Featuring host John Moore, Newstalk star Jerry Agar, and my friend John Tory Jr.
My morning rant, as captured on Twitter, and mooted on the 1010 Roundtable: why are the streets and sidewalks still full of snow – and there is nary a snowflake on the bike lanes no one ever uses?
This is historic.
Guilty of promoting hate against Jews – and, historically, against women.
Victory!
Justin Trudeau said he’d support indigenous leaders.
He didn’t.
Justin Trudeau said he’s a feminist.
He isn’t.
Justin Trudeau is a terrific actor, however. There he was, after his latest cabinet shuffle, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He almost sounded offended.
Demoting a competent, smart, inspiring indigenous woman like Jody Wilson-Raybould – as the Liberal leader had literally done, just minutes before inside Rideau Hall – wasn’t a demotion at all, he huffed. There can be no greater honour than working with Canada’s veterans, he insisted.
And if some other Prime Minister had said it, it’d be partly true: it is an honour assisting the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces. But under Trudeau, it was a lie. Under him, Veteran’s Affairs has become a political landfill. Under him, veterans have been disregarded, disrespected, and litigated against in the courts.
So, everyone recognized Trudeau’s claim for what it was, which was unadulterated bullshit.
This was the truth: Jody Wilson-Raybould was demoted – as she effectively later confirmed herself, in her own words, with an extraordinary statement to the constituents who first elected her in 2015. She’d been dumped. She’d been rendered PNG – persona non grata, to appropriate a phrase from The PMO Kid’s fave TV show, The Americans.
Why? Because she threatened them.
Leaving aside her gender, leaving aside her indigenous heritage, Wilson-Raybould was simply the most effective Minister of Justice in a long, long time. And she was insufficiently deferential to Justin Trudeau and the grievance-nurturing children who comprise his entourage. Or, as a Maclean’s writer memorably called them, “a tiny cadre of out-of-their-league staffers operating out of the Building Formerly Known as Langevin.”
Jody Wilson-Raybould spoke truth to power, as she herself said. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, as was well-known. She was impatient for change – for women, for the forgotten, for First Nations people.
But Justin Trudeau and his oxymoronic brain trust – who always regard dissent as treason, and who always see themselves alone as the stewards of all that is good and true and Canadian – didn’t like that. They didn’t like that at all.
As “feminists,” as those who claim to empower all women, their most revealing moment came last Summer, when it was confirmed that Justin Trudeau had groped a female reporter at a long-ago festival in B.C. Trudeau’s response?
Believe women when they come forward. Just, you know, don’t believe that woman. Support women who are victimized by men.
Just not that one.
Jody Wilson-Raybould has achieved plenty in her career, as a wildly-successful lawyer, as a Crown Attorney, as the leader of the B.C. Treaty Commission, as the Grand Chief of her home province. She knows Trudeau’s type, one suspects. All capable women do.
Justin Trudeau – who was the beneficiary of the most inept Conservative and New Democratic election campaigns in a generation – is entirely that type. He was born to immense wealth, was elected due to his surname, and never held a Parliamentary position more senior than the youth critic for the third party in the House of Commons.
But as an actor – as the willing receptacle for bland, beige talking points, wheedled out of a focus group somewhere – he is without equal. He is indisputably the Phoney-in-Chief, and he is exceptionally good at it.
Will female voters be offended by Trudeau’s ritual knifing of Jody Wilson-Raybould? It’s unlikely, for now. With Andrew Scheer’s social media still churning out frat boy bumpersticker stuff – and with Jagmeet Singh continuing his downward descent into irrelevance – female voters, historically reliably liberal, will keep their powder dry.
Will indigenous leaders turn against Trudeau for what he did to Jody Wilson-Raybould? That seems more likely. Across Canada, indigenous leaders are increasingly muttering to each other that, at least with Stephen Harper, he was always truthful about his disinterest in their issues. Justin Trudeau, they say, cheerily says one thing to them, and then does another.
And what of Jody Wilson-Raybould? She should resist the temptation to quit – because that’s what Trudeau and his acolytes want her to do. She should do her new job well, bide her time, and wait for her moment.
Her leadership moment. It is coming.
And, she should always remember this: smart, capable women are used to dealing with insecure boy-men who have more power than brains.
Jody Wilson-Raybould is just the latest.
With Justin Trudeau, she won’t be the last.
It’s the hat.
The initial coverage of the Kentucky Catholic kid and the Indigenous veteran decidedly favoured the latter over the former. A short video of the pair was everywhere, and the outrage was everywhere, too: the kid in the Make America Great Again hat had treated the Indian – that’s what Americans still call Indigenous people – with disrespect, or worse. The fact that it involved fourteen and fifteen-year-olds didn’t matter.
Anyway. A longer video has emerged, and I believe it tells a somewhat different story. You can see it here.
I don’t know which narrative will end up dominating. Like Charles Adler, Keith Baldrey (and other journalists I respect) have said, this mess doesn’t look as clear-cut to me, now. It’s harder to assign blame. Which then raises a key question: why did so many – me included – immediately believe the kid was the bad guy?
Because of the hat, that’s why.
He’s a kid, and I don’t expect him to be as sophisticated about politics and culture as the readers of this web site are. But the kid’s parents? And the D.C. field trip’s chaperons? And his teachers, at that private, all-boys, mostly-white private school in Kentucky? They have no excuse. None.
Letting hundreds of boys run around Washington wearing MAGA hats is profoundly, deeply stupid. It’s making a political statement, and every one of them knows it.
