This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
Tag: Justin Trudeau
Will anyone in government go to jail?
Because someone in government perhaps should.
The revelation, when it came, actually wasn’t much of one. The CBC’s Fifth Estate, no less, revealed the sordid, appalling truth, which my colleague Brian Lilley and others at the Toronto Sun had long suspected.
Namely, the Trudeau government’s failed vaccine deal with China’s dictatorship had profound consequences – most notably, Canada’s acquisition of Covid-19 vaccines being delayed by many, many months.
Which, one can reasonably conclude, led to too many unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths in Canada.
“The federal government’s failed collaboration with a vaccine manufacturing company in China early in the pandemic has led to a delay of nearly two years in efforts to create a made-in-Canada COVID-19 vaccine,” wrote the CBC.
“Government documents obtained by The Fifth Estate show that Canadian officials wasted months waiting for a proposed vaccine to arrive from China for further testing and spent millions upgrading a production facility that never made a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.”
Lilley, and this writer, believed that the Chinese vaccine fiasco caused a critical delay of months. The CBC (amazingly) says it was two years. But let’s give the Trudeau government the benefit of the doubt, and say that the collapse of the CanSino deal (in March 2020) and the Trudeau Liberals’ belated acknowledgement of that (in August 2020) – and the commencement of a meagre amount of vaccinations in Canada (in December 2020) – meant a delay of only ten months.
So: how many Canadians were killed by Covid in ten months in 2020?
More than fifteen thousand. That’s 1,500 deaths every month.
There are all kinds of variables, here. Was a death directly attributable to the coronavirus? Didn’t nations with vaccines experience greater mortality rates? Is there a direct causal link between the failed China deal and the deaths of Canadians?
That last question is the one that lawyers – and police, and coroners – will perhaps need to consider: did the Trudeau government’s vaccine failure lead to the death of Canadian citizens?
The CBC’s report, and common sense, strongly suggest that the answer is “yes.” And, sure, the Trudeau regime’s negligence may not have led to thousands of needless deaths.
But it inarguably led to some deaths. And that, then, should have legal consequences.
In the United States, they have greater experience with governmental failures that lead to wrongful deaths.
Most notoriously, and most recently, there have been successful prosecutions of police officers – as in the murder of George Floyd – for causing death while acting in their “official” capacity.
Other examples: the former Michigan governor, and others, charged with perjury and manslaughter for their role in the lead poisoning of water in Flint, Michigan. And there have been many, many instances of what is called “public health malpractice” in the U.S., leading to prosecutions of government officials at all levels.
In Canada, too, we have seen government officials prosecuted for failing to do their job properly. In 2000 in Walkerton, Ont., most notoriously, six people died – and about 2,000 became seriously ill – when E. Coli contaminated the local water supply.
In that case, Walkerton officials Stan Koebel was jailed for a year – and sentenced to house arrest, in Frank Koebel’s case – for their role in the contamination.
So, it’s a fair question: does the Trudeau government’s vaccine failure – and the sickness and death that needlessly resulted from that failure – rise to the level of a crime? Should someone be facing manslaughter charges?
Following this week’s revelations, it’s not an unfair question. It needs to be examined.
Will it?
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
They say it’s OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them.
This makes me wonder if Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole has learned from his mistake.
What mistake, you ask?
Well, recently, while musing to the media as to why he came up short in the last federal election, Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole, declared, “(Prime Minister) Trudeau used the pandemic to divide Canadians. We did not. Did we pay a price for it? Perhaps we did.”
In other words, O’Toole seems to think he lost because, unlike his rival, he didn’t play what the media sometimes likes to call the “politics of division.”
Not playing that game was his mistake.
After all, dividing voters is a time-honoured and effective way to win elections.
As a matter of fact, ever since democracy was invented, all political parties, of all ideological stripes, in countries all over the world, have successfully used this tactic.
Basically, it works like this: a political party will divide the electorate into two groups – Us and Them.
The political party will then go on to say something like, if we take control of government our priority will be to protect the good people of “Us” from bad people of “Them” who want to harm “Us.”
It’s the age-old “us” vs “them” dynamic.
