Canada's Back? Define "Back."

I have to admit that, like many Canadian progressives  (real progressives, not the watered-down to meaninglessness type popular with so many Liberals) I thought I had misjudged Justin Trudeau during the heady first days of his administration.

He ordered an enquiry into missing First Nations women. He got the process underway to repeal mandatory minimum sentencing. Overall he seemed to be serious about dismantling the worst excesses of the Harper regime. He boastfully proclaimed that "Canada's back" and, for a while, he sounded like the real deal.

Sure it was obvious that he was picking at the low-hanging fruit, the really easy stuff that most of us, including a percentage of Tories, found repugnant. Yet that did create a mood of optimism and hope that it wasn't a mirage, that he would do Canada proud on the hard stuff just as he was on the initial housecleaning. He showed us that he was good at pushing on open doors, maybe he'd have the courage to kick in the locked ones too. Surely with the muscle of a strong majority he could handle the tough jobs.

Barely a month in power and it's looking like it was all a mirage. This Saudi arms deal, 15-billion dollars worth of rolling death on wheels, shows that people like me might have been giving this Trudeau credit where it really wasn't deserved.

What's wrong with Canada playing footsie with the House of Saud? I've been writing about it for the past year. If you don't understand the background, go here and here and here. And here and here and here and over here. Or here and here.

Justin isn't even trying to explain this away. He's cowering behind Dion who himself is closed-lipped. It didn't take long for Harper-era transparency and accountability to return.

Why are we providing these weapons? To what purposes will they be put? Why are we dealing with the country that literally spawned and backed radical Sunni Islamists, al Qaeda, al Nusra, ISIS and their affiliates, the guys responsible for the US embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the first World Trade Center attack, the 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the attacks on London and Paris.

We're quick enough to condemn Shiite Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism but Shia Islam doesn't have us under attack. All of these things are the work of Sunni radicals, the Hellspawn of the very guys to whom we're about to deliver such a massive fleet of wheeled death wagons. We're in a state of terrorism-fueled security lockdown that pervades our personal privacy and supposedly necessitates state surveillance of us and that's all driven by Sunni fundamentalists who practice the same extreme strain of Islam as the House of Saud.