Trudeau is oblivious to the fact that millennial anger began when he betrayed his promise to enact electoral reform, and the virus just inflamed it.

The other two major party leaders also lip-sync from the Big Pharma hymn book, thus giving the electorate no alternative to official propaganda and dissembling on the issue, or so it would seem. O’Toole stated (reflexively, no doubt) that all Canadians should get jabbed, but he does not speak for the whole party or all voters. Alberta MP David Yurdiga, for one, denounced mandatory “vaccinations” as “another example of the Liberals using severe government overreach for political gain.” He’s dead right, and likely speaks for a lot more MPs who can marshall a lot of votes, but he could have gone even further.

Trudeau is not only violating civil liberties, but he potentially endangering the lives of all Canadians. Like like every other world leader and MSM hack, he is passing off these mRNA injections as vaccines, which they are not. To be considered a vaccine, a drug must contain a sample of the virus, either attenuated or dead, to stimulate the body’s immune system to create antibodies. The government’s own “vaccination” propaganda admits that these injections do not contain the virus; therefore, they are not vaccines and as such cannot confer immunity. They are unsafe, experimental gene therapies, and coercing people into being stuck with one of these needles is a violation of Article 6 of the 1947 Nuremburg Code against involuntary participation in medical experiments.

(The Internet is full of knee-jerk denials from those who claim the Code does not apply simply because it says nothing about vaccines. They are correct––about the non-mention of vaccines––but vaccines are not at issue, so denying of the applicability of the Nuremburg Code amounts to willfully ignoring a pervasive criminal act.)

To highlight the magnitude of Trudeau’s dangerous misconduct, people who are fully “vaccinated” are at least as susceptible to the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 as those who are not. What matters is not having the virus, but the viral load (degree of infection). If the Conservatives make civil liberties and public health an election issue––backed up by empirical data, and rational argument, not militant right-wing bombast––they could tap into that well of millennial anger and disillusionment and make substantial headway.

O’Toole wants to convey the illusion that his party is sheeple friendly and has even put some sort of a Liberal-like, multicultural/multisexual gloss on his party to make it appear electable. Therefore, it is unlikely that he will do anything principled or brave, like taking Trudeau down over coerced medical experiments. Intangibles like personal freedom, civil rights and the right to dissent are the most important aspects of democracy, yet they carry little weight with voters because the violation of them is not immediately sensed.

On Sept. 20, Canadians will go to the polls in a familiar robotic fog, yet many are now wondering if it make sense to perpetuate one tyranny just to keep out another. Trudeau has squandered so much political capital, particularly in the eyes of reform-minded environmental youth, that the Liberals are almost certain to lose seats––how many is the question. At this point it appears that one of two scenarios is likely.

In the first, disaffected Liberal voters park their votes with the NDP as they did in 2011. O’Toole’s self-destructive insistence on privatizing English CBC television and promoting pipelines may attract some older, right-wing Liberals, but will alienate most others. In the end. Trudeau will end up with a much smaller majority or even finish second to the O’Toole gang. As worrisome as this scenario may be, it has two redeeming virtues.

First, it is unlikely that either party will form a majority government, so an O’Toole-led anti-CBC/pro-pipeline government would not last long, and the governor-general would ask Trudeau to form another government. This time, though, the voice of the NDP will be stronger, which would force Trudeau to uphold his promises on environmental protection and electoral reform. It might also force him to abandon “vaccine passports”.