Categories for Feature
My latest: Joe versus Justin
One hundred days.
As of this week, that’s how long Joe Biden has been President of the United States.
Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has been Prime Minister of Canada for 2,000 days.
One hundred days versus two thousand days: who is doing better? Who is the better leader?
Now, this writer worked on the Biden campaign for many months. And you might say I haven’t exactly been the head of the Trudeau fan club. But by any reasonable standard – by any objective measure – Joe Biden is doing much, much better than Justin Trudeau.
Take the pandemic, for example (please). People have been bombarded by lots of statistics over the past year and a bit. Lots of partisans have played games with pandemic and vaccine-related statistics, contributing to no shortage of cynicism and disbelief.
So, let’s just look at the pandemic facts. No spin, no adjectives.
Biden came into the office of the president promising to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days. But he didn’t do that, at all. Not even close.
No, he more than doubled that. Biden’s administration blasted past the 200 million figure a couple weeks ago, and it did so well before the 100-day mark. So, the Democratic leader’s vaccinated more than 60 per cent of Americans.
Over a longer period of time, Justin Trudeau has procured enough vaccines to give at least one shot to more than twelve million Canadians. Just over 30 per cent.
So, Biden is doubling what Trudeau has done in vaccinations, in a much shorter time frame. But only one vaccine dose gives you only partial protection. What about the figure that really counts, those who have been fully vaccinated? It’s here that Biden crushes Trudeau.
In Biden’s America, nearly 100 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. That’s 30 per cent of the population of the United States.
In Trudeau’s Canada, only slightly more than a million people have been fully vaccinated. That’s about three per cent of our population.
That’s the pandemic. What about the other key indicator in our lives, the economy? Here, too, Biden’s 100 days easily eclipses Trudeau’s 2,000 days.
In his first 100 days, Biden has approved legislation that cuts child poverty by more than half. He has expanded Obamacare – and he has injected the U.S. economy with $1.9 trillion in stimulus spending. That’s more than twice the size of what Barack Obama’s Congress passed a decade ago.
Economic growth in Biden’s America is expected to exceed seven per cent in 2021 – which is the best that nation has experienced since 1984, when Ronald Reagan was in office. Under Biden, more than a million jobs were created last month alone.
In Canada, Trudeau oversaw mixed economic performance. While 2020 ended with double-digit growth in Canada, corporate and personal bankruptcies grew here, too. Bankruptcies were up nine per cent from the previous year, with retailers being hit the hardest.
Trudeau’s latest budget, meanwhile, took two years to see the light of day – and then mostly disappeared. While Trudeau has amassed the biggest budgetary deficit in Canadian history, his 2021 budget mostly unimpressed. As the National Post’s Kelly McParland memorably (and accurately) put it: Trudeau’s budget “held the public’s attention for maybe 12 hours.”
Joe Biden, meanwhile, continues to hold everyone’s attention. Far from being “Sleepy Joe,” as his political adversaries called him, Biden has been an animated and activist president. In just 100 days, he has already achieved much.
Justin Trudeau, over 2,000 days?
Not so much.
[Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien.]
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My latest: the budget speech Freeland should have given
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to table the 2021-22 budget of the Government of Canada. The real one.
I rise to give the budget speech I should have given yesterday, but didn’t. Yesterday, I read out the speech that had been dictated to me by the children in the Prime Minister’s Office — privileged, solipsistic, white children who have a guaranteed paycheque, and who accordingly don’t care or understand what is happening to Canada.
So, I stayed up last night, and remembered that I was once a journalist, and I once cared for the truth. This budget, this speech, is the truth.
Mr. Speaker, we — the former Liberal Party of Canada, which has devolved into a personality cult — have failed Canadians. At the moment of the greatest need, at the time of our greatest peril, we have failed those we had sworn to serve.
Our sins are myriad and undeniable. We entered into a vaccine deal with the Chinese government — a government that has unlawfully imprisoned and is torturing two of our citizens — and pretended to be shocked when that deal fell apart.
When the immensity of our mistake became clear, too late, we stole vaccine doses from Covax, a program that was designed to provide vaccines to the poor of the world. We, a G7 nation, did that.
We permitted international flights into Canada bearing people who we knew — we knew — were infected with the deadly coronavirus. As I stand here today before you, Mr. Speaker, 14 such flights are landing at Pearson airport alone.
Most seriously, Mr. Speaker, we as a government failed to provide the one thing that could save lives, and save businesses, and save families. We failed to obtain enough vaccines.
Tabling a dishonest budget, as I did yesterday, made a bad situation worse. That document was an act of fraud.
How can we claim to be funding affordable child care, after so many decades of making the same promise, and then never delivering on it? How can we, in good conscience, urge Canadians to place their children in places where the virus and its variants, we know now, can flourish and infect?
