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The stench of death.

That’s the colourful phrase some politicos use — uncharitably, but not inaccurately — to describe a campaign in its death throes.

Justin Trudeau’s campaign? It’s not in the proverbial morgue, yet. But it’s definitely lingering near the Intensive Care Unit.

The Last Rites no longer seem impossible.

How can you tell if a political party’s election campaign is dying?

Well, there’s the big things, like when a Trudeau cabinet minister calls the Taliban — who literally killed 158 Canadians — “our brothers.”

You know, the Taliban: the actual terrorist organization that subjugates, enslaves and rapes women.

Trudeau’s minister for “women and gender equality,” Maryam Monsef, called them “our brothers” yesterday.

She did that.

For the Trudeau Liberals, that represented a really, really bad day on the campaign trail.

Whatever else they wanted to announce was blown up by Monsef’s outrageous, disgusting statement.

But that’s kind of how the Trudeau campaign has gone, this time. Something has gone wrong every single day. To wit:

• Pre-election: On August 12, Theresa Tam announced Canada was in a 4th wave of the pandemic. Trudeau went ahead with the election call anyway.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8107100/fourth-wave-covid-19-canada-dr-theresa-tam/  

• August 15: Trudeau calls election just  as Kabul falls to the Taliban. Any other Prime Minister would’ve waited. Not Trudeau: he wants his majority, and to Hell with the consequences.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/world/trudeau-announces-withdrawal-of-canadian-diplomats-from-afghanistan/2021/08/15/9f2cdad5-f648-44a0-823d-db35d0276dc0_video.html 

• August 16: Trudeau and Global Affairs minister Marc Garneau refuses to say if Canada will recognize the Taliban as a government.  Wouldn’t that have been the, um, brotherly thing to do?
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-otoole-wont-recognize-taliban-government-trudeau-says-lets-wait-and-see 

• August 16: The federal Public Service Union opposes Trudeau’s vaccine mandate for federal employees. Trudeau can’t say if or how it would be enforced.  Oops.
https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/corbella-trudeau-falls-into-his-own-forced-vaccination-trap-that-he-set-for-otoole 

• August 18: Maryam “Taliban Brothers” Monsef posts a Twitter thread accusing O’Toole of being anti-abortion. He isn’t.  But the Trudeau campaign won’t ever let the facts get in the way of the daily smear. Onward and downward.
https://twitter.com/MaryamMonsef/status/1428121957308981249?s=20  

• August 19: Tweets surface of a star Liberal candidate from Calgary telling Albertans to “Fit in or f— off.”  Albertans look ready to return the favour.
https://twitter.com/MariekeWalsh/status/1428526176549625856?s=20 

• August 19: Trudeau says he doesn’t think about monetary policy – just as StatsCan reports 3.7% inflation in July.
https://financialpost.com/news/election-2021/trudeau-puts-families-ahead-of-monetary-policy-on-priority-list  

• August 20: Canada evacuates 198 people from Afghanistan — while the Americans evacuate 823 on the same kind of plane. Canadian officials fret about seatbelts. Seriously.
https://twitter.com/MercedesGlobal/status/1428750432533368842?s=20  

• August 20: A photo circulates of the Liberal plane in front of “Air Elite” sign. Life imitates art, etc.
https://twitter.com/MVLibertas/status/1428645354048733185?s=20 

• August 20: Trudeau blames Afghan refugees for being unable to get to the Kabul airport. That’s right: he blames The very people he had previously promised to help.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rupa-subramanya-trudeau-blames-afghans-for-not-getting-to-the-airport-fast-enough https://www.youtube.com/embed/u9SBTcejXNA?embed_config={%27relatedChannels%27:%20[],%27autonav%27:true}&autoplay=0&playsinline=1&enablejsapi=1

• August 21: Trudeau does not campaign. A grateful nation rests.
https://twitter.com/AndrewLawton/status/1428883990757380100?s=20 

• August 21: Trudeau minister Mary Ng releases a letter asking O’Toole if he will prohibit his caucus from proposing legislation which bans mandatory vaccinations — when Trudeau himself said for months that he was against mandating vaccinations.
https://twitter.com/mary_ng/status/1429118478192087049?s=20  

• August 22: Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland releases a video of O’Toole  which Twitter says has been manipulated.  Like they used to do for Donald Trump.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/twitter-labels-freeland-tweet-manipulated-media-1.6149734  

• August 22: Video emerges of the aforementioned Freeland at campaign headquarters looking decidedly un-Deputy Prime Ministerial about the fictionalized Conservative healthcare plan.
https://twitter.com/JIMrichards1010/status/1429541022732886021?s=20 

