From next week’s Hill Times column, which I’m still trying to cobble together, like a monument of sorts:

If you disagree [that we should remove statues paying tribute to racists], a challenge. Imagine, for a moment, you are a First Nations person – or imagine that you are, like me, father to a beautiful and perfect indigenous girl.

Just imagine that. Then read these words.

Here’s what [Macdonald] said in 1879: “When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages. He is simply a savage who can read and write. Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

And here’s what he said in 1885: “…we have been pampering and coaxing the Indians; [but] we must take a new course, we must vindicate the position of the white man, we must teach the Indians what law is.”

Also in 1885: “I have not hesitated to tell this House, again and again, that we could not always hope to maintain peace with the Indians; that the savage was still a savage, and that until he ceased to be savage, we were always in danger of a collision, in danger of war, in danger of an outbreak.”

A couple years later, in 1887: “The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.”

And, finally, this in 1884, when describing potlaches, the joyful indigenous gatherings held to celebrate births, deaths, adoptions, weddings: “…celebrating the ‘potlatch’ is a misdemeanor. This Indian festival is debauchery of the worst kind, and the departmental officers and all clergymen unite in affirming that it is absolutely necessary to put this practice down.”

And “put them down” Sir John A. did. He gave Canada’s First Nations – the ones who were here first – assimilation, brutality and genocidal residential schools.

That’s what he gave them, and us.

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Canada is in a social media war with Saudi Arabia.

It’s not a real war – at least not yet.  Real wars involve bullets and bombs and bodies.  This one is presently confined to Twitter and press statements.  Conscription hasn’t happened just yet.

There has been one truly extraordinary statement made by Saudi Arabia, however, one that promised violence on a grand scale.  A week ago, the state-controlled Saudi media tweeted this at Canadians: “Sticking one’s nose where it doesn’t belong! As the Arabic saying goes: ‘He who interferes with what doesn’t concern him finds what doesn’t please him’.”

Those words were superimposed on a graphic of an Air Canada plane, about to collide with some tall buildings in downtown Toronto.  The message was unmistakable.

We are willing to murder you, Canadians.

It was not subtle.  Continue to criticize Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship, and its unchanging abuse of human rights – as the Department of Global Affairs did, with an innocuous and fairly routine tweet of its own, the week before – and a plane will be dispatched, as on 9/11, and piloted into the CN Tower.  We did it before, Saudi Arabia’s rulers were saying, and we will do it again.

To you.

Because, you know, they did.  They did. There were 19 men who carried out the mass murders at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and just outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Of the 19 killers, 15 were Saudis.  Their leader, Osama bin Laden, was a Saudi, too.

A U.S. 2016 congressional inquiry found that there had been substantial Saudi involvement in 9/11.  The bipartisan inquiry reviewed half a million documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and released an 838-page report.  Bob Graham, the former Democratic Senator who co-chaired the inquiry, said the hijackers had an extensive support system while they were in the United States.  From the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The definitive probe into the attacks, The 9/11 Commission, concluded that there remained a “likelihood that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship diverted funds to al-Qaida.”  Those funds were used to carry out the murders of 2,998 people – 24 Canadian citizens among them.

So: the Saudi government’s little tweet, and accompanying infographic, isn’t so far-fetched, is it?  The tyrants who run Saudi Arabia evidently did fund efforts to murder two dozen Canadians, and many more Americans.  They did it before, their tweet strongly suggested, and they are unafraid to do it again.

None of this should surprise us, unfortunately.  The human rights record of Saudi Arabia, according to the watchdog Freedom House, is among “the worst of the worst.”

Saudi Arabia uses corporal punishment against wrongdoers, dissidents and critics.  This includes amputations of hands and feet for petty theft – and fines, floggings, and torture for being gay.  You can also be sentenced to life in prison, or death, for being gay or a “witch” in Saudi Arabia.

Until recently, women were not permitted to drive in the “kingdom.”  Women who protested this were jailed.  Oh, and this: over there, women have been flogged for being the victims of rape, as well.

Amnesty International has reported that the Saudi government habitually uses torture to extract false confessions.  Human Rights Watch has said that the torture includes “beatings, electrocution, and pouring chemicals into the mouth.”

Unsurprisingly, capital punishment is also a regular occurrence in Saudi Arabia, and it is done with the utmost viciousness.  Human Rights Watch reported on one 2015 case in which Saudi security officials “filmed the beheading of a Burmese woman in Mecca in which the swordsman required three sword strikes to sever the victim’s head.”

Sometimes, the Saudis behead as many as a dozen people in a single day.  Afterwards, they will often crucify the headless body, so that it can be displayed publicly.  If one is convicted of adultery, the death penalty is carried out by stoning.  Saudi women are usually the ones stoned to death.

