At a concert in Vancouver, Mick Jagger was rattling off some things he admired about Canada, when he made the mistake of mentioning two words: “Justin Trudeau”. It’s unclear whether he planned to go into more detail, because the previously contented crowd erupted into deafening booing, and he quickly changed the topic to Canada’s successful soccer team – this seemed to pacify them.
The mere mention of Trudeau’s name can whip up a crowd into anger – in Vancouver, of all places! Clearly, many outsiders remain unaware of just how unpopular Trudeau has become over the past nine years. Unpopular is an understatement – the Prime Minister is truly hated by a large portion of the Canadian public.
There is now a palpable end of regime feeling – no matter when the next election is triggered, the population stands ready to turf out the Trudeau Liberals. Just as in the recent election in England, the coming change in government will reflect anger against the establishment rather than a full-throated endorsement of the specific policies of the opposition – especially when the most detailed policy of Poilievre’s Conservatives is to “axe the tax”!
Conservative Party policies will not be put under the microscope by most citizens. For many Canadians, a vote for Poilievre will not be the reflection of any particular philosophy, but rather a Molotov cocktail that can be legally thrown at an incompetent and arrogant ruling class.
Incompetence. Can this trait of the Trudeau years be denied, even among the last remnants of diehard Liberal holdouts? A typical Canadian government will have a scandal every few months. Under Trudeau, it’s not uncommon to come home from work to find that four new scandals have been revealed!
More substantively, Canadians look around our cities and towns and find that the country is declining: tent cities, food bank lines around the block, widespread crime, general disorder, and – for all intents and purposes – open borders.
Arrogance. Soon after his election in 2015, Justin Trudeau gave an interview with the New York Times in which he described his vision of Canada: the “first post-national state” with “no core identity, no mainstream”. His naïve voters gave him a mandate to look handsome on the world stage and legalize pot – nobody voted for Canadian identity to be discarded wholesale.
Trudeau implemented his John Lennon “imagine no countries” vision anyway. Historical depictions – including Terry Fox, Vimy Ridge, and Nellie McClung – have been removed from passports. Christian symbols have been stripped from Canada’s Royal Coat of Arms.
The Conservatives have the next election in the bag, and the Liberals deserve to lose it. But if Poilievre seeks to create an enduring legacy, he will need to reverse Trudeau’s ideology of post-nationalism through serious reform. Canadians must be ready to scrutinize his government to ensure this happens.
If there is one positive outcome of the Trudeau years, it’s that Canadians have had the longest and deepest immersion in woke ideology anywhere in the world, and have as a result developed a profound contempt for it.
Editor’s note: My Counter Current column is published once every two weeks in the Islands Marketplace paper on Salt Spring Island. This piece was published on July 12th, 2024.
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