• Same day, August 22: Mr. Health Care, Justin Trudeau, won’t say if he’ll match O’Toole’s healthcare transfers to the provinces.
https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1429557179560992777?s=20  

• August 24: Trudeau threatens a clawback of Saskatchewan health transfers – despite the fact that Quebec has the very same health care approach as Saskatchewan.
https://twitter.com/punditclass/status/1430197147303956482?s=20 

• August 25: The Liberal candidate for Vancouver Granville is found to have engaged in speculative home buying – a day after a big Trudeau announcement…against speculative home buying.
https://www.citynews1130.com/2021/08/25/vancouver-liberal-flipping-homes/

Which brings us to Wednesday, the day the Trudeau government declared that the Taliban terrorist organization were “our brothers.“

Is the Trudeau campaign dead? Not yet, but based upon all available evidence, rumours of its impending death are not exaggerated.

— Warren Kinsella was chair of the federal Liberal war room in 1993 and 2000

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Trudeau and Trump.

There’d always been the similarities between Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump.

You know: Sons of multimillionaires. Celebrated surnames. Chasing aspiring models and actresses. Private schools, privileged lives. Charmed existence.

Charter members of the Lucky Sperm Club, basically.

And now Trump and Trudeau share another distinction: They’ve both been caught spreading mistruths and misinformation on social media. And, when caught, they refused to admit it. They refused to apologize.

Asked about postings made by his deputy prime minister — postings which Twitter labelled as “manipulated media” — Trudeau smirked. He defended what is indisputably, inarguably fake media.

And, in so doing, has created a big problem for himself.

A recap: Chrystia Freeland posted tweets, in English and French, purporting to show Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole answering a question during his party’s leadership race last year and seemingly answering “yes” when asked if he favours privatized health care.

Except he didn’t say that.

In fact, the full video is more than two minutes long and in it, O’Toole stressed that universal health care is paramount. In fact, he said the opposite of what Freeland claimed.

The Liberals had surreptitiously edited the video down to make it seem O’Toole had said something he hadn’t.

For the Liberal war room, it was a disaster. Even Liberal-friendly news outlets like the CBC and the Toronto Star ran critical stories about what Freeland had done. Twitter, for its part, has refused to remove the warning — which its rules say is done in cases where information has been “significantly and deceptively altered or manipulated.”

Did Trudeau apologize for his team’s deception? Did he retract?

Not on your life. Trudeau retweeted Freeland’s disinformation — and then doubled down.

As Trump did so many times — about coronavirus, about his critics, about Joe Biden (who this writer worked for, full disclosure) — Trudeau refused to acknowledge that he and his team had propagated fake news online. He refused to take responsibility for spreading falsehoods.

“Erin O’Toole came out unequivocally for private health care … for-profit health care,” Trudeau said to reporters Monday. “I encourage all Canadians to take a look.”

Some will. Some will come away with the same conclusion as Twitter: It’s bald-faced lie.

Why didn’t Trudeau just apologize and move on? Good question.

Trudeau, like Trump, boasts millions of followers on Twitter. Like Trump, his words and deeds command attention. He runs an entire country, just like Trump did. Maybe he thinks he can get away with it — like Trump apparently thought.

Twitter didn’t, and doesn’t, care about all that. They ultimately kicked Trump off their platform.

In May 2020, Twitter restricted a Trump post for glorifying violence. In the same month, other Trump tweets were cited for violating Twitter’s rules. That June, they removed a Trump tweet for violating copyright.

And then, again in June 2020, Team Trump were cited for “manipulated media” — just like Team Trudeau have been. The label was slapped on a fake CNN broadcast about race-baiting. It could have been argued that the Trump tweet was satirical.

But that can’t be done in the case of the fabricated O’Toole tape. In that case, the manipulation was intentional, methodical and in both official languages. It wasn’t a lame attempt at satire. It was deliberate disinformation. It was fake news.

By refusing to apologize, Justin Trudeau has kicked the story into another day, and possible more.

By refusing to come clean, Justin Trudeau has degenerated into something we thought we’d never see:

Justin Trump.

— Warren Kinsella taught media law and ethics at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law

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Big waves always start off as small waves.

Is the wave that hit Nova Scotia politics this week going to sweep away Justin Trudeau?

It could. (It should.)

Here’s a recap: On Tuesday night, a Nova Scotia election that was supposed to be a foregone conclusion, a sleeper of a contest, very unexpectedly became something else entirely. And thereby shocked many, many pundits, pollsters and politicos.