Yes, it’s a simplistic, maybe even crude, formula, but it works because it appeals to our ancient subconscious tribal impulses.
Simply put, millions of years of evolution have hardwired our brains to be fearful of people from outside our tribe and to galvanize around strong leaders who’ll protect “us” from “them.”
It’s a mindset that helped our primitive apish ancestors survive the dangers constantly lurking in the prehistoric world.
At any rate, my point is, smart politicians always take advantage of this evolutionary quirk.
Yes, even idealistic, “sunny ways” politicians like Trudeau will play the “us” vs “them” card.
Indeed, Trudeau, as O’Toole noted, craftily plugged the pandemic into this divide and conquer formula, as he promised to protect Canadians who had COVID vaccinations (us) from unvaccinated Canadians(them).
It was a message that certainly resonated with our subconscious minds and, unfortunately for the Conservatives, O’Toole did next to nothing to counter it.
Now don’t get me wrong here; I’m not suggesting O’Toole should have copied Trudeau’s pandemic-oriented “us vs them” strategy.
For one thing, such an approach would possibly have alienated grassroots conservatives, many of whom are suspicious of things like vaccine passports.
Rather I’m saying, he should have put forward an alternative “us vs them” scenario, one that would have worked better for him strategically.
Certainly, there’s lots of ways for conservative politicians to play the game.
For instance, former US president Donald Trump and former Toronto Mayor, the late Rob Ford, argued they would stand up for regular citizens (us) against corrupt and venal politicians (them).
Trump’s rallying cry was “Drain the swamp”; Ford’s, was “Stop the Gravy Train.”
Meanwhile, former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper gained a lot of political mileage when he pledged to defend law-abiding citizens (us) from bleeding-heart liberals (them) who wanted to put criminals out on the streets.
So yeah, O’Toole had plenty of options.
Off the top of my head, he might have made some gains had he channeled his inner populist, and accused Trudeau of caring more about his Bay Street buddies than about small businesses on main street.
But he didn’t. (The NDP, by the way, also failed to launch this obvious attack on Trudeau.)
At any rate, the question is, has O’Toole learned his lesson about how to engage in hardball politics?
If he has, then I suspect by the time the next election rolls around O’Toole (assuming he’s still Conservative Party leader) will promote the Conservatives as “Us” and degrade the Liberals as “Them”.
If he hasn’t learned his lesson, well, O’Toole will probably lose again.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is only available to our subscribers!
Become a subscriber today!
RegisterAlready a subscriber?
Subscriber Login
Conservatives write. They write, and they say that Erin O’Toole should have won the election, he made too many mistakes, he needs to be replaced, blah blah blah.
They’re wrong. Here’s ten reasons why, gratis.
Erin O’Toole was never going to win the election. Liberal cult leader Justin Trudeau called the election because – way back in August – he was way, way ahead in the polls. Remember? He was in majority territory. He was going to romp to victory, the Opposition didn’t stand a chance, etc. etc. Well, he lost what he wanted the most: a Parliamentary majority. By holding him to that, O’Toole’s Conservatives won.
Erin O’Toole exceeded expectations. Everyone was surprised by that, this writer included. O’Toole had the advantage that my former boss Jean Chretien had: he was underestimated. When you’re underestimated, you can only go up. O’Toole went up – not dramatically, but enough to deny Trudeau a majority.
Erin O’Toole ran a not-bad campaign. Was it perfect? Nope. Was it flawless? No sir. But the Tories ran a campaign that was pretty good (with two notable exceptions, discussed below). His platform launch went well, his tour was error-free, and he had fewer candidate bimbo eruptions than anyone else.
Erin O’Toole wasn’t bad on his feet. Politics generally – and national elections specifically – are hard. They’re not easy, particularly when it’s your first time before the klieg lights. But O’Toole had been underestimated, as noted above, and he had been practicing for the big time – a lot. It showed.
Erin O’Toole looked pretty good. He lost a lot of weight. He looked comfortable. And he looked like he was having fun, too. Early on, O’Toole’s team decided to set up a professional-looking TV studio at Ottawa’s Westin hotel, and O’Toole shot a lot of videos there, and he looked…professional. Trudeau, meanwhile, was outside a lot, looking sweaty and angsty, with puny crowds and people shouting at him.
