Even the U.S. has noticed that he often acts like he’s running for Congress
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board recently took note that Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, seems to keep doing and saying things for the sole purpose of impressing Americans. “One of the oddities of Canadian politics is that its Liberal Party politicians so often sound like they’re running for office in the U.S.,” it reads.
Canadian politics is never too far removed from its U.S. equivalent, but there have indeed been an awful lot of Liberal actions in recent months that don’t really make any sense unless you consider the Liberals’ desire to score points with a U.S. audience (or a Canadian audience who watches too much CNN). For example …
CONSTANTLY PRETENDING THAT ABORTION IS UNDER THREAT
It’s hard to think of a Western country that has more thoroughly cowed its anti-abortion movement than Canada. There are no laws whatsoever governing abortion in Canada; a fact that makes us an outlier even among the abortion libertine nations of Europe. Despite this, the consistent public position of the Conservative Party of Canada ever since its 2004 founding has been that whatever their personal thoughts on the matter, they will never introduce legislation to disrupt the status quo.
Of the six people running for Conservative leader right now, five of them (including the two front-runners) have publicly promised not to touch abortion with a 10-metre pole. The Conservative leader in the last federal election said he was “pro-choice.” Even Canada’s leading far-right option, the People’s Party of Canada, has promised not to legislate abortion.
In the face of all this, Trudeau has consistently campaigned on the notion that Canadian abortion access is somehow at risk like it is in select U.S. states. The Liberals’ 2021 platform said that “Conservatives want to roll back abortion access.” And when news leaked that the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision barring state-level bans on abortion, it only took a few hours for Trudeau to respond with a tweet that “every woman in Canada has a right to a safe and legal abortion.”
BANNING CANADIAN GUNS TO STOP AMERICAN MASS SHOOTINGS
Trudeau made direct reference to a recent mass-shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in his decision this week to “freeze” the sale or transfer of handguns. Not mentioned was that the shooting was actually committed with a long gun. Or that Uvalde is in the United States, and thus not subject to Canadian law. Or that the shooting would almost certainly have been prevented in Canada due to our existing latticework of laws, which are actually pretty good at screening out mentally ill gun owners. Or that handgun shootings in Canada are almost entirely committed with smuggled U.S. firearms that are already illegal.
A high-profile drive by U.S. progressives to counter mass shooting by banning the AR-15 rifle has also had a clear influence on Trudeau policy. The AR-15 was already a restricted firearm in Canada, but the Liberals issued a 2020 Order-in-Council prohibiting it and approximately 1,500 other long guns that look like the AR-15, even if they might happen to differ dramatically in capability and rate of fire. Notably, that particular order was issued in response to a Nova Scotia mass shooting that was committed with smuggled U.S. firearms.
IMPORTING THE U.S. CULTURE WARS ON RACE
By virtually every metric, the principal Canadian racial divide is the one between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. Indigenous Canadians earn significantly less, their average life expectancy is 15 years earlier and they’re disproportionately the victims of unambiguously racist attacks such as a Thunder Bay woman who was fatally struck with a trailer hitch thrown from a moving car.
But particularly since Black Lives Matter protests and riots roiled the United States in the summer of 2020, the Trudeau government has often framed Canadian race relations as being inflected by the legacies of slavery and segregation. Although African slavery in Canada ended 40 years earlier than in the U.S. — and numbered in the hundreds, rather than the millions — the Liberals have introduced anti-racism training into the civil service that mentions slavery more often than Indian Residential Schools.
Trudeau also has a penchant to issue a public response to every major U.S. racial incident, while overlooking any number of Canadian equivalents. When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, Trudeau issued a statement saying “we know Canada isn’t immune to racist violence & hate.” When protesters convened in Ottawa in June 2020 against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Trudeau ventured into the crowd and took a knee.
SOLVING AN OVER-INCARCERATION PROBLEM THAT DOESN’T EXIST
Sentencing reform is a big issue in the United States for the singular reason that they have more prisoners than anyone else. Even after some light moves towards sentencing reform, the U.S still has a higher proportion of their citizens in jail than any other nation on earth and it’s not even close.
This is … not the case in Canada. According to the World Prison Brief, we’re actually on the bottom end of countries when it comes to incarceration rates. As per their last count, Canada ranks 143rd in terms of its per capita rate of people in jail.
It’s why, when activists bring up the issue of sentencing in Canada, it’s usually to demand more of it. This came up a few times during the national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, when commissioners hinted that chronically light sentencing of violent offenders was “resulting in violence against Indigenous women.”
Nevertheless, the Trudeau government has jumped on the U.S. sentencing reform bandwagon with Bill C-5. The proposed legislation would drop mandatory minimum sentences for a host of violent crimes, including “robbery with a firearm,” “discharging a firearm with intent” and “extortion with a firearm.” Most notably — given Canada’s gun smuggling crisis — it would also reduce sentencing for six charges related to weapons trafficking.
ALLOWING IN 60,000 ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSERS TO SPITE TRUMP
Canada has never really faced a major migrant crises along its southern border. We’ve had the occasional rusty ship showing up on the West Coast filled with South Asian migrants, but the Canadian border has never really seen statistically significant numbers of people illegally darting across with luggage in tow.
That changed in 2017, when thousands of migrants began coursing through what Ottawa would come to call “irregular” border crossings. These were unguarded sections of the U.S./Canadian border, such as Roxham Road in Quebec, where migrants would cross illegally into Canadian territory before claiming refugee status. The crossings emerged entirely to bypass the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which refugee claimants at the U.S.-Canadian border are turned away on the grounds that they’re already in a safe country.
The influx neatly coincided with a 2017 tweet from Trudeau declaring “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.” It’s easily the most-shared thing that Trudeau has ever posted to the internet, and it was a direct response to a controversial executive order by U.S. president Donald Trump that barred U.S. entry to nationals from seven predominantly Muslim nations, including Middle Eastern refugees.
The tweet got Trudeau a whole bunch of praise in U.S. media, but helped to open up a back door into Canada that hasn’t really closed. Despite clear evidence that the likes of Roxham Road are being heavily used by foreigners who came to the U.S. on tourist visas for the express purpose of illegally entering Canada, the Trudeau government has continued to oversee a heavy influx of border crossers even after the election of a new president (except for that 16-month period when they turned them away to enforce COVID quarantines, of course).
So you probably know that Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government was re-elected in Ontario on June 2. But perhaps you’re not fully aware of just how explosively he clinched victory on Thursday night …
Less triumphant is that nobody actually showed up to the election. Only about 43 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, which could make this the least attended election in Ontario history. When you consider that the Progressive Conservatives won just 40 per cent of the vote, this means that Ford won re-election thanks to the support of a mere 17 per cent of the overall electorate.
Oh, and Ford’s nephew Mike is an MPP now. So for those counting, that’s three generations of Fords in Queen’s Park (the late Doug Ford Sr. was an MPP in the 1990s).
These days, when Canada inks a major land claim settlement, it’s usually either in B.C. or the North, both of which largely sit atop untreatied land. But on Thursday, the prime minister was in Alberta to finalize a $1.3 billion settlement with the Siksika Nation. The Siksika are indeed a treatied nation (they signed on to the 1877 Treaty 7 that underlies much of Southern Alberta) but the $1.3 billion settlement concerns a shady 1910 deal under which Ottawa strong-armed them into surrendering 115,000 acres of reserve land. This is why Siksika Chief Ouray Crowfoot was quick to note that the settlement isn’t some reconciliation gesture; it’s Ottawa making them whole for a shady contract that the nation spent 60 years in court to challenge.
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