Trudeau tells the rest of us to buy EVs when his government won't | Toronto Sun - "less than 5% of all federal vehicles obtained since Jan. 1, 2020, were electric... Even after adding in the 303,073 hybrid electric vehicles and 95,896 plug-in electric vehicles registered in Canada, that only amounts to 2.1% of all vehicles in Canada... Environment and Climate Change Canada obtained 122 vehicles since January 2020, but none were electric. Many were regular, full-size pickup trucks and just 34 vehicles were hybrids... Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault is not against racking up the kilometres for his job. Guilbeault was driving up to three times what the average Canadian would drive and was using a gas guzzling vehicle at the time. For April 2020 for example, Guilbeault’s odometer turned over 3,980 km in a single month."
Trudeau's bad handling of this bill is giving his government headaches | Toronto Sun - "Bill C-21, sold to the public as a way to enact a handgun freeze and to ban what the government describes as “military-style assault weapons,” had strong public backing. That is, until the Liberals went too far and added hundreds of hunting rifles and shotguns to the banned list. Trudeau went from insisting anyone claiming hunting guns were being banned was lying to saying he was listening, and the government will consider changes... they have tried to assure gun control advocates that they will stand firm, while telling Indigenous leaders they are hearing them. Last week at their annual meeting, the Assembly of First Nations passed a unanimous resolution against C-21 saying that the federal government did not consult them and that the bill infringes on treaty rights. If the bill passes in anything close to its current form, it will be subject to legal challenges, which will only extend the government’s headache... If the hundreds of gun models added to the banned list remain there, it will also push up the cost of the government’s gun buyback program... Police forces across the country have said they do not have the resources to set up and run such a program. The military and Canada Post have also both informed the government they can’t run such a program."
Trudeau ignores top cop on stricter bail and sentencing for gun crime | Toronto Sun - "The top cop in Canada’s biggest city says dealing with gun crime means better border enforcement and stricter bail and sentencing conditions. It’s too bad Prime Minister Justin Trudeau isn’t listening to Toronto Police Chief James Ramer or Toronto Mayor John Tory or even Ontario Premier Doug Ford for that matter."
We don't give out tough sentences in Canada, even for gun crimes | Toronto Sun - "The most dangerous guns are the ones used by criminals, and overwhelmingly, those guns are smuggled in from the United States. Instead of going after those guns, Trudeau and his Liberal government have imposed a handgun freeze on licensed owners and spent the last several years banning rifles and shotguns used by sports shooters and hunters. They have pledged to spend more on what they call their gun buyback program than they spend on programs for border officers to intercept smuggled guns from the United States. All the while, they have relaxed bail conditions under Bill C-75 in 2019 so that under the principle of restraint, the judge or justice of the peace “shall give primary consideration to the release of the accused at the earliest reasonable opportunity.” Is it any wonder that we regularly report on people being arrested for one shooting while out on bail for an earlier shooting. In Canada, we don’t have a justice system, we have a process system that cares more about criminals than victims."
Trudeau will push taxes higher in 2023 making life more expensive | Toronto Sun - "“At minimum, government should be pressing pause until inflation is under control,” Kelly said. That’s unlikely to happen given the Trudeau government’s spending patterns. Between April’s budget and the November fall economic statement, finance minister Chrystia Freeland increased spending by $20 billion while claiming fiscal prudence... “Other countries are cutting taxes, but Ottawa is sticking Canadians with higher bills,” said CTF executive director Franco Terrazzano. “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needs to stop wasting so much money and cut taxes.”"
LILLEY: Trudeau taking reins from premiers would be disastrous | Toronto Sun - "These calls for the Trudeau government to relieve provinces of their duties – specifically the Ford government in Ontario – aren’t coming from random Twitter trolls but from doctors, lawyers and seasoned political pundits... In every area of the COVID response that the Trudeau government is charged with, they have failed."
From 2021
KINSELLA: Trudeau unleashes disastrous Melanie Joly on world | Toronto Sun - "I mean, sure, my feminism took a bit of hit when, um, it was alleged that I groped a female reporter. But I repeat what I told her: I wouldn’t have done so if she had told me she was a writer for a national newspaper! And, OK, Donald Trump and I both arguably obstructed justice — him for cronies, and me for a Liberal party donor being prosecuted for corruption. Sure. But he was impeached, and I wasn’t! And, yes, my diversity credentials aren’t what they used to be. Lying about where I was on the day I set aside for Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation — and instead jetting off to a surfer’s beach in Tofino, and lounging at an $18-million mansion — wasn’t so progressive, I suppose. But I expressed “regret”! Isn’t that enough, World?...
