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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