UPDATED: Uh, Uh. Trudeau Enthusiasts Won't Like This

Start at the 1:40 mark to see what I mean. To whet your appetite, here are some viewer comments:

What an awesome way to drop that Saudi Arabia thing. Hasan's show just keeps getting better and better.

The look on his face after that question! He thought they were gonna joke about his cool socks!

Canada selling weapons of mass death to Saudi Arabia is them just following Americans lead.

Trudeau is the Canadian Obama. They both campaigned as progressives but as soon as they got in they turned into conservative establishment centrists who cater to the status quo and big oil.

This has got to be the worst condemnation of msm journalists today, they got upstaged by a comedian.




UPDATE: The Star's Venay Menon offers his take on the interview:

When I was a kid, this one time we were driving through Pennsylvania late at night when a fawn suddenly appeared in the headlights of our station wagon. Since my father maddeningly drove under the speed limit — and there was no traffic on the interstate — he was able to brake without incident. But that adorable creature just stood there for a good 30 seconds, motionless, unsure of what to do next.

It seemed so helpless and lost in the chaos.

I was reminded of it while watching Netflix’s Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj on Sunday. Trudeau might as well buy himself a pair of antlers and a bushy tail before Halloween. Just based on the moments of awkward silence and the reaction shots in which he looked absolutely paralyzed with fear, he was that fawn.

What Trudeau’s inner circle probably didn’t realize when it thought this interview — and global exposure via Netflix — was a great idea was that much of the really damning material would come from taped segments. In between clips of Minhaj’s sit-down with Trudeau, the comedian also blitzed his in-studio audience with facts, observations and timelines that portrayed Trudeau as a scandal-ridden leader who speaks out of both sides of his mouth. The show went after Trudeau over the SNC-Lavalin scandal. It raised the issue of ethics violations. It more or less called Trudeau a fraud on the environment. It condemned him over Canada’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Venon concludes that regarding the Trudeau cachet, the bloom is off the rose. I agree wholeheartedly.

Trudeau Dissected: A Guest Post By Pamela MacNeil

In response to yesterday's post on Justin Trudeau, frequent contributor Pamela MacNeil left the following response, which I am taking the liberty of featuring as a guest post today:

Bill McKibben is spot on in his assessment of Trudeau and his hypocritical betrayal of supporting climate change, Lorne. While climate change is one of the most important issues he has back tracked on, there are numerous others.

His full embrace of Harper's neoliberal agenda is a guarantee that his policies are being created to support the corporate/political/military domestic and global elite. In other words, he is giving away control of Canada's wealth to global corporations. In order to do this he must eliminate Canada's sovereignty as an independent nation. This is something he is happily proceeding with.

I say happily, because he bragged in an interview with the Guardian that Canada will become the first "post nation state." Governing for the interest of Canadians is not part of his neoliberal equation.

His asserting of Canada's foreign policy with what US policy dictates is deeply entrenched and it goes way beyond military demands, such as the intent of Bill C-51 bringing Canadian security and immigration more in line with those in the US.

There is actually a disturbing, but excellent article written in the Tyee titled "Anti-terror laws already eroding free speech debate." It is about an Italian philosopher barred from visiting Canada to speak at the UBC University of Calgary. His name is Antonio Negri. He has visited Canada before and is a major critic of global neoliberalism.

Trudeau completely supports any military, economic, or political action of the US.

Does the Canadian government speak for Canadians? Do Canadians really think it's okay that [people are] victims of US military violence which has obliterated their countries, had their wealth plundered, had millions of their lives lost and created millions of refugees, who for the most part wander aimlessly looking for a country that will give them refuge?

What does it mean that Canada supports this kind of military violence and injustice? It means we are complicit, complicit in the violence and in the injustice.

Trudeau's alleged support of human rights is a farce.

The US is a country that is an imperial power; its educational system has all but destroyed the conceptual foundation of learning, making knowledge almost impossible to pursue; it is a country where intelligence and ideas are replaced by scripture and myth making, a country whose government, whether Democrats or Republicans, is comprised mainly of thugs who are really just a criminal cabal. This is the country that Trudeau has most aligned Canada with, even if it means submerging Canadian identity in the process.

Because of Trudeau and his cronies, Canadians can very well lose their sovereign independent nation. Can we rebuild our country if the foundation of our democracy has been destroyed? No we can't!

Watch what Trudeau does with Bill C-51. His amendments will only be cosmetic. He and his government will want to keep it for their own use. After all, Canadians will figure out sooner or later, that they have been lied to and will start to protest and fight back. They will have to be stopped and Bill C-51 is just the legislation to do it.

There seems to be a rule of thumb evolving with Trudeau. Anything that involves the creation or reinforcement of the rights and freedoms of Canadians is either ignored or violated, such as in the corporate-controlled, sovereignty-destroying "trade deals" he so loves to promote and the anti-BDS motion he so dogmatically supported.

Harper's arrogant, vindictive personality was a reflection of his political authoritarianism. The authoritarianism is harder to see with someone like Trudeau, whose charm and oozing pseudo sincerity come across as being genuinely truthful and caring.

His continued ongoing authoritarian neoliberal policies that are a threat to Canadians' rights and freedoms, including the destruction of Canada's social democracy, pegs him as a tyrant to me.

Harper has not left the building. Trudeau's sunny-ways are going to lead to some very dark days.

When Is The Anti-Trump Not The Anti-Trump?

Answer: When you scratch beneath the surface of Justin Trudeau's soaring rhetoric.



In his scathing assessment of our prime minister, 350.og founder Bill McKibben says that Trudeau is, in fact, a fellow traveller with Donald Trump when it comes to climate change, something I suspect more and more thinking Canadians are discovering:

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 Catharine 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.

Trudeau's rhetorical shape shifting capabilities were on full display last month in Houston as he received a standing ovation from a petroleum gathering when he said,

“No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.”

And therein lies the crux of Trudeau's hypocrisy.

If Canada digs up that oil and sells it to people to burn, it will produce, according to the math whizzes at Oil Change International, 30% of the carbon necessary to take us past the 1.5 degree target that Canada helped set in Paris.

In that regard, we are certainly punching above our weight:

Canada, which represents one half of one percent of the planet’s population, is claiming the right to sell the oil that will use up a third of the earth’s remaining carbon budget.

Trudeau and his cabinet acolytes would have us believe that we can continue to pump out tarsands bitumen and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I have a theory as to why he thinks this kind of magical thinking can be credible to anyone with even a modicum of critical-thinking skills:

Justin Trudeau has fallen into the trap of believing his own press. The fawning hyperbolic language used to describe him in worldwide journals has, I suspect, led him to believe he can do no wrong or, if he does, Canadians will be too blinded by his 'radiance' to notice.

In this, I hope our young prime minster is badly mistaken.