Trudeau def ies truth just like Trump

People routinely get the vapours over Donald Trump as a “post-truth” politician. But hey, we’ve got one here, too.

Justin Trudeau keeps saying things like, “We are not limiting freedom of expression or freedom of belief in any shape or form. We are simply saying organizations with the explicit purpose of limiting and eliminating Charter rights like women’s rights do not qualify for government funding.” But the Charter does not protect unlimited abortion on demand.

The last time it came before the Supreme Court, under Brian Mulroney, the court struck down the existing law while making plain that Parliament could limit abortion in various ways. And, in a disquieting parallel with Donald Trump, people have repeatedly pointed it out without the prime minister changing his tune.

Perhaps, faced with an abortion law of the sort it invited in 1988, today’s Court would make a dramatically different ruling. Pierre Trudeau saw the danger, promising Archbishop of Toronto G. Emmett Cardinal Carter that if the courts ever found abortion in the Charter he would invoke the Notwithstanding Clause. One wonders what JT thinks of that position.

Probably he doesn’t. Any more than he cares that, as has again been repeatedly noted, the Charter does protect freedom of expression including freedom to criticize the Charter, the courts and government policy. And of course he’s trying to silence religious groups. His denial of the obvious so people will like him has nothing to do with truth.

Even on fiscal policy, he spouts the kind of brazen untruths Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt analyzed in “On Baloney.” (OK, not “baloney” but being old-fashioned I won’t quote his actual title.) And Trudeau told the Post, “Obviously we recognize the role church groups and faith groups of all different types have in promoting strong communities and running day camps for kids.”

To portray churches as daycares into which the odd weirdo drags God talk about the sanctity of life is as contrary to reality as his claim that, “On the actual mechanism for this, we’re happy to work with organizations that have concerns.” Both lack the crucial attribute of real lies, namely plausibility. They’re a different, postmodern kind of untruth.

The core belief of postmoderns, including “deconstructionist” literary critics, is that there is no truth, only “hegemonic narratives.” Which looks like, but is worlds away from, the notion that “the Establishment” lies, or Napoleon’s cynical claim that history is a set of lies agreed upon by the winners.

The postmodern thesis is closer to meaning everybody lies so the only question is whose lie will prevail. But if there is no truth, there is also no lie. Only a triumph of the will by “them” or “us.” Hence Oliver Stone’s admission that his film JFK did not aim to get history right but to defeat the Establishment myth with a “counter-myth.” Or Democrats recoiling piously from Trump’s untruthfulness while backing Hillary and idolizing Bill Clinton.

Or Canadians, regardless of their abortion views, tolerating a stream of prime ministerial baloney that doesn’t even try to rise to the level of deliberate falsehood. Including a Canadian Press interview where “He said he’s a Catholic who has long had to reconcile his religious beliefs with his responsibilities as a political leader and he said the latter demands that he defend people’s rights.”

Trudeau doesn’t believe God wants us to violate human rights and doesn’t expect us to believe he believes it. It’s just hegemonistic narration about agonizing over suppressing free speech when he’s obviously not, from a man who characteristically also believes he can invent his own Catholicism.

One last example. In a Hamilton town hall, dismissing the “kerfuffle around the Canada Summer Jobs program,” Trudeau said “an organization that has the explicit purpose of restricting women’s rights by removing rights to abortion and the right for women to control their own bodies is not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society.”

As my colleague Kelly McParland wrote, the idea that hardline pro-choicers won a national debate is false. Canadians are divided on abortion, with few pure pro-lifers and very few endorsing the status quo of no laws forbidding aborting the handicapped, women, or full-term babies.

What’s more, Trudeau must know it’s false. Except, as with Trump, to say he must know something makes an invalid assumption about his mental processes.

Politicians have always lied. But what rightly horrifies people about Trump is that he doesn’t try to hide the truth. He defies it. And while he’s nominally conservative and Republican, postmodernism is very much a creature of the left. Even Trump’s potty mouth represents a triumph of rebels like Lenny Bruce against conservative social mores; as so often, be careful what you wish for.

You might get it here, too. Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Canada’s version of Donald Trump in some respects? Columnist John Robson thinks he may be.