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Leave the unelected ones out of it.

Many of us – most of us, if you believe the statistics – have been through it.  It is sad.  It is painful.  It is like death without dying, almost.

And the last thing anyone needs, when going through a marital split, is to have the whole world watching.

But make no mistake: the whole world is indeed watching.  Justin and Sophie Trudeau’s simultaneous and identically-worded statement, announcing their separation after almost two decades together, rocketed around the globe within minutes,

Top story on CNN World: “Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie are separating.” ABC News: “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau separating from wife, Sophie.” The BBC: Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie to separate.”

Everyone has read the statement, by now, but this part should be seen and remembered: “As always, we remain a close family with deep love and respect for each other and for everything we have built and will continue to build…For the well-being of our children, we ask that you respect our and their privacy.”

And the children, here, are not politicians.  They are not high-powered bureaucrats.  They are just kids – all under the age of 15.

Their father stirs up strong emotions, pro or con.  After nearly a decade in power, he (understandably, predictably) has made decisions that are controversial.  Sometimes, his decisions – as we all saw during the Ottawa occupation last year – produce very, very strong reactions.

But the folks who hate Trudeau still shouldn’t go after his kids or Sophie.  They are not elected people.  They do not wield great power.  They are just people, now dealing with something that is always sad without limit.

So, we need to heed those words at the end: “We ask that you respect our and their privacy.”

There will those who ignore that, of course.  The Internet is already surging with wild conspiracy theories and cruel speculation.  None of it will be repeated here.

And, yes, in the days ahead there will discussion – hopefully moderate and respectful – about the political ramifications of Justin Trudeau, single Dad, leading his Liberal Party into another electoral battle.  Will he do that? Can he do that? Should he do that?

All of that, and more, will be discussed and debated, from coast to coast.

But for now, this is just one of many, many separations happening in Canada – most of which lead to the 50,000-odd divorces that happen every year.  Out 100,000 or so marriages that take place every year in this country.  Half end.

For those of us who have been though it, the Trudeau announcement conjures up memories of near-limitless despair and misery.  Even if you dislike Justin Trudeau, you have to give him that much: today is one of the worst days there can be.  On that, trust those of us who have gone through it.

So, let’s leave them alone on this day, and leave the political speculation to another day.  There will be lots of time for that.

Today, instead, let’s give them the privacy that they asked for.

And that they deserve.

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Been through it. Everyone should leave the kids (and her) out of it. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/0zli6LxvK0

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) August 2, 2023

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Bigot.

That word – along with its corollaries, racist, sexist, hater, et al. – get thrown around a lot, of course.  It happens so often, these days, that those words have lost all meaning.  Like they say: if everyone is a racist, then no one is a racist.

But Erica Ifill keeps at it, just the same.

To Erica, seemingly, everyone who isn’t like her – that is, a person with dark skin – is less than her.  She’s been preaching division for years now, on social media and behind a paywall at The Hill Times.  She calls herself “an award-winning anti-oppression journalist and economist.”

Full disclosure: I happily wrote for The Hill Times for years.  When I was there, my editor was mainly Kate Malloy.  Kate and I agreed that Hill Times columnists were not allowed to take cheap shots at each other, in the paper or elsewhere.  But if an occasion arose where criticism was merited, then the target would get a head’s up.

Other media have the same rule.  When Ezra Levant and I did commentary at the Sun News Network, for example, we promised we wouldn’t go after each other – even though we didn’t particularly like each other.  And we didn’t.

Despite that, I picked up the Hill Times one morning, where I found a column Erica Ifill had written about me.  Among other things, she said I was toxic, unethical, disloyal, and that I had never “lived up to any modicum of respectable conduct.” And so on.  Pretty good zingers, if not terribly original.

And then, she said I was a racist.

Given that I’ve spent most of my adult life documenting and opposing racism, that one was over the line – particularly coming from a newspaper I wrote for, and published without the courtesy of a head’s up.  So I quit, and I haven’t looked at the Hill Times since.

Until this week, that is.  This week, Erica unburdened herself of some opinions that – if the world was still in any way sane – would see her losing her gigs at the Hill Times, Canadaland, CBC and the like.  She won’t, but she should.

When Bingo, a Toronto police dog was allegedly shot by one Kenneth Grant – the day after Grant allegedly shot and killed one Sophonias Haile in Etobicoke – Ifill was unmoved.  Here’s what she put on Twitter (as it was then known):

“It’s amazing to me how white people show more compassion to animals than to people on the street. You people are reprehensible.” She then posted a graphic of a white person and a dog, mouth on mouth.  It even looked sort of sexual.  “WHITE PEOPLE BEFORE THEY LEAVE THE HOUSE,” the graphic read.

Can you imagine what would happen if a white columnist at the The Hill Times said that about black people?