How can we claim to be concerned with the plight of Indigenous people when we have broken our solemn platform promise to deliver clean water to them, the most basic human necessity?
How can we claim to be levying greater taxation on the wealthiest when our leader, and most of us on this side of the House, have never had to worry about defaulting on a rent or mortgage payment, or worrying about being unable to pay a utilities bill, or simply worrying about having enough left over to feed our children a healthy, sustaining meal?
Mr. Speaker, I do not wish to be known as the one who fiddles while Canada burns. I will leave that legacy to the prime minister.
Instead, my new budget has one single and single-minded focus: Vaccines.
With more vaccines, we will have far less sickness and death. With more vaccines, we will have far fewer bankruptcies. With more vaccines, we will have a health-care system that is not overburdened and collapsing across Canada. With more vaccines, we will have fewer ruined lives.
We are blessed with low interest rates. That is the single reason why we have not had a total financial collapse before now. I therefore intend to use the financial might of the treasury — which is still considerable — to aggressively and relentlessly purchase vaccines, and build a vaccine capability in Canada.
Getting vaccines isn’t health policy, Mr. Speaker. It is the best economic policy.
And that is the policy I intend to pursue, whether the children in Langevin Block approve or not.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.”
— Warren Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien
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My latest: CNN 1, #TruAnon 0
Celebrities love celebrities.
Justin Trudeau certainly does. He considers himself one, after all.
No mere mortal is our Justin: He breathes the rarefied air of the uber-rich and uber-cool at Davos and places like that. It’s his milieu. Hollywood stars, billionaires, best-selling academic types — that’s Justin’s world.
So there he was, just a few years ago, watching TV one Sunday night. A bunch of Justin’s fellow celebrities had gathered in Johannesburg for something called Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100. The celebrities were raising money for children’s education.
It’s a worthy cause. Normally, governments go through a process before they pledge money to stuff like the Global Citizen Festival. Not our Justin, however. The rules that apply to normal folks don’t apply to him.
Justin thumbed out a tweet to the host of the show, comedian Trevor Noah. Here’s what he said: “Hey @Trevornoah – thanks for everything you’re doing to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s legacy at the @GlblCtzn festival. Sorry I can’t be with you – but how about Canada pledges $50M to @EduCannotWait to support education for women & girls around the world? Work for you? Let’s do it.”
“Sorry I can’t be with you.” OMG! Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that dope? Just like that, our Justin offers $50 million — no pesky votes in the House of Commons, no oversight or review stuff or whatever! Just like it’s his own money! So sick.
Justin got in a lot of trouble for that little stunt, as you may recall. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel called Trudeau “tone deaf” — and noted that Trudeau seemed to be more preoccupied with getting noticed by a celebrity than, you know, acting like a prime minister.
But Trudeau, and Trudeau’s family, kept at it. Rules schmules. The rules don’t apply to them.
So, a couple years after the Trevor Noah Is My Bestie thing, Sophie Trudeau jetted over to a big star-studded event in London, to urge support for — wait for it, wait for it — the WE charity’s toxic twins, Craig and Marc Kielburger.
Lots of famous people were there. British TV chef Jamie Oliver, Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, the actor Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones. Neat!
Idris Elba was there, too, and Sophie Trudeau got to hang out with him and get selfies and stuff. Idris, however, got something else: Coronavirus. He tweeted about it.
“This morning I tested positive Covid-19. I feel OK, I have no symptoms so far but have been isolated since I found out about my possible exposure to the virus.”
Added Elba, who would’ve made the best James Bond ever, IMHO: “This is serious. Now is the time to really think about social distancing, washing your hands. Transparency is probably the best thing for this right now.”
The bit about “transparency” was interesting because the British press reported that Elba felt Sophie Trudeau had infected him. Yikes! It’s a licence to ill!
And that brings us to right now, this week.
This week, you see, no less than CNN turned on celebrity Trudeau. This was a big deal, because CNN was formerly a bit of a media cheerleader for the Canadian Prime Minister, in the interminable Trump vs. Trudeau comparative coverage they used to do.
Jake Tapper broadcast a Paula Newton story about how Trudeau’s government was doing really, really lousy in acquiring vaccines. “It’s a real failure by the Trudeau government,” said Tapper.
Trudeau’s PMO, being obsessed with what Trevor Noah, Idris Elba, Jake Tapper et al. think about them, dispatched some winged monkeys to defend Canada’s honour online. One Trudeau fan even tweet tut-tutted Tapper directly, and noted: “Canada has been ranked the best country in the world.”
Tapper responded thusly: “It’s a great country. One that deserves better leadership regarding obtaining and distributing vaccines.”
Ouch. Ouch!
Justin, Justin: When your fellow celebrities abandon you, whatever are you going to do?
Davos sure is going to be different next year!
— Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien
My latest: is Trudeau a feminist?
“I’ll keep saying I’m a feminist.”
Those are Justin Trudeau’s words. He said them at a United Nations summit focusing on women in March 2016.
He said he’d keep calling himself a feminist, in fact, “until it is met with a shrug.”
On Monday of this week, no one in the real world was shrugging. They were shaking their heads in disbelief.
On Monday, the Liberals – aided and abetted by the separatists, no less – voted to shut down a defence committee investigation of sexual misconduct at the highest level of the Canadian Armed Forces.
The Liberal and Bloc Quebecois MPs voted together – and they voted for a Liberal motion that effectively kills the Parliamentary committee’s work. The committee had heard shocking testimony about how the Trudeau government had handled allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against women in the Canadian military.
So the Liberals ended it.
It’s disgusting, and despicable, and profoundly wrong. But, given the testimony that had been coming out, it’s probably not a shock.
Previously, the committee had heard that Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan knew as long ago as 2018 about sexual misconduct allegations against Gen. Jonathan Vance. He did nothing, effectively – other than passing along the allegations to the Prime Minister’s personal bureaucrats in the Privy Council Office (PCO). PCO did nothing, too.
Vance denies the allegations. And so does his successor as Chief of the Defence staff, Admiral Art McDonald – who has also stepped aside due to sexual misconduct allegations against him.
Think about it. The top two men in the Canadian Armed Forces are facing allegations about they were sexually harassing and abusing women under their command. An investigation was imperative.
So what do the self-styled feminists in Justin Trudeau’s cabal do? What did the separatists do?
They shut it down.
Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld – remember that name – proposed the motion. She said MPs had heard enough from witnesses.
Furious Conservative and New Democrat MPs voted against Vandenbeld’s move to cover up, naturally, but the Trudeau cabal had the numbers. It took just a few minutes to do what they did.
Which was to strangle the truth. Which was to whitewash sexual abuse. Which was to sneer at Canadian women in uniform.
Which was to provide incontrovertible proof, once and for all, that Trudeau’s Liberals are no feminists.
“[Trudeau’s PMO] are interfering in our ability to get to the bottom of this,” said Ontario Conservative MP Leona Alleslev, a graduate of the Royal Military College and a former officer in our air force. Her voice was shaking with anger.
“We are talking about the trust and confidence of Canadian forces personnel, and Canadians…the very institution of our military and our democratic structure is strongly at risk!”
It didn’t matter. The Trudeau Liberals – after doing a dirty deal, one assumes, with the separatists – ended the committee’s work.
Way back in 2015, Justin Trudeau did something good. He made half of his cabinet – his first – female. That had never happened before. Asked why he did it, a smiling Trudeau said: “Because it’s 2015.”
Well, that was then, and this is now.
After the infamy that we all witnessed at the National Defence Committee on Monday, we can all agree that it doesn’t feel like 2015 anymore.
It feels like 1815.
When Canadian women were still a 100 years away from being given the right to vote.
[Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien]
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My latest: Trudeau’s Canada, plague central
Keep out.
Of Canada, that is. That was the rather extraordinary message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week: if you’re American, you should just stay away from Canada.
Here’s the official notice the CDC released on Wednesday: “Travellers should avoid all travel to Canada. Because of the current situation in Canada, even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants and should avoid all travel to Canada.”
“Avoid all travel to Canada.”
Now, governments issue warning about travel all the time, and not just because of the coronavirus. Travel advisories get released when there’s natural disasters, crime waves, and unstable governments.
But this one was a bit unusual — unprecedented, even. So said an American expert.
Dr. Eric Feigel-Ding is a high-profile epidemiologist and health economist. He’s been at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, so you could say he knows a bit about what he’s talking about.
Here’s what Dr. Feigel-Ding says when talking about Canada and the CDC’s statement:
“Wow.” (That’s a quote.)
“CDC has just issued…a warning against all travel to Canada,” Feigel-Ding wrote on Twitter.
As the Trudeau regime’s online winged monkeys hurriedly pointed out, a U.S. government caution against travel to Canada has been in place for months. But what made this one notable, Feigel-Ding wrote, is the CDC’s concern about so-called COVID-19 variants rampaging in communities across Canada.
Said he: “[The advisory] is about variants in Canada…Notably, CDC is very worried about new variants and warns ‘even fully vaccinated may be at risk’.”
He continued: “Given that #B117 British variant already in the US, the CDC must have issued the new variants/vaccination warning for the new [variant] outbreak emerging in Western Canadian provinces, especially BC.”
In this writer’s experience, Justin Trudeau’s PMO doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about bad coverage in Canada. They know that, if editorial opinion mattered for much, they wouldn’t have won re-election in 2019.
