Categories for Feature

Comments (2)

ACT ONE

[The scene: The office of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in March 2020.]

KATIE TELFORD, CHIEF OF STAFF: Prime Minister, we have good news and bad news.

TRUDEAU [putting down mirror]: What’s the bad news?

TELFORD: Our vaccine deal with the Chinese fell apart. Which means most other countries will fully vaccinate their people months before we do.

TRUDEAU [irritated that the planned Instagram shoot will be cancelled]: What’s the good news?

TELFORD [brightly]: We won’t tell anyone for several months!

ACT TWO

[The scene: A boardroom at the PMO in January 2021.]

TRUDEAU [happily]: Yay! Mean old Donald Trump will soon be gone!

TELFORD [exchanging worried looks with other PMO staffer]: We don’t think that’s good for you, Justin.

TRUDEAU [bewildered]: But why, Katie? Nobody likes Trump! Joe Biden and me will be BFFs!

TELFORD: Two reasons. One, Trump may be a bad guy, but he’s vaccinating more than a million Americans a day.

 

TRUDEAU: Is that more than me?

TELFORD: Way, way more. And, Biden is promising to vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of his presidency. But we don’t think he’s going to do it.

TRUDEAU [smiling]: That’s good, isn’t it?

TELFORD: No. We think he’s going to have 100 million Americans vaccinated in 60 days, not 100.

TRUDEAU: Uh-oh, Spaghetti-Os.

ACT THREE

[The scene: The PMO situation room, in February, where staff are counting and recounting vaccine purchase orders.]

TELFORD [mopping her brow, closing her eyes]: Damn.

TRUDEAU [bewildered]: What’s wrong, Katie?

TELFORD: We simply aren’t going to get enough vaccines fast enough. We are going to have the worst vaccination record in the G7. And the data suggests we will be around 65th in the world for vaccinations per capita.

TRUDEAU: Is that bad?

TELFORD [exasperated]: It’s really bad. It means we can’t get back to a majority. It means we may even lose the election.

PMO STAFFER WITH NO MEDICAL OR SCIENCE TRAINING WHATSOEVER: I know! Let’s delay the second vaccine dose by months! That way we can vaccinate more people!

 

TRUDEAU: Is that safe?

PMO STAFFER: Who knows, who cares. We may lose a few elderly people, but they don’t vote for you anyway.

ANOTHER STAFFER: Good point.

ACT FOUR

[The scene: Trudeau and Telford are walking near Parliament Hill in March, a phalanx of RCMP security around them.]

TRUDEAU [waving merrily]: Look! Everyone is happy to see us and is waving at us!

TELFORD: I think they’re giving us the finger, sir.

TRUDEAU [crestfallen]: But how come? Nice Joe Biden is lending us a bunch of AstraZeneca vaccines!

TELFORD: That may be because the Americans aren’t sure that vaccine is safe.

TRUDEAU: Is it?

TELFORD: Um.

TRUDEAU: Well, just make sure you inject that mean Warren Kinsella guy with it, OK?

TELFORD [brightening]: Excellent idea, sir.

ACT FIVE: THE FINALE

[The scene: A private reception area at the Ottawa Congress Centre on election night.]

 

TRUDEAU: Katie, did we win?

TELFORD: [smiling, astonished as she looks up from one of her several devices]: I can’t believe it, but I think we did!

TRUDEAU [immediately adopting the Downward Dog position]: See? I told you, Katie! This nasty virus wasn’t going to defeat us! Yay!

TELFORD [whispering]: Well, just between us, Prime Minister, we screwed up getting vaccines early on. Then we didn’t get enough. Then we put people at risk by going against science on the second dose. Then we exposed them to even more danger when we injected them with vaccines we hadn’t fully tested.

TRUDEAU [confused]: But why did we win, Katie?

TELFORD [holding up a device with a photo of Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh in debate]: Because, against these two, you couldn’t lose, Justin.

TRUDEAU: Yippee! Let’s have some herbal tea!

THE END.

[Warren Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien.]

Comments (30)

Comments (0)

“Democracies are down-up,” said the old political pro.

He grinned.

“Movements are up-down.”

And that’s when the light went on in this writer’s tiny cranium.

It explained everything. Every scandal, every broken promise, every misdeed: to Justin Trudeau, the old pro was implying, the regular rules don’t apply.

Because he’s the leader of “a movement.”

That’s what Justin Trudeau thinks, anyway.

Trudeau and his acolytes have actually been telling anyone who will listen that they’re not the old Liberal Party of Canada anymore. They’re not really a grubby old political party. They’re a shining, shimmering “movement.”

Seriously, that’s what they’ve been saying around Ottawa. And who can blame them?

A political movement, the Webster’s people tell us, is “a group of people working together to achieve a political goal,” which sounds pretty benign.

And which doesn’t even begin to describe Justin Trudeau’s movement.

That’s because it’s not just a movement. It’s more like a cult, as this writer has suggested before.

It certainly has all the characteristics of one.

The Webster’s people have a definition for that, too, naturally.

They say a cult is “a system of intense religious veneration of a particular person.”

Bingo.

Now, the Trudeau movement folks would object to the notion that their fealty to Justin Trudeau is derived from the sacred and the divine.

They don’t like religious people — except at election times, that is, when they haul out the religious elements in the Conservative Party and (successfully) beat them like a rented mule.

But the Trudeau movement sure is decidedly cultish, isn’t it?

Here’s what the deprogramming experts say about cults:

•They are unquestioningly devoted to their leader. The self-professed anti-racists in the Liberal caucus refusing to condemn Trudeau’s racist blackface: check.