Anyway. People were outraged, of course, because what the Hill Times columnist posted was insane.  But she wouldn’t back down.  She posted a “study” that read, in part: “The use of dogs as tools of oppression against African Americans has its roots in slavery and persists today in everyday life.”

“Slavery.” And here we simply thought that a dog had been shot and killed: turns out the dog deserved it, because slavery.  So said Erica, who wrote: “F*ck Bingo. Guess he ran out of luck.” She then posted a smiling emoticon.

And, even then, she would’t concede that she had gone too far. “Free speech is for white people and white feelings only,” she declared. She’d experienced a “whitelash,” she said. She was “glad y’all are offended,” she said.

For the Hill Times’ Erica Ifill, all of this is great fun.  A giggle.  She calls white people racist all the time.  She has suggested that “white people” have “a Nazi phase.” That Canada was “built on white supremacy and the fascism of right-wing, Christian dogma.”  That Canada has “white supremacist and seditious elements within.”

Even the Justin Trudeau government is white supremacist, apparently: “When it comes to racism and white supremacy, this country continues to be two-faced. While the Trudeau government denounces white supremacist extremism at home, it meets with them in the dark.”

And so on, and so on.  When you hear that Erica celebrated the death of Queen Elizabeth – a woman who “bathed in the blood of my ancestors” – well, none of this stuff is particularly shocking anymore.

It is, however, the sort of anti-white racism and black supremacy upon which Louis Farrakhan built his Nation of Islam empire.  It is dishonest and damaging and divisive.

It is also the sort of thing you hear from bigots.

Like Erica Ifill.

[Kinsella is the author of the bestselling Web of Hate, and the leader of the group Standing Together Against Misogyny and Prejudice, which led a successful campaign against a pro-Nazi newspaper in Toronto.]

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Name ten federal cabinet ministers. Just ten.

It’s not a lot. Ten represents just a quarter of Justin Trudeau’s cabinets in recent years.

So, name ten. But you can’t, can you?

You’re not alone. Few can. With the exception of weirdos like media political columnists and Ottawa-based bureaucrats, Joe and Jane Frontporch generally don’t know who is in cabinet, and they mostly don’t care, either.

Apart from Chrystia Freeland and Dominic LeBlanc – perhaps – most voters couldn’t pick a Trudeau government minister out of a police lineup (where not a few voters think they belong, but that’s a column for another day). The majority of Trudeau’s ministers are distinguished by being indistinguishable. They are remarkably unremarkable.

In the annals of Canadian politics, successful Prime Ministers have tended to surround themselves with notables. Jean Chretien had Paul Martin, John Manley, Brian Tobin and more. Brian Mulroney had Joe Clark, Don Mazankowski and Jean Charest. Stephen Harper had Rona Ambrose, Peter MacKay and Lisa Raitt.

Even Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, always cultivated talent around the cabinet table – Marc Lalonde, Allan MacEachen, John Turner, the aforementioned Chretien.

But Justin Trudeau? As mentioned, it’s all about him, generally. L’etat, c’est lui – the State is Him. You don’t really hear about anyone else unless they get in trouble – and Trudeau Junior’s ministers get in trouble quite often (Marco Mendicino, Bill Morneau, Bill Blair, et al.).

So why don’t we know more about the people who make up Canada’s federal government? Because Justin Trudeau’s government isn’t really a government. It’s a cult of personality.

It begins and (one hopes) ends with Justin. It is entirely, indisputably, All About Him.

A cult of personality, the dictionary folks tell us, is “a cult promoting adulation of a living national leader or public figure.” Which, in Trudeau’s case, sounds about right.

None of his ministers ever spoke out about, say, the fact that Justin Trudeau is the first Prime Minister to have been found to have violated multiple federal statutes. None of the people within his Liberal Party bothered to check, back in 2008, whether the aspiring politician had groped a woman without consent (he had) or worn racist black face (he had, more than once).

But none of his partisans – christened “TruAnon,” memorably, by CNN’s Jake Tapper – care about any of that stuff. You can see the TruAnon types in the comments below this column, like a swarm of oily earwigs, objecting to anything and anyone who is outside the cult.

So, it’s a cult of personality. Generally speaking, if a cult leader is effective at suppressing dissent and bad PR – like Scientology or the Moonies – then the cult leadership survives.

But that’s the imperfection at the center of Justin Trudeau’s cult of personality: the leader is imperfect. Aga Khan, SNC-Lavalin, WE “charity,” now Chinese interference in our democracy: in every single case, the biggest Trudeau-era scandals have implicated Trudeau personally. Him.

So, in a cult of personality, when the leader stumbles, it jeopardizes the entire organization. It places the whole shebang at risk. And that is particularly the case when there isn’t someone standing in the wings, ready to take over.

And there just isn’t. With the exception of Intergovernmental Affairs’ LeBlanc or Industry’s Francois-Phillippe Champagne, it is very, very hard to picture anyone else taking over and surviving a Tory landslide.

Because they’re all mostly invisible.