In the past two years – because, yes, it has been two years since that white supremacist cheated his way into the White House with the assistance of the similarly-racist Russians – that hat has become as distinctive as a Klansman’s white robes or a neo-Nazi’s stiff-arm fascist salute. It is much more than a hat, now.
Ask a neo-Nazi. Ask a committed racist. They’ll tell you: it means Make America White Again.
It’s the “again” that changes the meaning. Studies have been written about it. If Trump had said “Make America Great,” he would’ve sounded like any other politician. It’s the addition of that final word – plus Trump’s personal history of racism, because other, decent Republicans have used the phrase, too – that suggests going back to an earlier time. When things were whiter. When things were Christian. When fathers ran America.
As one writer put it:
Perhaps the kid didn’t actually mean to intimidate that indigenous veteran. Perhaps the veteran was a bit wrong in his assessment of the situation. Perhaps the media got it wrong.
Perhaps, perhaps. About that hat, however, there can be no doubt anymore: it means something.
And what it means, now, is hate.
And this is the part where I’m actually calm.
Justin Trudeau said he’d support indigenous leaders.
He didn’t.
Justin Trudeau said he’s a feminist.
He isn’t.
Justin Trudeau is a terrific actor, however. There he was, after his latest cabinet shuffle, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He almost sounded offended.
Demoting a competent, smart, inspiring indigenous woman like Jody Wilson-Raybould – as the Liberal leader had literally done, just minutes before inside Rideau Hall – wasn’t a demotion at all, he huffed. There can be no greater honour than working with Canada’s veterans, he insisted.
And if some other Prime Minister had said it, it’d be partly true: it is an honour assisting the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces. But under Trudeau, it was a lie. Under him, Veteran’s Affairs has become a political landfill. Under him, veterans have been disregarded, disrespected, and litigated against in the courts.
So, everyone recognized Trudeau’s claim for what it was, which was unadulterated bullshit.
So:
And that’s just this week.
Meanwhile, the commentariat wonder why some of us are thinking about voting Green. Wonder no more, etc.
The puzzle that is Jagmeet Singh: what are we to do with you, Jagmeet?
Andrew Coyne has a typically thoughtful piece in today’s National Post about the erstwhile New Democratic leader. Mr. Coyne:
It is safe to say Singh has not proved quite the rock star New Democrats hoped when they elected him leader in October 2017. Undertaker would be closer to the mark. While the party trundles along at a little under 17 per cent in the polls, about its historic average, Singh himself is in single digits, slightly behind Elizabeth May as Canadians’ choice for prime minister.
Singh’s trajectory is a cautionary tale on the importance of experience in politics. With just six years in the Ontario legislature, Singh was barely ready for the job of provincial leader, still less the much sharper scrutiny to which federal leaders are subject. It has showed.
He appears frequently to be poorly briefed, on one memorable occasion having to ask a member of caucus, in full view of the cameras, what the party position was on a particular issue. He badly mishandled what should have been a softball question on where he stood on Sikh terrorism, and alienated many in the party with his knee-jerk expulsion of Saskatchewan MP Erin Weir for what appeared to be no worse a crime than standing too close to women at parties.
I write about him in next week’s Hill Times, too. This what I say:
Jagmeet Singh is the worst federal party leader since Stockwell Day. He has led his party to historic lows in public opinion. And his political instincts – as seen in his caucus relations, his policy stands, and his byzantine approach to securing seat in the House of Commons – are non-existent.
So, we’re all agreed on one point: Jagmeet Singh has been a disaster.
Another point of agreement: the Conservatives tend to win when the NDP do better than they’re doing under Singh’s reign of error. Conversely, the Liberals tend to win when the NDP do what they’re doing now, which is dropping like a proverbial stone. That’s a Canadian political truism.
Anyway, those are the points of agreement. Where I diverge with Professor Coyne is here: I divine no logic – none – in the way the parties are treating the Burnaby South by-election. Unlike the learned Coyne, I cannot observe the outlines of any brilliant strategy at work, here. To wit:
None of it makes any sense to me. It’s all stupid. Unlike Mr. Coyne, I can attribute no grand strategic vision to any of this. It’s a shambles, for all the parties. And it recalls the very first Kinsellian Political Rule™:
Never discount the possibility they did it because they’re just, you know, stupid.
My first book in the X Gang series, Recipe For Hate, is up for another award this year – the White Pine Award – and I’m honoured to be considered with so many amazing authors and books.
Also amazing: the kids at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary in the Hammer did a display depicting scenes from Recipe For Hate, and it is totally awesome. Their tweet is here and some photos of their work are below. (Another book, Black Chuck, also provided inspiration.)
The White Pine Award gets decided in May. Win or lose, it is so cool to see something you write get interpreted in this way by others.
Some of the reviews of Recipe For Hate are here.
As the new school year begins, I was wondering where I was a decade ago this week.
For one thing, I was getting ready to square off in court against a far-Right former diplomat who had sued the CBC and me for libel. We – assisted by the amazing Scott Hutchinson – won at trial, we won at appeal, and we won all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada.
But I was also starting to work for Michael Ignatieff as an outside advisor (but not for long). And one of the things we were doing, ten years ago, was making full and frequent use of the Interweebs – in a way that the Conservatives simply weren’t.
Here’s one such effort, posted under our GritGirl moniker. Wonder if this sort of message could be reprised in 2019?