•Doubt and dissent and discouraged and even punished. Defaming and exiling Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott: check.

•The cult is elitist, and claims an exalted, special status for itself. As everyone knows, the Trudeau Liberals regard themselves as synonymous with Canada, so that opposing them becomes un-Canadian: check.

•The cult believes that the ends always justify the means. Victory at all costs, for which various compliant media folks hail their savvy political acumen: check.

•The cult is preoccupied with making money and recruiting new members. So, Justin Trudeau made memberships in his party free — but he also charged charities hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees — to do what other Canadians do voluntarily. Check.

•The cult’s leader is not accountable to any other authority. And, of course, Justin Trudeau isn’t. Despite being condemned for serial scandals – despite being the only Prime Minister in history to have violated a federal statute while in office – Justin Trudeau remains unaccountable. Check.

And who is to blame for all of that? Is it those who belong to his “movement?” The members of his ersatz cult?

No, it is us.

Us. You know, Canadians.

After all of it — the conflicts of interest, the obstructions of justice, the dishonesty, the groping incident and the blackface incidents — after all that, if we keep electing him to the highest office in the land, who is to blame?

The cult leader? Or those who shrug, and pencil an “X” by the Trudeau Liberal cultist candidate?

As he sits in his study in his government-appointed cottage, listening to his senior staff natter on and on about calling an election sooner than later, Justin Trudeau must often smile to himself, with that fake-phony smirk he so often uses for photo-ops and the like.

It’s a movement, all top-down, he must say to himself.

And, until it is down-up again, it won’t really be a democracy, will it?

Comments (56)

Comments (1)

Comments (1)

Comments (5)

Some guy I met was interested in getting one of my paintings. Here he is with it. Nice guy.

Comments (11)

I got the AZ shot.

I haven’t died of a blood clot yet. But let’s see if I make it to the end of the column, shall we? (Justin Trudeau’s possibly hoping that I don’t.)

The AstraZenica vaccine hoopla or hysteria – take your pick – has been raging for days. It has now reached the point where approximately ten per cent of Quebeckers are reportedly refusing to get the vaccine, when they learn who manufactured it.

The AZ angst started a few days ago, and is entirely related to a batch that was delivered only to Europe. A sixty-year-old Danish woman received the vaccine, and died a few days later.

The poor woman had “highly unusual” symptoms after getting the vaccine, including a lower number of blood platelets and some clotting in her small and large blood vessels.

The Danish Medicines Agency – which few outside of Denmark had ever heard of before, but is now apparently regarded as more influential than the Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and Dr. Anthony Fauci all put together – suspended use of the AstraZenica vaccine for 14 days.

A bunch of European Union countries followed suit – including the three biggest EU nations, Italy, Germany and France. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) was called in to investigate the AZ apoplexy. Their conclusion: out of more than three million Europeans who had received the AstraZenica dose, 22 had gotten some blood clotting.

Twenty-two. Some.

Oh, and this: the EMA helpfully noted that people develop blood clots all over Europe, all the time. There was “no indication” the AZ batch caused anyone to get sick or die, their spokesperson said, adding: “We are still firmly convinced that the benefits of the AstraZenica vaccine in preventing Covid-19, with its associated risk of hospitalization and death, outweigh the risk of these side effects.”

But did that deter the conspiracy theorists? Not on your life. Why listen to an actual expert, when you can consult one of the many Twitter-based super-duper epidemiological geniuses, the ones who live in Mom’s basement, drink fizzy pop for breakfast, and reek of kitty litter and loneliness?

After more than a year of the pandemic, you’d think we’d all learn to be wary of disinformation and misinformation, about everything from masks to smooth surfaces to vaccines. But, no. We never learn.

Given that I was about to get AstraZenica’s concoction – a curse or a cure, take your pick – injected into my arm, I went looking for an actual expert. Call me crazy, but I sometimes think scientists know a thing or two about, well, science.

I found Dr. Mark Toshner, a pulmonary vascular physician, and a professor at a little school called “Cambridge University.” (You may have heard of it, basement-dwellers.) The good doctor decided to take on the conspiracy whack-jobs on their own turf – Twitter. He won, and then some.

Casting an experienced eye over the past few days, Dr. Toshner called all of it “one to two weeks of loud noises.” Hauling out his crystal ball, Dr. Toshner made some predictions.

“Scientists will do [the] math and ‘risk’ may increase from 0.0002 per cent for a rare thrombotic event to, at the very highest, 0.002 per cent – or, more realistically, 0.0004 per cent,” he tweeted.

This writer isn’t very good at math, but that kind of sounds like the coronavirus may be a much bigger risk. The doctor went on.

“Clusters of rare things happen. Remember: there are literally hundreds of rare things that can happen, and they happen stochastically (at random). When we look for patterns, we see patterns (observer bias).”

The people making the call about suspending AstraZenica will learn the truth – that the vaccine is safe – but precious time will be lost. “Two to four weeks,” wrote Dr. Toshner. There will be more deaths and sickness that could have prevented, as a result. “Vaccines will go to waste, rollout will slow further,” he tweets.

“We need to break this cycle,” Dr. Toshner tweets, likely (understandably) angry. “We need better message discipline and communication. We are so distracted by [the AZ controversy] we haven’t even started to put serious energy into developing countries with no vaccines. This is where the real battle lies.”

I was convinced. I went to my local Shopper’s Drug Mart and got the shot from a nice lady. She, and the AstraZenica vaccine, didn’t kill me.

Sorry, Prime Minister. Maybe next time.

[Kinsella was Chief of Staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health.]

Comments (12)

Comments (0)