The so-called experts prognosticated that the Nova Scotia Liberal government was going to be re-elected, handily. Polls showed the Grits with as much as a 28-point lead. But the good people of Nova Scotia had other plans.

The Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives — and they are truly progressive conservatives, more on that in a minute — swept away 15 years of Liberal rule with a left-leaning platform that promised more and better health care. Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservatives captured nearly double the seats won by the Nova Scotia Liberals and were elected with a comfortable majority.

The Nova Scotia Grits, meanwhile, ran a disorganized, lacklustre campaign. Their newly installed leader, Iain Rankin, revealed himself to be the rookie he was — and, at one point, was forced to to admit to drunk-driving charges in 2003 and 2005.

Rankin kept his seat — but a number of senior, veteran Liberal cabinet ministers lost theirs.

What happened?

Well, the pandemic, for starters. Like their federal Liberal cousins, the Nova Scotia Grits were seen as arrogant and complacent. Houston and his New Democrat counterpart, Gary Burrill, zeroed in on Rankin’s health-care shortcomings.

And Houston promised the sorts of things that have become important to voters since COVID-19 hit: A $15 minimum wage, more paid sick days for workers, and rent control.

Another sleeper factor: The cost of living. Pollsters like Abacus — and others who have supplied numbers to this writer without attribution — have identified the rising cost of living as the top issue for voters across Canada.

So, the obvious question: Do the shocking Nova Scotia results portend a big change when Canadians line up to vote next month?

Perhaps not. Voter turnout in Nova Scotia was very low. It’s difficult to draw big conclusions when less than half of eligible voters are showing up to decide who should lead them.

Also: Alternation is real. That is, Canadians — particularly in places like Ontario — will often vote Team Blue at one level of government and then vote Team Red at the other level. Perhaps Tuesday night’s result was a case of Nova Scotians blowing off some steam, only to stay within the federal Liberal fold on Sept. 20.

Maybe. But most of all — and as I always like to say — campaigns matter. The Houston Tories ran a disciplined, smart campaign. The Rankin Grits just didn’t.

Federally, Justin Trudeau’s campaign effort has been as uninspiring as Rankin’s was. On day one he needed to clearly explain why he called an election two years early. He needed to persuade Canadians that calling an election — during a surging pandemic, raging wildfires and a deepening crisis in Afghanistan — was the right thing to do.

He didn’t.

Erin O’Toole has problems of his own — most particularly, an enthusiasm for vaccines, except where his own caucus and candidates are concerned. He’s given them a pass.

But, on Tuesday night, it was Trudeau who may have been hearing footsteps echoing through the halls at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, where he lives. An election campaign that was supposed to be in the bag now, suddenly, looks less so.

Nova Scotia, you started a wave.

And it’s a wave that may well get a lot bigger and sweep away another Liberal government, too.

— Waren Kinsella was chairman of the federal Liberal war room in 1993 and 2000

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It’s easy to get into war.  

Chuck Hagel said that, and he’d know.  Hagel is a much-decorated war hero, an ex-Senator, and the former Secretary of Defense in Barack Obama’s administration.

Hagel wasn’t perfect.  As a Senator, he voted to go to war in Iraq. He later admitted that was a mistake.

And, after 9/11 – the twentieth anniversary of which is just days away – Hagel voted to send troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. As the war ground on, however, Hagel started to express concern.  

Said he: “We cannot view U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan through a lens that sees only ‘winning’ or ‘losing.’ Iraq and Afghanistan are not America’s to win or lose.” 

And, fatefully, Hagel also said: “We can help [Iragis and Afghans] buy time or develop, but we cannot control their fates.”

By 2011, Hagel wanted to “start looking for an exit” in Afghanistan.  “We need to start winding this down, “ he said.

They, we, didn’t.  The war – which saw Canadian involvement from 2011 to 2014, and led to the deaths of 158 courageous Canadian troops – continued apace. Until Joe Biden.

Biden, like Donald Trump, had promised to end the presence of the United States in Afghanistan.  It was a popular promise for both men.  The Afghan conflict had been the longest U.S. war, claiming the lives of 6,500 fighters and a trillion American dollars.

But – and it’s a big but – Americans, and the world, expected that the withdrawal would be conducted in an orderly, safe and timely manner.  For those countries who sent young men and women to Afghanistan – many of whom would not come back alive – we expected the winding down of the war, as Chuck Hagel put it, to be done right.

It wasn’t.

