Trudeau On The World Stage : How're We Doing?

"If they had Googled the name, this guy would have shown up in two seconds."
"They obviously decided they were going to do things differently and put their guy out there. But this has done irreparable damage to the relationship [between Canada and India]."
Garry Keller, former chief of staff, foreign affairs, Canada

"This was an opportunity to get Canada to lean away from rival China at a time of high Sino-Indo tensions."
"Yes, Trudeau looks pretty silly in his outfits. The Atwal invite was a mind-boggling dumb political blunder. But if this ends bad, I’m not sure India gains anything out of it, even if they think they are sending a stern message. It’s lose-lose when eyes should be focused on China."
Stephanie Carvin, national security analyst, professor, Carleton University

Trudeau calls India tour ‘excellent’ despite controversy over invite to Sikh extremist

The Prime Minister's Office and Justin Trudeau's legion of defenders have been attempting to insinuate that the security failure in inviting a known felon, a man who belonged to an outlawed terrorist group and who was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison, whom a former Indo-Canadian premier of British Columbia and fervent critic of Sikh extremism accused of beating him almost to death to a state affair at the Canadian High Commission reflects a plot planned by India.

However, the truth is that this man, a stalwart supporter of the Liberals, an Indo-Canadian Sikh, Jaspal Atwal, although well known in the Sikh community, and whose activities have been closely followed by the RCMP appears to have a well-received presence within the Liberal party, his criminal past notwithstanding. Surrey Centre MP Randeep Sarai, knows him well, and was the one who extended the invitation for this convicted felon to appear alongside the Trudeaus on their India trip.

A more inconvenient juxtaposition could barely be imagined, immediately following Justin Trudeau's assurances of Canadian non-tolerance for terrorism, to both the first minister of the Punjab who had accused the current Canadian government of giving aid and comfort to Khalistani separatists in Canada, and to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had approached the Canadian Prime Minister on more than one occasion to express his unease at Canada's stance with respect to Khalistani provocations out of Canada.

Justin Trudeau's infantile preening while in New Delhi, playing  the colourful tourist impudently engaging in cultural sartorial misappropriation would have been vociferously denounced as racist imperialism had anyone but himself engaged in these disrespectful shenanigans. It was the thespian, the self-absorbed megalomaniac in Trudeau that had come to the fore. A man who had once taught
drama classes at a private school in Vancouver, now Prime Minister, delighting in meeting Bollywood actors in dress-up -- he and his family, that is; the Indian actors wore respectful Western-style suits.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, daughter, Ella-Grace, and son, Xavier, visit Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, India, on Monday. (Sam Panthaky/AFP/Getty Images)  Delhi journalist Shivam Vij: "You know, this whole thing about Justin Trudeau being so handsome has been taken over with 'Hello, what's with the clothes?'"

Back when Russian President Boris Yeltsin strode the world stage, usually half-cut, eliciting gasps of amused disbelief from watchers as he spontaneously acted out his peculiar impulses to relax formality by performing all manner of inappropriate-to-his-station skits of droll proportions, his clumsy but demeaning-to-his-office behaviour brought huge embarrassment to his country. Russians do enjoy their hard liquor -- they are usually more discreet in public; Putin by comparison, shuns it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, lives in a perpetual state of arrested adolescence, he simply cannot rise above his self-veneration, his touching belief that he can do no wrong, that he is the world's premier admired gallant and defender of the weak and the vulnerable. He clamours righteously for the world to become more 'feminist' as he has done, he speaks volumes of his dedication to the working class, to equality rights for the alt-gendered. His pretense at being middle-class and socialist in spirit belies his love of opulence, wealth and ostentation.

His free-spirited public show of all of that in India doesn't appear to have impressed either the Indians, Canadians, or the outside world looking in with great bemusement on these revelations. There is another side to this man's agenda, however, that is more troubling; that he lends his position and prestige to meeting with unsavoury personages, from outlawed terror group leaders (Tamil Tigers, Khalistani separatists), to purported Afghan hostages who happen to be criminals, as example.

For no effort however puzzlingly unseemly, is too far a road to travel when the prospect of votes arise as a result. Little puzzlers like Trudeau's affection and support for the Castro brothers in Cuba, his fascination with the Communist Chinese Politburo, that can turn political matters 'on a dime', his stated willingness to restore diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, an exporter of terrorism and exemplar of internal persecution of its public. Trudeau will turn up at mosques in Canada visibly celebrating extremism.


He has sent Liberal parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs Omar Alghabra, to attend a meeting of the world’s largest group of Islamic countries at the 44th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Cote d'Ivoire, last July. Canada, lest anyone be uncertain, is not, has never been, and possibly never will be a member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a matter which appears to have slipped Trudeau's notice.

Canada's Department of Global Affairs was asked if Alghabra would be speaking at the conference as a guest, raising the topic of Islamophobia; the response was that he planned to address "ways to promote diversity and counter anti-Muslim discrimination". Scheduled, at the same opportunity, according to Global Affairs, to "articulate[ing] a position in line with our foreign policy which includes the protection and promotion of the rights of women and girls around the world", symbolic of Canada's nobility, one certain to impress the OIC.