Countries only turn 150 once — but Melanie, as minister responsible, turned ours into an unmitigated fiasco. Indigenous youth protested it, and citizens hated it, and even wrote to me about it... Melanie gifted the streaming giant tax-free status for a piddling amount of investment in Canada’s cultural sector — including in her home province, Quebec. The media weren’t impressed... Ottawa Holocaust Monument. Melanie commissioned one, but she forgot something. The Washington Post noticed: “(Joly) forgot to mention Jews on the new Holocaust monument dedication plaque.” Oops.
Parliament Hill hockey rink. Melanie had a rink built on Parliament Hill, which was nice. Not nice: The rink (a) prohibited the playing of hockey; (b) was going to be in existence for less than a month; and (c) was a block from the biggest skating rink in the world, the Rideau Canal. Oh, and this, from the Toronto Star: “The rink is budgeted to cost about $215,385 per day that it’s open.” That worked out to about $300 per skater. Ouch, ouch, ouch!"
Tasha Kheiriddin: Trudeau's 'feminist' Liberals shut down probe into military sexual misconduct - "One of the most serious matters is the investigation by the House of Commons’ defence committee into allegations of sexual misconduct against former chief of the defence staff, Gen. Jonathan Vance, and what Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau knew of them in 2018... a government and prime minister that continually flaunt their feminist credentials are failing to tackle misogyny and harassment within one of this country’s most important institutions"
KINSELLA: Out-of-touch Chrystia Freeland and her Disney gaffe | Toronto Sun - "“I personally, as a mother and wife, look carefully at my credit card bill once a month. And last Sunday, I said to the kids, ‘You’re older now. You don’t watch Disney anymore. Let’s cut that Disney+ subscription.” She went on, digging herself ever-deeper: “So we cut it. It’s only $13.99 a month that we’re saving, but every little bit helps.”... did the minister of finance not notice the kerfuffle about her boss, the prime minister, staying in a $6,000-a-night palatial London hotel in the lead-up to the Queen’s funeral? Did she not note that the president of the United States, him personally, set an example by staying at the U.S. Embassy and thereby saved his taxpayers a small fortune? Or, has she looked at any polls — and God knows her department is addicted to polls — which tell her what Canadians are preoccupied with these days? It’s the cost of living... When asked what inflation and rising interest rates have made “much more difficult” to get, half said food. Thirty-five per cent said housing. And 34% said energy — heating their home or fuelling their vehicle. This, of course, is why Chrystia Freeland’s Disney+ gaffe was so plus-sized: It reminds everyone how utterly and completely out of touch the Trudeau regime is"
William Watson: The Liberals' 570 fixes for Canada - "Just as you don’t truly get a sense of how big Canada is until you drive across it, you don’t truly get a sense of how all-controlling a modern political party wants to be until you read its platform... Whether the exact number of Liberal promises is 516 or 518 or 570, it’s a lot of promises. Strangely, it’s a lot more than the 325 in their 2015 platform... after six years in government, they have almost double that number of things they want to do — as if “appetite had grown by what it fed on,” as Hamlet says. If I were considering coming to Canada and I heard that the party in charge for the last six years thought the place was still 570 ways imperfect, I might go elsewhere — which would at least ease the pressure on housing prices. Not all the new promises involve financial commitments. The budget table presented at the end of the document, just before the disability statement, includes only 112 new spending lines. Only. A lot has been made of how the Liberals have had their plan costed but as neither they nor the Parliamentary Budgetary Officer is saying anything about how the costs were calculated it’s not clear how boast-worthy that is. The Liberals have done their own gender and diversity analysis of their own proposals. No worries: it’s all good. No one argues diversity isn’t important. But the platform includes the word “diversity” 38 times, versus only three appearances of that other d-word, deficit. The most important mention: “This plan will continue to reduce Canada’s debt as a share of the economy over time and our deficit is decreasing every single year” — an awkward construction that suggests the copy editor didn’t just have trouble with bullets. Incidentally, the word “deficit” does not appear in the fiscal table. The line where the numerical deficit appears simply says “fiscal projection.” It shows negative numbers all the way out, including negative $32.1 billion in 2025-6. “If you have 40 priorities, you don’t have any priorities,” Paul Martin used to say — which is ironic, since he eventually lost the prime ministership to a simple, understandable five-priority Conservative platform. (Note that 570 is more than 14 times 40.) In fairness to the Liberals, they do indicate which policies they would address in their first 100 days — even if governments usually emphasize the first 100 days when, like FDR in 1933, they’re replacing an opposition party, not themselves... four of the Liberals’ highest-priority items are to reintroduce legislation that their calling of the election put on hold. Gender and equality accounting is fine but what I’d really like to see in the platform is a list of how many of the proposals the NDP would have blocked if the Liberals had tried to get them through the last parliament. My guess is none. No wonder the prime minister is having trouble persuading Canadians his not having a majority government is preventing FORWARD. For everyone."
