, 03.31.2022 11:53 AM

My latest: he’s not a dictator, FFS

Look, Justin Trudeau is many things.

He’s disinterested in ethics, as evidenced by his appalling conduct in serial scandals — the Aga Khan, SNC-Lavalin, the WE “charity.”

He’s indifferent to real racism, as evidenced by his willingness, as an adult, to wear racist blackface and thereby mock Black people.

He’s dishonest — as seen just last week, when he did a backroom deal to create a NDP-Liberal coalition government, after having repeatedly promised to never do such a thing.

The Liberal prime minister is many, many things. But a dictator?

That’s what a Conservative MP thinks he is. She got up on her hind legs in the House of Commons this week and called him that. Lethbridge’s elected voice in Parliament, Rachael Thomas, said “many Canadians” agree Justin Trudeau meets the dictionary definition of “dictator.”

Now, Thomas didn’t cite any polling or research to back up her claim. We don’t even know if she consulted with the good people of Lethbridge (who this week lost a truly honest and decent representative, former Senator Joyce Fairbairn, who succumbed to Alzheimer’s after many years of suffering).

What Thomas said was neither honest nor decent. It was deeply stupid. Trudeau can be fairly accused of many, many misdeeds (see above). But is it really necessary to liken him to real dictators, like Russia’s monster, Vladimir Putin, or China’s, Xi Jinping? Really?

Now, we shouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of idiocy coming from Thomas. Just a few weeks ago, she was again in the news — for posting an InfoWars-style nutbar video.

In it, Thomas said that vaccinated people were more likely to get COVID-19 (false). She said that taking a daily rapid test was safer than getting vaccinated (false). And she said that vaccines did not protect against the Omicron variant (false).

We shouldn’t, however, get too upset about anything Rachael Thomas has to say. As her province’s premier, Jason Kenney, said about her “dictator” claim: “I disagree with Justin Trudeau on the vast majority of issues. I think he’s been too quick to use extraordinary powers like the Emergencies Act. But for all of that, I think it’s unhelpful and corrosive to suggest that that he operates like, let’s say, the president of China or the president of Russia.”

It is indeed unhelpful and corrosive. And other MPs have done the same sort of thing in the past. Liberal MPs Carolyn Bennett, Hedy Fry and Pablo Rodriguez, to cite three examples, all called a Conservative prime minister “a dictator.”

Along with being inaccurate and stupid, it’s unhelpful. Because, in politics, language is important. Labels, too. As Kenney notes, the strongest criticisms should be reserved for the clearest cases. The most deserving cases.

When everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism. When everyone is a racist, then no one is a racist. When your political adversary is a “dictator,” well, then what’s left to call Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? You’ve kind of exhausted your political thesaurus, at that point.

Justin Trudeau is, as noted, many things. He is deserving of many criticisms. But he’s not a dictator.

Rachael Thomas, however, has revealed herself to be plenty of things, too.

None of them are good.

41 Comments

  1. Darrell McDougall says:

    Trudeau runs the country using the Bermuda Triangle of Liberal power in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. He is a dictator and is propped up by NDP. I just read your article “Bankin’ on hubris” and it is my opinion that you are doing Canadian citizens a disservice by justifying unsustainable federal debt to achieve nothing but high inflation that only hurts the lower income people. This current Liberal government only governs for Liberal supporting provinces, as an Albertan I feel that their policies are extremely out of touch with reality. It does not help the the Liberals have a state broadcaster to support their corruptness and keep feeding us fake news. Every European leader walked out of his speech to the EU and called him an “Authortarian Dictator”. WAKE UP Warren before it is too late, The West will seperate or better yet, kick Quebec out of our federation!

    • Darrell,

      It’s not with chestnuts like that that the West will get its precious equalization formula modifications. Better luck next time!

      As for separation, don’t make me laugh. They remind me of a barking dog. None of them have the actually balls to say Adios and that’s why the Laurentian Elite are continually falling over laughing all the way to the bank. They KNOW AB, SK, MB and BC will never exit, period.

    • Derek Pearce says:

      I don’t know what cocoon of media you live in Darrell but “every EU leader” did NOT walk out on Trudeau’s speech. The only couple of members of the EU parliament who criticized him are in fact nutso far-right conspiracy theorists who don’t believe in Covid. So thanks for showing us what company you keep. Next.

  2. Katherine says:

    Good Piece and accurate about ethics and lying. Also, the childish Black Face dress-up a time or three, however, it seems if you do criticize him on Social media you are at risk of being blocked for not meeting “community standards” – since I called him Mr. Snazzy socks and photos ops, punctuated with smirks, I have been in FB jail, and I mentioned his mother’s love from freedom in a post cause I witnessed her free spirit in Toronto Clubs back in the day. Not allowed by the social media police.