Erin O’Toole had good debates. He surprised the perpetually-angry/resentful/humiliated French media with his facility with their language. In the two French debates, he didn’t just play defence – he was comfortable enough going on the offence, too. And, in the single English debate – as with all of his TV appearances – O’Toole kept cool, per Marshall McLuhan’s maxim.
Erin O’Toole recovered from mistakes well. The worst errors in politics, in the Kinsellian Rule Book, are the self-inflicted ones. O’Toole’s promise to keep legal the weapon used in the Montreal and Nova Scotia massacres was stupid, stupid, stupid. So, too, his unwillingness to promise – as Ontario Premier Doug Ford has – to green-light only those candidates who are fully vaccinated. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But O’Toole pivoted away from both mistakes not-badly. He shouldn’t have made those mistakes in the first place – but he survived. Sometimes in politics, mere survival is the biggest win.
Erin O’Toole won’t be underestimated again – but he’ll be more ready. (Is that grammatical? More ready? How about readier? Readiest? Anyway, you get the drift.) He’s learned how to run a decent national campaign. Next time, he’ll obviously be better at it. Dumping him now means yet another rookie Tory leader, making yet more rookie mistakes mid-campaign. Bad idea.
Erin O’Toole can’t be replaced during a minority government. Okay, well, he can be, but it’s a dumb idea. Justin Trudeau, who has no soul, will take full and frequent advantage of a Conservative Party at war with itself. The instant he sees that Tories are divided, he’ll engineer a pretext for another election. Don’t fall into that trap.
Erin O’Toole seems to be a decent guy. Sure, yes: I know the maxim – in politics, nice guys finish last. But it’s not true. I’ve proudly worked for Jean Chretien and Dalton McGuinty – two HOAGS (Hell Of A Guy). We were able to secure six Parliamentary majorities with those HOAG-y good guys. Oftentimes, good guys finish first.
Will the Tories listen to me? Of course not.
Nobody listens to me.
Warren Kinsella was chairman of the war rooms for five of Chretien and McGuinty’s victories.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
The urban-rural divide is the underlying current in our politics.
In the 2021 election, the Liberals swept urban and largely suburban Canada, particularly in Ontario. They also lost rural seats they’d narrowly won in 2019, and got swept away in the ones they lost that year. Liberal losses – including King—Vaughan in Ontario where I helped run Election Day – occurred in semi-rural ridings, according to the Canadian Press.
That CP report nailed it by simply recording the results and letting them speak for themselves:
“The Liberals held onto their strongholds in Canada’s largest cities, winning 22 out of 24 ridings in the Montreal area and all of Toronto’s 25 ridings. The Liberals also won nine out of 10 seats in the Ottawa-Gatineau area and flipped three ridings in the Vancouver area. They also won all the ridings in the Halifax area and picked up a riding in each of Calgary and Edmonton.”
As my friend Tim Krupa told Politico, “The urban-rural divide is real. And it’s always beneficial to have a diversity of views in the government and caucus, and I believe that perspective can also be offered in a variety of ways through the party, and through the government”.
As a municipal councillor for a suburban and rural community, this divide fascinates and worries me.
That CP story spoke to various professors about the urbane feel of the Liberals and the more rural instincts of the Tories, pointing to childcare versus gun control as focuses.
But the problems are deeper than that.
We risk divides and we risk being a country where urban Canada thrives with a creative class, yet one that forces young people to look further afield for affordable homes, and then rural Canada lacks the infrastructure of a big city, not just in terms of transit or roads but also broadband.
Of course, this is global; we saw it with Trump, we saw it with Brexit.
But a Liberal renaissance in rural Canada or a Tory revival in urban is more than good politics. It is also important for a strong sense of faith in the national government.
Erin O’Toole tried to modernize and moderate his party. He started with a standing start, and it was complicated by his own leadership race where he advocated that he would be the most right-wing candidate. But his instinct was right: to grow in the suburbs and urban Canada, to appeal to new Canadians. He failed in the execution.