In recent days, those of us in the West have watched events unfolding in Afghanistan in horror. The total collapse of the Afghan military.  Chaos and anarchy everywhere.  Terrible tragedies – such as Afghans literally falling off of departing planes, so desperate have they been to get out.

And, most ominously, the Taliban – the biggest and most feared terrorist organization in the world – now runs an entire country. Those who are knowledgeable about the Taliban foresee them returning to what they did so often in the past – repressing women, crushing dissent, and conducting terror attacks in the West.

The government of Justin Trudeau, practically alone in the civilized world, has refused to rule out recognizing the Taliban terrorists as a legitimate government.  Typically, Trudeau has also overpromised and underdelivered on rescuing those Afghans who assisted the Canadians who served there.

But it is the Joe Biden administration that has failed the most spectacularly.

Speaking to the nation this week in a televised address, the U.S. president was simply awful.  He blamed the Taliban victory on Afghans themselves – and he attempted to shift blame to his predecessors.  He sounded defensive, and chippy, and impatient.

Biden – who I worked for during last year’s presidential race – was decidedly unpresidential.

It gives me no pleasure to say that the Afghanistan fiasco will leave an indelible stain on Joe Biden’s administration.  Unlike John F. Kennedy after Bay of Pigs, or Ronald Reagan after the Iran-Contra mess, Biden didn’t take responsibility. He tried to shift blame.  He tried to dodge the truth.

And the truth, as Chuck Hagel also once said, is that it’s easy to get into war.

But it’s never easy to get out.

[Kinsella was Jean Chretien’s special assistant]

 

 

 

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It’s unnecessary. It’s unwanted.

And it’s been imposed on us by a Prime Minister who is unfit.

Because, make no mistake: Unfit he is. Untrustworthy and unethical, too.

He swore he was a “feminist” while neglecting to mention to other Liberals that he’d groped a woman in BC. He pledged to fight racism when he’d remained silent about video evidence that he’d worn racist blackface multiple times.

He insisted he’d be scandal-free and then he became the first sitting Prime Minister to be found guilty of violating federal statutes. Oh, and his myriad other promises, like balancing the budget or getting clean water to Indigenous people?

Those were all untruths, too.

He’s the UnPrime Minister. And this will be the UnElection.

Because we don’t want an election now. We don’t need an election now.

Vast swaths of the country have been literally on fire. Thousands have been forced out of their homes, or — like my brother and his family in rural B.C. — they are waiting for the order to evacuate.

The situation has gotten bad enough that people in Nova Scotia have smelled smoke — smoke that has wafted East from far-away BC.

And the virus, the cruel, unkillable virus. It’s surging again, pretty much everywhere. And Canadians are getting sick again — and some are dying from it.

In the past week alone, due to the Delta variant, Covid infections have exploded by 60% across Canada. That’s the worst it has been in months.

As former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould put it on Twitter, it’s the “#DeltaElection.”

In Afghanistan, the people who helped saved Canadian lives when we had troops there desperately need our help – but Justin Trudeau is doing less than zero.  And his Foreign Affairs minister is refusing to rule out recognizing the Taliban as a legitimate government.

And into this morass Justin Trudeau wants to force an election? Why?

Because he thinks he can win back the majority government he squandered. Because he thinks his opponents aren’t as good as him.

Because of his ego, essentially.

His ego is immense. It is vast. It is without limit. He is known to sit on government jets, reviewing his Instagram photos. Not his briefing books.

And the evidence was right there, for all to see. For months, his vaccine acquisition effort was an unmitigated fiasco.

He tried to do a deal with a hostile foreign power, the Chinese while the Chinese were illegally detaining two innocent Canadian men. And when that vaccine deal predictably fell apart, he hid the evidence from us for months, thereby losing critical time. And Canadian lives.

For months, we lagged far behind our allies in vaccinating citizens. And we are only now near the front of the vaccination pack because of the determination of Canadians themselves, not the feckless, reckless Prime Minister.

His record, his performance, his values all combine to produce one irreducible, irrefutable truth: he is unfit of the high office he has held, improbably, for half a decade. He is unqualified and unfit.

Is he unelectable? Only you, Canadian voters, can answer that question.

Because the unElection has begun.

Kinsella was chairman of the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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It’s unnecessary. It’s unwanted.

And it’s been imposed on us — commencing this weekend, according to a Reuters report — by a Prime Minister who is unfit.

Because, make no mistake: Unfit he is. Untrustworthy and unethical, too.

He swore he was a “feminist” while neglecting to mention to other Liberals that he’d groped a woman in BC. He pledged to fight racism when he’d remained silent about video evidence that he’d worn racist blackface multiple times.