Rupa Subramanya: Trudeau has turned Canada into an insular country with little power to affect foreign affairs - "In my years away from Canada on work assignments overseas, Canada was hardly ever in the news until Trudeau came to power. The paradox is that Canada is probably less consequential in the world than it has been at any time in recent decades... Here in Ottawa, one would be hard pressed to realize this is the capital of a G7 country. It’s strikingly provincial and inward looking. Some might say that a middle power like Canada can only do so much in the international arena, yet this neglects our own history as a serious international player and the fact that today, medium powers such as Sweden, Norway and Australia punch way above their weight."
Opinion: Justin Trudeau’s reality: Much of the country dislikes him - The Globe and Mail - "Will Justin Trudeau know when it’s time to go?... My guess is he won’t return from vacation with any grand revelation resulting from a walk on the beach – the summer version of his father, Pierre’s, famous walk in a snowstorm that inspired his retirement in 1984. Instead, Justin will likely gird for a fight with Mr. Poilievre while trying to refurbish an agenda that has been hijacked and uprooted by a series of unfortunate events: a pandemic, inflation, war in Ukraine, and a new political adversary who is skilled in landing devastatingly effective political punches. But the Prime Minister must also face another reality: he is not well-liked by broad swaths of the public. Mr. Trudeau incites a visceral response in many Canadians, and not just those living in Western Canada... There has always been a “to-the-manor-born” aura about the Prime Minister, something that comes with being the scion of a famous family. Many people have never felt comfortable with the way he speaks – it can seem affected, unnatural. It’s a subjective matter, but one that can influence the way a person thinks about you. Mr. Trudeau has also been hurt by self-inflicted wounds. He has cemented the impression that there is one set of rules for him, and another for the rest of us. The whiff of privilege enveloping him appeared early on, when he spent the Christmas of 2016 on the Aga Khan’s private island, in violation of federal conflict-of-interest laws. That feeling extended to his latest holiday in Costa Rica, where he and his family emerged from a private jet, maskless. Again, one rule for him, another for the lumpenproletariat forced to fly commercial. The Prime Minister is seen by many as a woke virtue signaller, more concerned with image than substance. There was his showy trip to Kyiv in May to reopen the Canadian embassy, which hasn’t been occupied since. He travelled to Tofino, B.C., for a surfing holiday on the first-ever National Day of Truth and Reconciliation last year, despite his oft-repeated declaration that nothing is more important to him than treating Indigenous peoples with respect and dignity... one letter writer suggested to me that when people feel their interests and values are systemically being disregarded by governments, they begin to look for alternatives – as unappealing as some of those other options might be to them. That may explain a recent Abacus poll that showed the Conservatives up five points over the Liberals if an election were to have been held last month. The same poll asked respondents if they had a positive or negative impression of Mr. Trudeau. Fifty-one per cent responded in the negative – his worst number on this question, ever. The survey also indicated that a dwindling number of people believe the country is heading in the right direction. Mr. Trudeau has always been unpopular in the Prairies. But that enmity is now spreading. There is an impression that the Prime Minister is a master of wedge politics, which has divided the country more than anything the Conservatives have done in recent memory. Many Canadians haven’t been able to trust the PM since the SNC-Lavalin scandal and his showdown with Jody Wilson-Raybould."
