THIS ELECTION IS ONE OF THE MOST CARELESS AND SELFCENTRED ACTS OF CANADIAN POLITICS.
Perhaps within the shadowed cloister where the prime minister’s super smart political ferrets dwell, it was thought “clever” to call an election in August, during a pandemic, two years in from the last one, and during the gift of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
But clever can very quickly become cute, and cute is not a nice word. It is not a generous word. It lives very close to sneaky, sly and tricky. Cute is always wrapped around personal advantage and gain, and is so close to what is referred to in common terms as “pulling a fast one” as to be shorthand for it. Cute is also the very opposite of generous, public-minded, worthy and noble … well, actually, noble isn’t even in the same semantic country as cute. I can imagine what they would be pleased to call their strategy session.
“Hey, if we call it in August, two years before we really have to, with Canadians exhausted from all the toils and anxieties of COVID, weary to numbness from lockdowns and ever-changing mandates, and of course so very many in the deepest distress over job losses, the failure of small businesses built up over the years, their children out of school for over a year, and stressed to breaking point from the imposed claustrophobia of the pandemic — well, let’s just say, in that atmosphere the population will let the premature call just slide by. Who notices a stream when the flood waters are high?
It’ll be just one more irritation alongside so many other, bigger more serious concerns, they’ll hardly notice we didn’t have to call it, we have no real reason to call it (except of course that it looks really good for us if the polls hold) and we can grab a majority, four full years, and an impotent opposition.”
If such was the thinking, and we have been given no grounds to assume any differently — two weeks in the Liberals have given no substantial reason for why this thing was called — then it is a grotesque misreading of the Canadian electorate. It is the thinking of political charlatans, opportunistic before all else.
Canadians are not (most times) intense about their politics, but when serious matters are at stake, when the honour of the country is subdued and bypassed in favour of political advantage, they can get very serious indeed, and they will present a strenuous recoil to any attempt to stampede them into making an electoral choice on spurious and contrived grounds.
Then there is Afghanistan. The political arm of this government can plan, prepare, and be ready-as-hell when their political fortunes are at play. However, when the gravest of events occur, the safety of its citizens and its allies in a far-off country is on the line, then it’s all scramble, confusion, bureaucratic fudge and straight on-the-line incompetence. There were warnings by the dozen, from generals and the bottom ranks some months and even years ago, to prepare for the evacuation from Afghanistan of our citizens and allies. To use a choice phrase, did the government have their backs?
Here’s the phrase for it: Just Not Ready. To which I’ll add: At All. Would that Christie Blatchford were still writing. It would take her judicious fury to match the shame of this moment.
The flaw in our current leadership is blatantly clear. Mr. Trudeau is a one-man lighthouse of virtue-signalling for faults not his own. The light dims catastrophically however, when events on a historic scale are mismanaged on his watch. You may put it in a capsule sentence. The calling of this needless election during days of international crisis and pandemic is one of the most careless and self-centred acts of Canadian politics of which we have record.
The events in Afghanistan are not a play, the people abandoned are not extras; the soldiers of our country who went a world away on a mission nominated by our country, should not, cannot, and must not be blithely passed over, relegated to the back of the political hall during this, for them most arduous and emotional moment; nor should they be denied a direct address from the prime minister, telling them in real language — not the concoctions of some “communications team” or the doctored script of hired spin doctors — telling them the value of what they have done, of the sacrifices they made, the lives they shed on that far away battle field.
Boris Johnson, however he is regarded, has done precisely this. He has centred the Afghanistan evacuation in his remarks to British soldiers. Here in Canada it’s a one-time 500 dollar gift to seniors, and a sitting cabinet minister with remarks not worth the pulp that was mashed to print them on, referencing the sadistic Taliban, against whom our soldiers fought, died, were lamed and traumatized, as “our brothers.” Try building that back better.
It is terrible and Pontius Pilate-cruel to “wash your hands” of people who took such great risk to help our soldiers and now to leave them defenceless and exposed to the predictable barbarities of the Taliban. This will be a very hard memory for those of our soldiers whom they helped and befriended to live with.
Dishonour is the eclipse of conscience, and is the negation of every soldier’s creed.
IT IS THE THINKING OF POLITICAL CHARLATANS.