Having landed in Havana as part of her husband’s official visit to Cuba, Margaret Trudeau is said to have been seated during one event next to Fidel Castro who, like everyone else, was struck by the Canadian first lady’s beauty.
“I have an eye problem,” the former guerrilla allegedly told an intrigued Trudeau, then 28, “and the doctor told me to look at the sun and absorb its shine, which I do, but your eyes’ shine is brighter.”
Margaret’s marriage to Pierre, who was 29 years older than her, didn’t last, but her glamor did, and in fact passed down to their three sons. The eldest, Justin, inherited not only his mother’s radiance but both his parents’ charisma and also his father’s views, all of which underscored a 10-year premiership which this week was effectively declared, by him, braindead.
Tragically, unlike his father’s illustrious 15-year premiership, the resigning Trudeau’s premiership will be recalled as an emblem of Western liberalism’s crisis and decay.
THE TRUDEAUS’ combined 25 years at Canada’s helm dominated an era in which Canada consolidated its image as America’s European enclave.
The elder Trudeau liberalized divorce, simplified abortion, legalized homosexuality, spiked social spending, taxed capital gains, and legislated universal healthcare.
Influenced as a student in the London School of Economics by socialist thinker (and Zionist leader) Harold Lasky, Trudeau forged a European-style social democracy, and occasionally also jabbed Uncle Sam, for instance in that visit to Cuba.
That was last century. By the time Trudeau-the-son reached power, the issues changed, but the attitude remained. Canada thus banned conversion therapy, legalized assisted death and recreational marijuana, outlawed “assault style” weapons, imposed a federal carbon tax, introduced a program that slashed families’ day-care costs, and passed a child benefit program that pays low-income families more than $6,000 per year.
While such measures are, everywhere, subjects of public debate, they were in line with what was expected of a liberal, and were generally agreeable to the 7 million voters who, back in 2015, handed Justin Trudeau a decisive victory as he unseated the conservative Stephen Harper by a margin of 184 to 99 parliamentary seats.
That was then. Now, 10 years and two elections later, polls consistently showed Trudeau on the verge of a monumental defeat, garnering hardly one-fifth of the vote, trailing the Conservatives by more than 20 percentage points, and struggling to survive in practically each and every province, district and town.
Where did he go wrong?
Judging by the diatribe of Christina Freeland, Trudeau’s finance minister and closest ally until her angry resignation last month, his mistakes were about economic direction.
With Canada’s biggest trade partner expected to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian imports once Donald Trump takes over, Trudeau had to produce a plan, a task that Freeland said he failed to fulfill. Instead, she charged in her letter of resignation, he turned to “costly political gimmicks,” while Trump’s threat “means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war.”
The gimmicks included spendthrift plans to send cash to households and relieve some sales taxes, a transparent effort to buy at least some of the electorate that abandoned Trudeau’s Liberal Party in droves.
Considering the size of the disillusioned electorate, such shots from the hip would have missed the target at best, backfired at worst. Even so, the Canadian majority’s disenchantment is about much bigger things than the economics Freeland cited. It’s about political deafness and moral eclipse.
THE DEAFNESS is about immigration. Under Trudeau, Canada became America’s Germany, a magnet for refugees and a champion of multiculturalism, a position we Middle Israelis could only admire, and a humanistic generosity we must salute.
Canada’s population, 35.7 million when Trudeau took office, is now 41.6 million, a breakneck growth pace that included the emergence of more than 1 million new Canadians in 2022 alone. Since Canada’s fertility rate, 1.5 births per woman, is well below the replacement level, its sharp population growth reflects an influx of immigrants.
Anyone who drives through Canada’s endless countryside knows that geographically it can absorb hundreds of millions more. However, economically, socially, and culturally it can only digest that much, and swallow that fast. The result of the accelerated population growth has been a housing crunch, price pressures, an overheated healthcare industry, and crumbling social services.
Never mind that Trudeau failed to prepare for all this in advance, he failed to hear the people’s growing anger in the face of his radical version of the liberal ideals on which he was raised.
Then Trudeau’s misinterpretation of liberalism became a moral farce, and that happened in the context of the war in the distant Middle East.
“As Canadians, we will abide by all the rulings of the international court,” said Trudeau after a Hague-based tribunal issued arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes. But unlike his claim, Trudeau did not speak as a Canadian.
The real Canadian view was voiced by Trudeau’s party colleague Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former justice minister and a world-renowned human rights jurist. The ruling, he said, reflected that court’s double standards as well as its failure to meet its own juridical standards, and Canada should therefore say it will not honor its arrest warrants.
Trudeau would have done that, had he been true to the liberal ideals that originally guided him; the tenets that are what the war here is all about: the clash between those who attack and those who defend human rights, political liberty, religious freedom, women’s equality, and gay rights.
Trudeau’s Middle Eastern misstep is but a footnote in his premiership but it well represents the journey he made while the sun rays he inherited from his mother made way for eclipse.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.