We used to have serious governments, we don't under Justin Trudeau | Toronto Sun - "When it came to fighting Apartheid, Canada was at the forefront, even as our close allies the Americans and British took a different stand on how to end the odious regime. Canada’s position championed by Mulroney, and Hartt, won the day and won Nelson Mandela’s freedom. Today we have a government led by a prime minister who campaigned on a slogan of “Canada’s Back!” on the international stage. All we got was a slogan, not much else because our allies fail to take us seriously today. It’s not as if Mulroney was the last serious prime minister, it’s just that now we don’t have one. Both Jean Chretien’s Liberal government and Stephen Harper’s Conservative government maintained our international reputation. We were well regarded among allies and the wider international community under their leadership. In Chretien’s era, Canadian peacekeepers played an outsized role in conflicts like Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia. Under Chretien, Canada took a leading military role in Afghanistan. His government balanced the budget for the first time in decades. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, Canada played a leading role with Harper chairing a committee of leaders through the G20 on stabilizing the global financial system. Harper worked with Obama to save the auto sector from collapse. He expanded trade agreements for Canada around the world. And with Trudeau? Twice in the last two years our closest allies have cut us out of new security structures. What was the Five Eyes group has increasingly become the Three Eyes Group as the Americans, British and Australians cut us out. Even in bilateral relations with Washington, when Trudeau went to the American capital last November to push for an exemption to a harmful policy on electric vehicles, he wasn’t met by Joe Biden as he arrived. Instead, Biden was in Detroit promoting the harmful policy Trudeau wanted to speak to him about... If Mulroney’s government was one of substance, of changing the direction of the country – and in some cases the world – in serious ways, then Trudeau’s government is one of the latest Instagram post, the latest meme, the viral TikTok."
Opinion: The vacuum at the centre of Canadian politics: an incompetent, unethical government faces an intemperate, unhinged opposition - The Globe and Mail - "you have a Liberal government that is now embroiled in half a dozen crises of its own making, the fruit of a peculiar mix of cynicism, moral vanity, incompetence, doctrinaire ideology and apparently habitual abuse of power – a culture that originates with the leader, to be sure, but which appears to have spread throughout the party. Thus you have, simultaneously, the airport mess, the passport mess, and the Russian embassy party mess; the abject retreat on vaccine mandates, in the face of a panicky Liberal backbench; the revelations that its centrepiece climate plan is in disarray, its 2030 carbon emissions reductions targets acknowledged, within government, to be a distant fantasy; all while it is engaged in the utter madness of attempting to regulate the internet, through no fewer than three separate bills. That’s four or five ministers in trouble, and we haven’t even got to the matter of the Public Safety Minister, Marco Mendicino – and, let us not forget, the Prime Minister – apparently lying to Parliament about why they invoked the Emergencies Act, and on whose advice. Or, worst yet, the jaw-dropping allegation that the Prime Minister’s Office, and the then Public Safety Minister, Bill Blair, prevailed upon the commissioner of the RCMP, Brenda Lucki, to interfere in the investigation of the murder of 22 people by a gunman in Nova Scotia two years ago, for the purpose of selling gun control legislation the government had planned."
Thread by @TristinHopper on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I know everybody thinks the UK is some unstable banana republic right now, but this is exactly what democracy is supposed to look like when leaders screw up. Canada only *appears* more stable because we have a ludicrously high tolerance for failure. Theresa May, Boris and Liz Truss all generally lost their jobs due to screw-ups that would barely cover a week's worth of headlines for the Trudeau government. My God, we haven't even had time to cover the Lucki Affair what with all the other scandals. A Brit would have been sent into freaking continental exile over blackface."
FIRST READING: The least popular Canadian government ever elected - "Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau now becomes the prime minister with the slimmest share of overall electoral support in Canadian history. On Monday, Trudeau got only 32.2 per cent of the popular vote (which means that 67.8 per cent of Canadians did not vote for him). For context, the 2006 election that first elected Stephen Harper is usually cited as one of the slimmest minority governments in Canadian history. Even in that case, Harper managed 36.3 per cent of the vote. According to former Liberal strategist Gerry Butts, winning elections with ever-diminishing shares of popular support is entirely intentional. In a Tuesday tweet thread, Butts praised the “efficiency” of Liberal campaigns that maximized gains from vote-splitting in key areas. This may be an indication that the Liberals were never all that serious about their 2015 pledge for electoral reform, but perhaps we’re being cynical. Naturally, calling a $612 million election just to obtain the same result as before has invited plenty of mockery... Monday had the lowest voter turnout of any election in history? Only 58.5 per cent of eligible voters bothered to go to a voting place... Not every People’s Party of Canada voter is a disaffected Tory, but Maxime Bernier’s populist movement absolutely took the wind out of the Conservatives’ sails on Monday night. Below are all the ridings in which a combined PPC-Conservative vote could have swung the balance. It’s 24 ridings total, including 18 that ultimately went for the Liberals. Had they all gone Tory instead, Monday’s result would have have been a Conservative minority with 143 seats to the Liberals’ 140... John Ivison followed Justin Trudeau throughout the course of Election 44. His takeaway from the whole odyssey? It was a remarkably toxic and divisive ordeal that didn’t need to happen. “Trudeau calls anyone who doesn’t agree with him a cynic, but this was the height of cynicism and voters seem to have seen through it”... a humble, normal person in charge of the Liberal Party would have seen Monday’s results as the signal for a dramatic reversal in tone and approach. But Trudeau is not a humble, normal person. “He doesn’t like to be told ‘no’ and doesn’t seem to be able to avoid danger”"
Ottawa now underreports true level of spending - The Hub - "Prior to 2020, federal budgets and other financial disclosures only differentiated between public debt charges (i.e. interest costs on federal debt) and program spending (all spending except interest costs, including transfers to Canadians and other levels of governments, and direct spending on programs such as national defence). It was fairly easy to identify how much Ottawa planned to spend and how much interest was paid on debt for past borrowing. But this simplicity and transparency was reduced in 2020 when “net actuarial losses” were removed from program spending and added as a separate item... The ability to hold elected politicians and bureaucrats accountable remains premised on an agreed set of facts. Financial disclosures that obscure the total cost of federal spending make such accountability more difficult and less transparent for average Canadians. Reforms to ensure better clarity and transparency are needed."