Because there was a big-deal cabinet shuffle, this week, and the chances are excellent you (a) didn’t know or (b) don’t care.

Welcome to the club.

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In our hearts, we know: the only certainty in life is death. It comes for every one of us.

The uncertainty of the hour of death is also a source of grief in our lives, someone said, and they’re indisputably right. That death is coming, on whispering feet, and we know not when.

For many years, science – and people themselves, making wiser decisions about what to put in their bodies – has pushed back the tide of death. The years between 1916 and 1920 were notable for that: following the first Great War, people just started living longer.  

Babies born in England or Wales had a life expectancy of just 41 years back then.  Their descendants now routinely live into their Eighties. China and India have recorded the fastest gains in life expectancy of any societies in recorded history, and they have the economies to prove it: a hundred years ago, their people would have been lucky to survive past their late twenties.  Now, in India, the average is 70 years.

Since the great global influenza pandemic a Century ago, life expectancies have actually doubled.  The reasons why are myriad and multiple: defeating cholera with better water and sewage systems; embracing pasteurization to kill bacteria in foods, saving billions of lives; the discovery of antibiotics, to slow and kill the growth of bacteria in our bodies; the development of vaccines to fight polio and measles and more.

We collectively live, then, in an era where few before us have lived as long.  While we have not defeated death, we have greatly delayed his arrival at our doors.

In Canada, while we live among the longest in the world, death has naturally continued to claim us in different ways.  Before the Covid-19 pandemic commenced in earnest, the leading cause of death, year after year, was what is called “malignant neoplasms” – cancerous tumors.

Diseases of the heart come next, and the cerebrovascular afflictions – strokes, mainly.  Respiratory diseases and influenzas after that.  And so on.

The pandemic revised the list, everywhere. In New York, just next door, life expectancy dropped by about five full years in 2020, the dark year when the coronavirus was in full bloom.  There, the death rate doubled what it had been the previous year.  Across in the US, life expectancy went from 79 years to 76.

In Canada, lives were cut shorter, too, but not by nearly as much.  However, Covid became one of death’s grim medallists in Canada, beaten out only by cancer and heart diseases.  And, globally – because Covid laughed at the notion of borders – seven million people were killed by it. Another 700 million got it, and about 100 million are still dealing with it, their lives upended by long Covid.

Covid death counts have largely faded from view, and people have mostly gone back to believing that they will not experience something like that again.  But, generally, the odds are pretty good (30 per cent, they say) there’ll be another pandemic in the next decade or so: the ubiquitousness of international travel, and the stupidity of humans, practically guarantees it.

But, even if we somehow escape death from an unseen virus, we all – right now, this week – face another existential threat: the world is getting dramatically hotter.  You don’t need to be a scientist to notice. And, at this stage, it doesn’t matter whether we did it to ourselves, or it’s the result of some preordained Biblical event – it’s well underway, and no one seems to know how to stop it.

So, we in the media report records being broken until no one is shocked enough to pay attention anymore, and a Texas woman (insincerely) claims to bake a loaf of bread in her mailbox: it’s become the stuff of bathos.

The reality is that a hotter planet will continue to affect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the shelter we seek. Smart people, educated people, say that the future will include wars over water, and the mass displacement of people seeking food and refuge from the heat.

So, yes: in the hundred years since World War I, we have delayed – but never denied – death.  Sooner or later, death comes for us all.  It is relentless.

And, this week, he came for my mother, Lorna, who lived a long and wonderful life. We love her and we will miss her, always.

But death always prevails in the end.  And it always breaks your heart.

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KINSELLA, Lorna Emma Bridget. Artist, loving mother, grandmother and wife. Born in Montreal, July 7, 1932; died in Toronto, Ont., July 15, 2023. Daughter of Irene (Danaher) Cleary; survived by loving sister Saundra Cleary; pre-deceased by cherished siblings Eddie, Mickey, Carol, Gail and Irene.

Married T. Douglas Kinsella MD, CM, the one and true love of her life, in Montreal on June 18, 1955; thereafter followed fifty wonderful years of marriage, until his untimely death on June 15, 2004.

Hero to her four boys: Warren, Kevin, Lorne and Troy. Beloved grandmother to Emma, Benjamin, Samuel, Jacob and Kane; missed greatly by her daughters-in-law Annette (LaFaver) and Barbara (Joy).

Lorna was an artist of renown, her works seen in homes and galleries across Canada. She taught art and loved art; she gardened; she donated her time and energy to the homeless and Ukrainian relief and more. We love her and miss her already.

Funeral Mass will take place at 11 a.m. on Friday, July 21 at Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church, 1810 Queen Street East in Toronto. In lieu of flowers, we respectfully request donations to the Ukrainian Red Cross or the Salvation Army.

FORTIS IN ARDUIS.

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Tonight's Yeats. The final night, I think. pic.twitter.com/tT3TjmEF1M

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) July 14, 2023

 

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