Trudeau continues to embarrass Canadians
In life, our choices bring consequences. Choose to behave like a fool, or worse, and expect derision or ridicule.
But when someone becomes an international laughingstock and drags an entire nation along with them, enough already. Justin Trudeau, stop embarrassing us.
From the intellect who challenged us to “rethink elements as basic as space and time” to the prime minister defending his “close friendship” with the Aga Khan, who he met only once in 30 years, some of Trudeau’s affectations are frustrating.
Others are just silly and childish, like morphing from wearing GQ -inspired fancy socks to now hiking up his pant legs at international summits to show off his latest socks. Or, recently interrupting a woman using the word “mankind” to admonish her that “we prefer people-kind” and then trying to chalk it up to a lame attempt at humour.
But the damage from Trudeau’s disastrous trip to India may be more enduring.
I can’t distinguish a sherwani from a kurta, but we’ve all seen the colourful and flowing long jackets worn by men on the Indian subcontinent for certain special occasions like weddings or Bollywood dance routines.
Presumably for religious and cultural reasons South Asian men wear these outfits; not vacationing white dudes from Canada.
But during Trudeau’s eightday family vacation to India — with a little state business thrown in — he donned at least three different entire outfits, including one flashy gold brocade number, as his wife and kids similarly dressed up, even using the Taj Mahal as a photo backdrop where they bowed, hands clasped, and extended an Indian greeting to the world.
As this prompted mockery in some circles and skepticism in others, it is difficult to find a suitable parallel in our culture. But one comes to mind from the pageantry and beauty of summer powwows.
Imagine at an Indigenous powwow a white city slicker getting out of his car dressed as a fancy dancer, wearing brightly coloured eagle feather bustles on his back, a matching beaded cape and a porcupine head roach, bells and fur leggings.
At his side, his spouse wears an intricately beaded shawl, leggings, moccasins, jewelry and the hairpiece of a fancy shawl dancer. Before these posers could get far, the cries of cultural appropriation would be properly heard from here to Onion Lake.
On one of the occasions in India when he was not in fancy dress Trudeau did manage to mistakenly remind his audience that we had just “celebrated the 100th anniversary of Canadian Confederation.” 1967 might have something to say about that.
As it seems so often with this man, Trudeau’s travel disaster soon slid from silly to serious. Now, an international incident may have ensued.
After Vancouver Liberal supporter and former Sikh extremist, Jaspal Atwal, was invited by the Canadian government to attend two events in India with the prime minister, questions swirled about Atwal’s conviction in 1986 of attempting to assassinate an Indian government official.
Rather than just admit a mistake, the Prime Minister’s Office arranged a background briefing by “an unnamed high-level security official” — later identified as Canada’s national security adviser — who suggested that certain Indian officials removed Atwal from a security blacklist so his appearance in India would dull the Indian prime minister’s interest in a Canadian government they believe is not committed to a united India.
Besides the fact that the Indian travel restriction was lifted before Trudeau’s trip was planned and the Atwal invitation was pushed by a Vancouver Liberal backbench MP, this weird conspiracy theory being peddled by Trudeau’s office has now been called “baseless and unacceptable” in a stern rebuke from India.
As citizens, there is nothing that we can do to prevent Trudeau from behaving like a chump, embarrassing himself and being regarded as an international laughingstock. These are his choices.
But can he stop dragging Canada into this farce?