What is Justin Trudeau to do to appeal to rural Canadians? Some work can be done on pushing a conservationist approach to environmental policy, but simply delivering more broadband isn’t sufficient. It’s also about tone, style and respect, allowing rural voters to feel like they are heard and not regarded somehow as lesser.
That’s a bit of a nebulous diagnostic comment, but it’s an important one. Get results, lecture less, might be another way to put it. That doesn’t mean progressive policies around equity should be sacrificed, just that a focus on bread and butter issues might help.
At the end of the day, building a strong country requires strong urban centres, dynamic suburbs and thriving rural areas, the latter of which feed the former two. Good agricultural policy, good infrastructure investments, good ministers who get rural life, and environmental protection – all these efforts matter.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
When you’ve worked in politics or journalism for a while, you kind of lose your idealism, you know?
In particular, you sometimes lose track of what got you into those things in the first place.
It happens because, in politics and journalism, you get exposed so regularly to the very worst in human nature. Lying, deceit, wrongdoing: you see a lot of it. Too much of it.
So you develop ways to cope. Some drink, some do drugs, some screw around. But most everyone in politics and journalism lose some (or all) of their passion. They get tired, they get cynical.
Most of all, they lose their capacity to feel outrage.
Having dabbled in both politics and journalism, I sometimes feel like that. That – after seeing too many scandals and hearing too many lies – I can’t feel actual outrage anymore.
You know, outrage. The dictionary people all define it as “a feeling of anger and shock.” Not anger or shock. Both.
That’s what I felt when my colleague Brian Lilley called me, Thursday, to tell me where Justin Trudeau was. I had just gotten off the line with my Indigenous daughter, and I thought Brian was joking, at first. But he wasn’t.
Justin Trudeau was in B.C., on a surfer’s beach. That’s what Brian Lilley told me.
What was astonishing about that was twofold. One, the Office of the Prime Minister had flat-out, bald-faced lied about where he was. They issued an official statement, on PMO letterhead and everything, that said Trudeau was in Ottawa.
He wasn’t. He was three provinces to the West.
But here’s the other reason why it was such a shock – why it has whipped up a tsunami of anger and rage: Justin Trudeau was surfing on the very first Truth and Reconciliation Day.
The day that his government declared to commemorate, chiefly, the wrongful deaths of thousands of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada. Children and babies, thrown in unmarked graves, like they were garbage. That day.
Here’s what Justin Trudeau said about the day set aside – by him! – for Truth and Reconciliation. Here’s his own words: “Today, I invite everyone across the country to recognize and observe the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It is a day to reflect on the painful and lasting impacts of residential schools in Canada, and to honour survivors, their families, and their communities. It is also a day to remember the many children who never returned home, and an opportunity for us all to learn more, and to affirm the need for reconciliation and commit ourselves to the work ahead.”
A day to “reflect on the pain.” A day to “honour survivors.” A day – he actually said this – “to remember the many children who never returned home.”
Who says things like that – who gives pious, sanctimonious speeches like that – and then lies about where he is, and goes surfing? Who would dare to do such a thing?
When I expressed my anger and my shock online – when I expressed my sincerely-held, bona fide, in-my-bones outrage – some Conservatives sniffed. It didn’t surprise them, they said. It isn’t anything new, they said.
They made me almost as outraged as Justin Trudeau had. In a way, they had become as cynical and misanthropic as Trudeau has.
What can you say, when a leader debases himself like this? What can you do? History helps.
History, you see, doesn’t record whether Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman went golfing when US soldiers discovered thousands of Jewish bodies at the Nazi killing center in Dachau in April 1945. Nor do the historians have a record of Winston Churchill cheerfully puttering around in his garden when, also in April 1945, Britishtroops found 60,000 Jews starving at the Bergen-Belsen death camp – and where at least that many had been slaughtered.
History doesn’t have a record of those things, because no true leader would have dared do something like that. You know: slinking away to go surfing on the actual day set aside to remember dead Indigenous children.
Justin Trudeau is not a real leader. He is a disgrace. He is a deceiver. He is a delinquent.
And he is profoundly, irredeemably, deserving of this:
Outrage.
[Kinsella was Jean Chrétien’s special assistant.]
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
This content is restricted to subscribers
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