Meme - "Probably the most incoherent and useless Prime Minister in our national history."
TRUDEAU: "WE CANNOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT INFLATION BECAUSE IT IS A GLOBAL CRISIS"
ALSO TRUDEAU: "WE MUST ACT To STOP CLIMATE CHANGE BECAUSE IT IS A GLOBAL CRISIS"
LILLEY: Trudeau fiddles while economy burns amid rising inflation, interest rates | Toronto Sun - "How is this Trudeau’s fault in any way, shape or form? Because he has been warned about inflation for more than a year now and has done nothing... Senior economists across the private sector have warned for months that if government spending was not curtailed, it would put more pressure on the Bank of Canada to hike interest rates and in turn put pressure on family budgets. “Fiscal policy has every bit as much a role to play in dampening inflation as does monetary policy,” Doug Porter, chief economist at Bank of Montreal, said last month. The response from the Trudeau government was a dismissive one. Trudeau bragged Wednesday about how the Canadian economy, under his leadership, now has more people working than before the pandemic. What he won’t tell you is that this increase in jobs is mostly government jobs... It should also be noted that the federal government currently can’t seem to offer basic services from passports to immigration processing, visas, or prompt screening at airports despite all these additional government workers. In Justin Trudeau we have a prime minister whose government can’t control its own spending, can’t control inflation, and is helping to drive up the cost of living by its own actions. Yet, the Trudeau government still can’t deliver basic services that the public pays for and relies on. In the private sector, this would get you fired, but Trudeau just jets across the country lecturing us about climate change while he goes from photo op to photo op. Elections have consequences, and now we’re are all paying the price for electing Trudeau after he put his ignorance on display last August during the election."
FIRST READING: Canada pauses and reflects on ineptitude of prime minister - "Trudeau spokesman Alex Wellstead asserted that just because the prime minister took a jet to Tofino does not mean that he is on vacation. “He wasn’t on a beach,” said Wellstead. Anyways, here’s video of Trudeau on a beach. As news of Trudeau’s clandestine Tofino trip blew up, the CBC initially tweeted a headline reading, “On the first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travelled to B.C. speaking with residential school survivors from across the country.” When it emerged that the “speaking” was actually just a series of in-flight phone calls, the network quietly deleted the initial tweet."
