A tough day for the Dauphin.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Justin Trudeau is being called out for who he is, not what he appears to be. In fact, the Canadian prime minister is compared to Donald Trump and found far more similar than different.
Slate.com points out the obvious, Justin Trudeau isn't really standing up to Trump.
Trudeau isn’t Canada’s answer to Trump. He’s Canada’s answer to Barack Obama. Our habit isn’t to reject America. It’s to imitate you, a few years later and a few degrees milder. Just like you, we replaced a divisive old conservative (Stephen Harper) with a young, feel-good centrist in progressive clothing. Unlike you, we played it safe and went with a name-brand candidate—only in Canada could the son of a former prime minister be considered a transformational leader.
More ominously, the article suggests our "bargain basement Obama" could deliver our next prime minister - Kevin O'Leary.
Leading the polls in the current leadership race for Canada’s Conservative Party is a reality television star who cultivates the persona of an obnoxious rich businessman. Sound familiar?
Americans may know Kevin O’Leary from ABC’s Shark Tank. Canadians have a decent chance of knowing him as our next prime minister.
On the far side of the Atlantic, The Guardian is running a piece by Bill McKibben who writes, "Donald Trump is a creep and unpleasant to look at, but at least he's not a stunning hypocrite when it comes to climate change."
Not rhetorically: Trudeau says all the right things, over and over. He’s got no Scott Pruitts in his cabinet: everyone who works for him says the right things. Indeed, they specialize in getting others to say them too – it was Canadian diplomats, and the country’s environment minister Catherine McKenna, who pushed at the Paris climate talks for a tougher-than-expected goal: holding the planet’s rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But those words are meaningless if you keep digging up more carbon and selling it to people to burn, and that’s exactly what Trudeau is doing. He’s hard at work pushing for new pipelines through Canada and the US to carry yet more oil out of Alberta’s tarsands, which is one of the greatest climate disasters on the planet.
The truth is there isn't much in either article that hasn't been expressed on plenty of blogs, this one included. It's just that those observations and sentiments have gone on into the big time.
Trudeau is all show, no go; all hat, no cattle; all Margaret, no Pierre. When the going gets tough, you'll always find him on his knees, ducking.
But doing the second negates the first – in fact, it completely overwhelms it. If Canada is busy shipping carbon all over the world, it doesn’t matter all that much if every Tim Horton’s stopped selling donuts and started peddling solar panels instead.
As the Donald would put it: weak, failing. so sad.
1 comment:
"More ominously, the article suggests our "bargain basement Obama" could deliver our next prime minister - Kevin O'Leary."
I already got a $50 bet going that O'Leary will win a majority in 2019.
Pretty easy money. O'Leary is a rock star among conservative voters. Like Layton to Dippers and Junior to vacuous fake liberals. He just needs to win over conservatives to snatch up absolute corrupt power on 40% of the vote. The conservative media is already starting to 'normalize' him. It's a done deal.
Junior is really going to regret ditching his electoral reform promise. (Not that Dippers gave him any choice with their absurd 'my way or the highway' ultimatum.)
Dippers might reclaim the OO. But they could've formed the government under ranked ballot voting which Trudeau was going to do before Dippers said that would be tantamount to waging 'political nuclear warfare.' (FPTP allows the establishment to infantalize the NDP. Dippers respond by acting like infants.)
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