They do care, however — profoundly, deeply — about perceptions about them from abroad. Back in 2015, for example, this writer made some critical remarks about Trudeau to a British newspaper. A future ambassador actually called me to ask me not to do it again. (I declined.)
So, the CDC advisory, and comments like Dr. Eric Feigel-Ding’s, upset Trudeau’s fart-catchers a great deal. Unfortunately for them, there’s been quite a bit of that, lately.
Edward Alden is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week, he wrote an essay in the Globe and Mail and lambasted what he called the Trudeau government’s “anemic vaccine rollout.”
Britain’s respected Guardian newspaper slammed Trudeau for his government’s “fumbles” and “sluggish distribution” of vaccines — and for taking vaccines from the Third World. Similarly, the New York Times reported this a few weeks ago: “As Britain and even the United States, despite its problems, continue to rise in the rankings, Canada has dropped well down the list, sandwiched this week between Bangladesh and Romania.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post was even more unimpressed: “An administration once celebrated as a global model for handling COVID-19 now finds itself on the receiving end of growing global pity, as it becomes an example of a nation getting vaccines very wrong indeed,” wrote the Post’s Canadian columnist.
Compared to other developed nations, he wrote, “Canada is not vaccinating at anywhere near world-class levels.”
Don’t despair, fellow Canadians. When it comes to doing poorly — really, really poorly — to the point that our nearest and closest ally is compelled to urge people to stay away from us, however?
In that category, Justin Trudeau’s Canada is truly world-class.
Warren Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien
My latest: Hitler, Hillier and hate
What would Hitler do?
That’s what preoccupies Randy Hillier, apparently. Hillier is a member of the Ontario legislature. He doesn’t belong to any political party, because Doug Ford kicked him out of the Progressive Conservative caucus two years ago.
On Thursday, Hillier tweeted a picture of Adolf Hitler surveying a parade of Nazi troops, above the caption: THE THIRD WAVE.
Here’s what Hillier posted: “The Third ….wave. Everyone who has ever been to the sea, knows there is no end to waves. Its only 28 days this time. Truth does not mind being questioned. Lies do not like to be challenged. #onpoli #WeAreLivingaLie #nomorelockdowns”
Hillier is the MPP for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston. He thinks the coronavirus is a hoax, a lie.
Hillier has been piloting the dark waters of the anti-mask, pandemic-denying lunatic fringe for about a year, now. He’s held anti-mask rallies, and cheerfully posed maskless for pictures. Along the way, he’s attracted the support of a gaggle of knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who actually equate modest public health measures with fascism.
Hillier and his hillbillies don’t like lockdowns – and, as of Saturday, Canada’s largest province is again under one. Premier Doug Ford said that the numbers – as reflected in the number of daily new infections, as well as hospitalizations – were heading in the wrong direction. So, Ford said, it was time to apply an emergency brake.
Said Ford: “We are facing a serious situation and drastic measures are required to contain the rapid spread of the virus, especially the new variants of concern. I know pulling the emergency brake will be difficult on many people across the province, but we must try and prevent more people from getting infected and overwhelming our hospitals.”
Some on the political Right are mad at Ford for going too far. Some on the political Left are mad at Ford for not going far enough.
That’s fine. That’s democracy. As my old boss Jean Chretien used to say, when the fringes on the Right and the Left are both mad at you, you’re winning.
But no one of significance has actually likened Ford’s lockdown to National Socialism. Until now.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney condemned it. Tweeted Kenney: “There is – and should be – a vibrant debate about how best to deal with the pandemic. But equating the public health measures of democratically elected and accountable governments to the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Nazi Third Reich is odious.”
Bernie Farber, the former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, also expressed his outrage. Said Farber: “The comparisons to Hitler re: Covid are obscene. That it would come from a member of the Ontario Legislature is truly detestable. He needs to be isolated by his constituents and voted out of office.”
Like Kenney and Farber say, Randy Hillier is odious. He’s obscene.
But he and his cabal are acutely in need of some education, so let’s give it to him. Because he’s got everything backwards. So here, below, is a message to Randy Hillier.
Randy, Naziism – like the pandemic – is monstrous. Like Naziism, the pandemic has rendered life dark and grinding and bleak. Like Hitler and his murderous cult, it is the coronavirus that has killed and sickened millions.
Randy, the pandemic has stolen away jobs and livelihoods, just like Hitler did. Like National Socialism, the virus has destroyed businesses and economies.
Adolf Hitler and Covid-19 are the real killers, Randy. They are the real destroyers.
But our response to the coronavirus – as seen in the wearing of masks, and social distancing, and limiting public gatherings – doesn’t kill people. It saves them, Randy.
Randy, it was wrong to equate what most of us are willingly doing to Adolf Hitler and Naziism. Because if Adolf Hitler was here today, Randy, we all know where he’d be, don’t we?
He’d be at one of your rallies, clapping.