The Saudis execute children, as well. In 2016, the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child reported that the Saudis were stoning children to death in Yemen, with whom the Saudis are at war.  The UN has also documented that, out of the 47 people executed by the Saudis on Jan. 2, 2016 – their biggest mass execution day in decades – “at least” four were children.

We could recite many such figures, here, but banal statistics do not adequately capture the full extent of the brutality and savagery that is familiar in Saudi Arabia.  Suffice to say Saudi Arabia is one of the three countries who executes people the most – along with China and Iran.

In the past few days, Saudi Arabia’s “royal” goons have said they will be expelling our ambassador, pulling out of Canada thousands of Saudi students and hospital patients, barring Canadian grain exports, and making attempts to tank Canadian bonds in the marketplace.  And, as noted, they have now even hinted at a 9/11-style attack on Canadians.

Asked about all that, our Prime Minister has not blinked.  He has said: “We will continue to speak clearly and firmly on issues of human rights at home and abroad wherever we see the need.”

Canada is quite literally under attack.  As a nation, we need to rally behind the position taken by Prime Minister Trudeau – and all of us need to refuse to be intimidated by a vile mob of homicidal scum posing as Saudi Arabia’s leadership.

Because that’s what they are.

Scum.

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Where was he?

The Prime Minister of Canada, I mean.  When Canada’s biggest city needed him – when the millions of people who live and work here were feeling anguished, and angry, and afraid – Justin Trudeau was AWOL.

He was gone.

A young girl, and a young woman, murdered in cold blood on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue.  A dozen more wounded and hurt, some critically, and in hospital.  Toronto has had a horrific Spring and Summer, with the van attack on Yonge Street, with children being shot in playgrounds, with an explosion in gun violence.

None of that, however, quite equalled the horror of the Danforth Avenue attack on hot Summer night.  Two children, out with family and friends, shot to death on a city street: it affected this place in a way that is hard to describe, and impossible to imagine.

Now, most Canadians don’t live in Toronto, of course.  So not every Canadian can be expected to completely comprehend the impact of the Danforth terror attack – because that’s what it was, really, because it terrorized so many.  It chilled the blood of this city.  It left people breathless, like the very air was running out.

A vigil was held.  Hundreds showed up.  Among them were Toronto’s mayor, John Tory, and Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford.

Justin Trudeau?  He had sent out a couple tweets, one in English, one in French.  But he didn’t show.

He was on vacation.

People noticed.  People talked about it.  People – included Liberal and liberally-minded people – shook their heads.  People got mad.

Because here’s the thing:  if you think that Justin Trudeau isn’t good at anything at all – economics, policy, foreign affairs, trade, defence, whatever – there is one thing we all know that he is really, really good at.  There is one thing he excels at.  And that is the so-called retail part of politics.

You know: showing up.  Hugging people.  Shaking hands, smiling, looking in their eyes and making them feel like they are important.  Justin Trudeau is good at that stuff.  Really good.

After the Danforth attack, when this rollicking, noisy, diverse city was wounded – when it was laying in the dirt, gasping – we needed Justin Trudeau.  We needed him to show up, and listen, and put his arms around the city.  Because that is the one thing, above all things, at which he is without equal.  He’s the best at that.

On social media, the usual suspects attacked him for having too many vacations.  They attacked him for surfing out in Tofino.  They attacked him for being not there, even though they would still attack him if he was there.

His supporters, meanwhile, also took to social media.  He deserves a vacation with his family, some said, and they were right.  “Damned if he shows up, damned if he doesn’t,” they intoned, all King Solomon-like, and they were wrong.  Because that’s crap.  It’s bogus.

I worked for a Prime Minister.  The job description is vast.  The responsibilities are endless.  But right at the very top of the list is this: to give comfort to the afflicted.  To console the grieving.  To soothe the fearful.  To give hope and help a wounded city get through it all.

He didn’t.

When the full extent of his error became known to he and his advisors, of course, he eventually made his way here on a Challenger jet.  He went to the funeral of the 18-year-old, Reece Fallon, and spoke to people afterwards.  Some asshole heckled him, but Trudeau didn’t lose his cool.  He spoke well.  He was there, finally.

But too many days had gone by.  And, for too many Torontonians, showing up so late reminded them that he hadn’t been there when he was needed the most.  It reminded them that he was absent when a big, grieving city wanted to hear from him.

Will any of it be remembered in the way that the disastrous Indian trip will be remembered?  Maybe not.  Will it hurt him in the way the Aga Khan and the groping mess hurt him?  Probably not.

But down here in a city that matters – a city that should matter politically to him, too – his absenteeism is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon.  This is now a mark on Justin Trudeau’s permanent file, right down here in Toronto.

Where was he?  We wanted him here.

And he just wasn’t.

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