He insisted he’d be scandal-free and then he became the first sitting Prime Minister to be found guilty of violating federal statutes. Oh, and his myriad other promises, like balancing the budget or getting clean water to Indigenous people?

Those were all untruths, too.

He’s the UnPrime Minister. And this will be the UnElection.

Because we don’t want an election now. We don’t need an election now.

Vast swaths of the country have been literally on fire. Thousands have been forced out of their homes, or — like my brother and his family in rural B.C. — they are waiting for the order to evacuate.

The situation has gotten bad enough that people in Nova Scotia have smelled smoke — smoke that has wafted East from far-away BC.

And the virus, the cruel, unkillable virus. It’s surging again, pretty much everywhere. And Canadians are getting sick again — and some are dying from it.

In the past week alone, due to the Delta variant, Covid infections have exploded by 60% across Canada. That’s the worst it has been in months.

As former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould put it on Twitter, it’s the “#DeltaElection.”

And into this morass Justin Trudeau wants to force an election? Why?

Because he thinks he can win back the majority government he squandered. Because he thinks his opponents aren’t as good as him.

Because of his ego, essentially.

His ego is immense. It is vast. It is without limit. He is known to sit on government jets, reviewing his Instagram photos. Not his briefing books.

And the evidence was right there, for all to see. For months — and as this newspaper regularly documented — his vaccine acquisition effort was an unmitigated fiasco.

He tried to do a deal with a hostile foreign power, the Chinese while the Chinese were illegally detaining two innocent Canadian men. And when that vaccine deal predictably fell apart, he hid the evidence from us for months, thereby losing critical time. And Canadian lives.

For months, we lagged far behind our allies in vaccinating citizens. And we are only now near the front of the vaccination pack because of the determination of Canadians themselves, not the feckless, reckless Prime Minister.

His record, his performance, his values all combine to produce one irreducible, irrefutable truth: he is unfit of the high office he has held, improbably, for half a decade. He is unqualified and unfit.

Is he unelectable? Only you, Canadian voters, can answer that question.

Because the unElection is about to begin.

Kinsella was chairman of the Liberal Party’s war rooms in 1993 and 2000.

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In the bleak, grinding, early days of the pandemic – when it felt like the world might actually sort-of end – I wrote this:

“When times are this bad, we learn things about ourselves. We learn things about our leaders, too.

For this writer, few leaders are as inspiring as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. No adjectives, no spin, no homilies: in that New Yorker’s brusque dialect, Cuomo sits there every day, no notes, and simply offers up the truth.

He emotes honesty. He tells it as is; he does not give false hope.  And he seemingly knows everything.

More than once, I’ve been driving my Jeep – to locate toilet paper, to pick up some canned food my little band of survivors – and I’ve pulled over to the side of the road to listen to Cuomo. In the way that my grandmother told me that she and her seven children would stop everything, and gather around the radio to listen to Winston Churchill during World War Two. Giving hope, giving faith, giving a path forward.”

Was I wrong? Was I ever wrong. 

And I quote those words, here, to provide a reminder – to myself, and maybe to you – that we should stop having heroes.

Or, at least, having heroes who are in politics. Because they always seem to end up breaking our hearts, don’t they?

Cuomo’s story is, by now, well known.  He resigned in disgrace this week, chased out of office by dozens of complaints of sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct.

In the end, the Democratic Party establishment – of which he himself was once part – turned its back on him.  So, too, President Joe Biden, who said that Cuomo needed to resign for his appalling behavior.

And appalling it was.  He, a former champion of the #MeToo movement, felled by it.  A likely future presidential candidate, his career now in ruins. And deservedly so.

For me, Cuomo isn’t the only politician who fell from grace.  There was Sir John A. Macdonald, who I learned had called Indigenous people like my daughter “savages” – and who lamented the loss of “Aryan culture” in Canada. And who created residential schools to “kill the Indian in the child.”

There was Bill Clinton, who I once respected so much – so much so that a photograph of Clinton and I adorns the cover of my book The War Room. And who, I learned, destroyed the life and reputation of Monica Lewinsky, simply because he was a man and powerful, and she was neither.

And now Cuomo. Who I actually wrote “emotes honesty” – when all he emotes, now, is sleaze.

Who I said “gave hope, gave faith.”When all that he gives us, now, is an important reminder: to stop having political heroes.

Stop putting their names on the sides of schools.  Stop naming roadways and schools after them.  Stop regarding them as some superior order of human.

They’re not. They’re just mortals – and, sometimes, deeply flawed and dishonest ones.

Like Andrew Cuomo.

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