  3. The Doctor says:

    Totally I agree. I think JT is a vapid cheeseball, but it’s just ridiculous to label someone who won power through a perfectly free and fair election, and whose party will again be running in a perfectly free and fair election, as a dictator.

    One of the ways in which the age of social media is destroying people’s brains is the way that partisan political rhetoric is permanently cranked up to hyperbole level 11 these days. Anyone you don’t like is a dictator. Any time somebody does something you don’t like, they’re committing genocide of some sort. And so on.

  4. Sean says:

    Justin is the kind of guy who convenes committees to find out whether BIPOC LGBTQ lumberjacks deserve apologies in three official languages rather than four official languages. Not dictator material.

  5. Pedant says:

    Bills C11 and C36 will soon be passed which will criminalize conservative speech, or any speech deemed harmful to the government. Any article, protest, report, tweet or off the cuff joke that inconveniences the Liberals will be reflexively labelled hate speech and its “perpetrators” heavily fined or thrown in prison for thought crimes. A vast bureaucracy will be set up to scour the Internet for Canada-based sites and users that deviate from the Liberal compelled speech directive. The only escape will be emigration, and I suspect the Liberals are about to make that process much more onerous.

    You think I’m exaggerating? After the Liberals seized the bank accounts of political opponents?

  6. Gilbert says:

    I won’t call Justin Trudeau a dictator, but it seems he has little respect for democracy. He wants people to get an injection that makes the pharmaceutical industry very rich, gives the media lots of money, doesn’t work much, freezes bank accounts, insults those who don’t support him and admires China’s basic dictatorship. That makes him a very bad PM.

    • Derek Pearce says:

      No one is forcing you to get vaccinated. You have the choice to not get vaccinated but not get on a plane, or get vaccinated to protect your fellow passengers and get on a plane. The bank accounts frozen were those supporting an unlawful insurrection.* And as for insulting those who don’t support him, have you heard of a guy called Jason Kenney? I can’t stand Trudeau but every point you listed is a red herring.
      * How much you wanna bet that going forward, any and all Conservative govt’s will freeze the accounts of pipeline protesters?

  7. Bennett, Fry and Rodriguez: the two empresses and emperor of “lateral” moves…

  8. Anton Strocel says:

    I’m a Canadian who has moved to the USA so I get to watch from afar. There should be no question in anyone’s mind that nearly everything trudeau does, is harmful to the country. Using the word “dictator” to describe him is probably the kindest word I could come up with to describe this ignorant manchild. Your attempt at playing with words is definitely not helpful.

    • The Doctor says:

      Kind of ironic, given that the 45th President of the Utopia that you’re currently living in wanted to illegally seize power by fraudulently invalidating the results of a free and fair democratic election. You know, the kind of thing that actual dictators do.

  9. Anton Strocel says:

    There aren’t enough bad descriptions in the English language to describe this ignorant manchild! Calling him a dictator is a very minimal description of what this idiot really is. The world sees him as totally inadequate and incompetent, so why are the Canadians so dumb to have elected him twice!

  10. These open-upsters just kill me. So…they’re all opening up and dropping restrictions and surprise, surprise, COVID’s SIXTH wave is on the way. What dolts.

    Anyone with a brain already knows that you never, ever, open up and lift restrictions until all COVID variants have been eradicated. Period.

    That gang…representative of Einstein’s theory of doing the exact same thing and somehow expecting different results. In short, so much of the political class with beans for brains.

    Meanwhile, every day at work we find out about another client, transport company rep or other who contracted Omicron the same day. Waiting for news on Deltacron. It’s coming.

    • Steve T says:

      Until all COVID variants have been eradicated? So basically, you are saying we never open up.

      Variants will continue to develop so long as there are cases of COVID – just like variants of the flu occur every year. To eliminate them, you would need to have a “COVID zero” strategy in every country on the face of the earth. That will never happen, and even the countries that have tried (China, most notably) aren’t successful.

      You can critique the pace at which re-opening occurred, but it is crazy to think we will ever “eradicate” COVID.

    • Paige says:

      Inconceivable that all COVID variants will all be eradicated. Period. Ever. So are we to never ever open up and lift restrictions?