Trudeau heckled online for using elongated '2SLGBTQQIA+ people' acronym - "Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inspired online confusion and mockery after stating the latest iteration of an elongated LGBT moniker that some say sounded like an encryption password, commemorating "2SLGBTQQIA+ people... Many prominent users on Twitter did not fully understand the acronym the prime minister was referring to, prompting some to joke that "Headbutting the keyboard is now a sexuality," British rapper ZUBY tweeted"
Liberals cut ties with Toronto candidate over dropped sexual assault charge, military review - "The Liberal Party said Toronto candidate Kevin Vuong is no longer running under the party banner and won't sit with the Liberal caucus if elected. Vuong, running in Spadina–Fort York, had been asked by the Liberals to "pause" his campaign after reports of a past sexual assault charge, which was dropped, surfaced"
An accusation is as bad as a conviction. Even if charges are dropped, no man who has been accused is ever safe
GOLDSTEIN: Trudeau's carbon tax cheques will make most of us poorer | Toronto Sun - "according to Yves Giroux, Parliament’s independent, non-partisan budget officer, most people receiving these cheques (60%), will pay a lot more in annual carbon taxes than they get back in carbon tax payments, and will do so every year up to 2030, at least... The Trudeau government, by contrast, continues to claim 80% of households paying the carbon tax will be better off financially. The difference in the competing claims is dramatic... Giroux’s calculations differ from the government’s because the feds only calculate the direct financial impact of the carbon tax — the amount paid by taxpayers versus the amount the government returns in rebates. Giroux says those figures are accurate but they’re incomplete because they don’t include the added cost of the economic damage caused by the carbon tax. He calculates Trudeau’s carbon tax will reduce Canada’s real GDP growth this year by 0.4% and by 1.3% in 2030. Total labour income will be cut by 0.5% this year and by 2.3% in 2030. Investment income will decline by 2.6% this year and by 3.6% in 2030... Trudeau obviously hopes that when people living in the four provinces where his carbon tax applies start receiving quarterly cheques in July — with an initial double payment to cover the January to June period this year — they’ll forget that most of them will be paying more in carbon taxes than they’ll get in rebates."
Destroying the economy and impoverishing people with negligible benefit to the environment. Sounds about right. Too bad credulous people will just blame "greedy companies"
Rex Murphy: Santa Justin puts a lump of coal in every Canadian's Christmas stocking - "Are there any so naïve who did not believe the Trudeau government would work to slyly entwine the protracted and immiserating COVID-19 crisis with its global warming obsession?... Just as we follow the science on COVID, so too we must follow the science on global warming, was Trudeau’s message. This is tripe, and blatant tripe at that. There is no equivalency, not even in metaphorical terms, between the real science of the first, which has in fact produced a vaccine for a hitherto unknown, present-day illness, and the “science” of the second, which much like astrology or futurism speaks to conditions 80 years out. Global warming science is a hodgepodge of wild models, failed predictions, overzealous researchers, and a great clutter of thousands of advocacy organizations that have been bellowing “the science is settled” when it so plainly isn’t and can’t be, for over two decades now. It has no precision, no empirical measurement, no replication. It does not follow the canons of experiment and observation. It is a vague cloud of passionate alarmism linked to the feverish religiosity of radical environmentalism, and far too closely resembling, if not replicating, the outbursts of millenarianism that have been the hallmark of irrationality through the centuries... China is not on board. India is not on board. Russia doesn’t care. The U.S. has no federal carbon tax and yet has lowered carbon-dioxide emissions more successfully than Canada. I ask again, where does Mr. Trudeau find the delusionary basis that if he slaps $170 a tonne on carbon-dioxide emissions in Canada, the world is saved from incineration?"
William Watson: U.S. court rulings not in Trudeau's jurisdiction - "(The prime minister’s more-reported statement over the weekend was his twitting of Vladimir Putin for having once ridden horseback bare-chested. Fair enough. It was bizarre, even if good Liberals don’t mock other countries’ and cultures’ different customs. But this is a prime minister who kickstarted his own political career striking a bare-chested muscleman pose at the weigh-in for a charity boxing match. When he won the 2015 election NBC News re-ran the weigh-in photo, noting the tattoo on the prime ministerial bicep: “Meet Justin Trudeau: Canada’s Boxing, Strip-Teasing New PM.”)... I wonder if he would be as forthright in his denunciation if a conservative Republican who actually liked the decision were in the White House — as may well be the case in 2025. My bet is his standing up would be much more circumspect. One true thing Donald Trump said while president (there were not many) was that Mr. Trudeau was two-faced: obsequious in private at the G7 summit in Quebec but defiantly standing up to him only in the press conference after Trump was comfortably aboard Air Force One. By such calculations are the limits of political courage determined. The Canadian constitution doesn’t actually say anything about abortion. It does say a lot about jurisdiction. The democratic virtue of jurisdiction is that it clarifies responsibility. Mme. Plante has no jurisdiction over American abortion law. She does have jurisdiction over policing, traffic and taxes in her city, which are increasingly dysfunctional. Mr. Trudeau has jurisdiction over airports, passports and the RCMP. No wonder he prefers talking about U.S. abortion law. Speaking of jurisdiction, there is much talk on CBC about preparations for a flood of American women coming to Canada to have abortions (rather than to New York, for some reason, which can’t be that the flights are cheaper). Can someone with jurisdictional responsibility please explain how the resulting queues will be handled, how much longer the expected wait times will be for Canadian women as a result, and who will pay for all these abortions?"
