Yep, We're Watching!

Yep, We're Watching!

"[It would be] with regret, but it would be with absolute certainty and firmness [that Canada would soon enact retaliatory tariffs.]"
"I have made it very clear to the president [Donald Trump, post-G7 June summit in Charlevoix] that it is not something we relish doing, but it is absolutely something we will do."
"Because Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around."
[Just watch me...?]
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Lest there be any lingering doubt, Justin Trudeau did come to the executive administrative helm of political Canada well prepared to become prime minister of the country. His flair for theatrics and drama, and playing to an audience was all the preparation he really needed, supplemented by his incorrigibly "sunny ways" that so endeared him to the voting public who wanted someone photogenic, charismatic, cosmopolitan and caring. Because it was 2015, you know...

The Guardian

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House

So how did the empathy and friendliness between two neighbours turn so, um, ugly? They were, weren't they! best pals? Trump prepared to dote on the young, personable next-door neighbour considering himself a friend of Canada. Trudeau prepared to make allowances for a powerful neighbour's incendiary personality and to properly ingratiate himself with a man he had so little in common with on the political spectrum. Personality though? Oh, there's ego, self-validation in that two totally unsuited mentalities managed to scoop the prize at the end of their nations' rainbow; there's the certainty that they're so right and knowledgeable who would dare challenge them?

Trudeau, with his stage skills, his ingratiating personability, has the obvious impression that he is the political peer and world status position quite comparable with that of a Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, or Narendra Modi. When he speaks, they listen. Or not. Canada may be a middling country but its prime minister knows how to make himself noticed. And he needs to be noticed for his charismatic presence, his good humour, his negotiating skills, his dexterity at making people feel comfortable and befriended. One of the boys, so to speak.

So to speak, that's what happened when the G7 meeting wound up and Donald Trump left earlier to tend to more important matters, say a golf game, and in his absence, the formerly obsequious Trudeau felt free to assert himself before his remaining peers to elicit their admiration by declaring that he's no puppet of Trump's designs on trade or any other matter of profound importance to the world. He won't be 'pushed around' and neither will Canada, not on his watch, sunny ways and all.

Anyone with half a brain would have to admit Justin Trudeau has distinguished himself. He may have sexually harassed a young female reporter twenty years ago, but he's an ardent feminist now. His discerning mind and high intelligence chose a cabinet without bias to reflect the makeup of Canada; men and women of equal weight; plenty of minorities because there are ample votes among tribal mentalities. A wealthy businessman for finance, a reporter for foreign affairs, and he's open for business.

Business as in giving Canadians a gift; their very own $4.5-billion pipeline project to have and to hold. In perpetual abeyance, its purchase also a gift to Kinder Morgan enabling it to fulfill an obligation to its shareholders. The prime minister who reminded First Nations repeatedly that he wasn't Stephen Harper and under the Trudeau administration their grievances would melt like a glacier in hell failed adequate consultation allowing the TransMountain pipeline expansion to sink into a swamp of recrimination beggaring Alberta and the rest of Canada.

As a thespian whose capacity to entertain is boundless, Trudeau should never be underestimated; relieving tension by showing up uninvited in India to visit world heritage sites dressed in garishly glittering costume, but smiling, smiling, smiling, even when inviting a convicted terrorist to wine and dine at the Canadian Embassy along with other Canadian dignitaries familiar with living off the public purse. So much comedy it was easy to overlook a growing deficit and the provincial premiers offside the prime minister.

Canadians were supposed to swell with pride that their prime minister boasted Canada would open its borders to the refugees and haven seekers and economic migrants the U.S. was spurning. Instead the souring of the Canadian mind resulted in lock-step with welcoming illegal migrants jumping the queue and crowding the intake resources both federal and provincial, resulting in legal immigrants aspiring to join Canada facing an even longer, more tedious and problematical backlog in the struggle to accommodate the illegal hordes overtaxing the system.



Enter the gracious, glamorous and well-travelled minister of global affairs who knows a good deal when she sees one, and she didn't see one in tete-a-tetes with Trump's assigned trade negotiator who developed a deep and abiding loathing for the preening Chrystia Freeland. Whose clumsiness in inserting herself in the process, leaving the bargaining table to lobby U.S. lawmakers infuriated Robert Lighthizer, but she perkily insisted to enquiring journalists that things were really swell, even while Canada was shut out and the U.S. and Mexico reached an amicable settlement bilaterally.

But wait, Chrystia Freeland, like the rest of The Chosen, indulges in the same kind of virtue-signalling as her boss and saw fit to turn to Twitter to demand of Saudi Arabia that it immediately release human rights critics of the Kingdom recently imprisoned, further endearing herself and Canada to the House of Saud which reacted with amazing alacrity in cutting off investment, trade, air travel, student placement, and any other lingering nation-to-nation ties inclusive of diplomacy in convincing Canada it had alienated yet another dispensable 'ally'.