      • Steve,
        Paige,

        Maybe so. It could ultimately turn into a chronic yearly condition such as the seasonal flu but in the final analysis it becomes a value judgment. How many waves of future deaths becomes medically and socially acceptable? Is it the yearly worldwide death rate from the flu, or less than that? Over 6 million dead and counting tells me that opening up now without precautions such as masks, social distancing and hand washing is asking for at least another million dead
        And yes, that’s only MY value judgment.

        • Taking it down to brass tacks: society long ago made a collective judgment that those who don’t get the yearly flu shot and die as a result are expendable. That death rate is acceptable and I don’t buy it.

          And now the collective is well on its way to applying that same value judgment to corona viruses and their death rates. I will never buy that. The present variants are still far too transmissable to allow for a carte blanche opening up. Period, exclamation point.

  11. Douglas W says:

    The current Liberal government:
    • Brainless Prime Minister
    • Underachieving cabinet
    • Spineless caucus

    Ruthless PMO. Extremely ruthless.

    Okay, so you’re not comfortable, calling the PM a dictator.

    So how would you describe this government?

    • Warren says:

      If you read 10 fucking words of what I have written about Trudeau, you know the answer to that question already.

      And if you lived in a real fucking dictatorship, neither of us would be printing this stuff on the Internet.

      Grow up.

  12. Peter Williams says:

    Calling Trudeau a dictator is wrong, but calling Harper a dictator seems to be ok.

  13. Yup. They’d be far too busy shooting or poisoning us à la Putin.

  14. Paige says:

    Not a dictator but through the pandemic and the effective neutralizing of political opposition at all levels has had the opportunity to explore the pros and cons of a command and control administration and economy.
    I’ll leave judgment of whether any or all of the actions of the executive were positive or negative. But one thing is clear.
    The average citizen HATED IT

  15. R. Marut says:

    Invited his admired basic Chi-com troops to Canada but was slapped down by the real men of the Royal Canadian Military People.
    Tried to be a big shot just like (step)dad by introducing his own me-too Emergency Act and made an even greater fool of himself than Nature did.
    Attempted to introduce an updated version of the Enabling Act of 1933 but was stared down by the menacing Andrew Scheer.
    Smeared anyone who wouldn’t kiss his cowardly trust-fund arse, then hid from the heavily armed truckers at Harrington.
    Not a dictator. A chickenshit wannabee, without the guts to ever do anything about it.

  16. Derek Pearce says:

    Well there’s no hope for the commenters under the video on YouTube. They literally (and I mean LITERALLY, not figuratively) don’t know the definition of a dictator. They hate the guy, I get it, I do too. THAT DOESN’T MAKE HIM A DICTATOR.

    This is one of those days that makes me think what this planet needs is a good meteor impact. Sigh. Time to go for a walk and get some fresh air lol.

    • The Doctor says:

      I’m reminded of that story that ran in the Globe a couple of days ago about our Senators getting inundated by these idiotic letters from people who thought their CPP etc. was going to be taken away because the Senate was going to look into the possibility of a minimum basic income. All kinds of conspiracy-laded idiocy in these letters, just because a bunch of partisan nuts on social media had gone into overdrive.

      One of the quotes from one of the Senators was something to the effect that the combination of COVID isolation and way too much time spent on social media had simply broken a lot of people.

      • Doc,

        Our office libertarian’s mental health has definitely been affected by her non-vaccinated status. Ditto one person in my family who has been basically isolated for two years. His anxiety is now off the charts. COVID-19 is not only a humongous health crisis but probably the biggest collective mental health crisis in Canadian history.

        • The Doctor says:

          Totally agree. I think all of us have at least one person in our social circle who has become noticeably unhinged over the last two years. Particularly with respect to political and/or social media statements.

  17. Scot says:

    Haven’t been here for a while. A real cesspool of rabid right wingers commenting. Almost as bad as twitter. How about more of your decent art and less whacko’s.

    • Warren says:

      Come in back and push back on the ones you disagree with. You’re welcome anytime. Ball’s in your court.

    • Scot,

      Believe me when I say that we “rabid right wingers” actually missed you. But remember why Warren put you in the penalty box: don’t do like the Martinites did and attack people, in our case commentators. Attack our ideas instead. Now, if you still don’t get that, or can’t break the habit, I’ll wager you won’t be here long.

    • The Doctor says:

      From a reading comprehension perspective, I find it interesting that you find all of the above comments to be “a real cesspool of rabid right wingers”.

      • Scot says:

        I would think it patently obvious I’m not talking about Ronald and the Doctor and likely a few others. I could easily debate them. These new gen whacko’s are impervious to common sense and I avoid them now for my own peace of mind. Having said that I may just take up Warren’s offer.

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