When it comes to commies, is Justin just like his dad?
If, as the saying goes, the nut doesn’t fall too far from the tree is true, then no one should be surprised that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau admires a communist dictatorship.
On Thursday — just four days before Remembrance Day — Trudeau was not asked a puffball question, like the “ladies’ night” invitation intimated would be offered up by the women in attendance. No. Instead he was asked the following question by one of the 100 women who paid $250 each to see Justin Unplugged: “Which nation, besides Canada, which nation’s administration do you most admire, and why?”
His answer is another one of his now mounting doozies that he is currently attempting to explain his way out of.
“You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” said Trudeau to the women. “Because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest … we need to start investing in solar.’ I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted that I find quite interesting,” said Trudeau.
It’s an astonishing answer but then, maybe not. Consider his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who frequently expressed admiration for dictators and totalitarian regimes.
In his refreshing new book, The Truth About Trudeau, Bob Plamondon reserves an entire chapter to the topic of Trudeau’s coziness with commies, entitled “A Friend to Communists,” which chronicles in succinct, though devastating detail, just how flirtatious and downright supportive the elder Trudeau was with the world’s most oppressive and murderous regimes at a time when political prisoners in those countries disappeared into Gulags or mass graves. Justin is clearly a student of his father’s words, writings and perverse sympathies.
As Plamondon points out, after a trip to post-revolutionary Cuba in 1964, Pierre Trudeau spoke of the fervour of the masses: “There were no elections in Cuba, but when you see mass rallies with Fidel Castro speaking for 90 minutes in 100 degree heat you wonder what is the need for elections.”
After becoming prime minister in 1968, Pierre Trudeau’s affection for communist regimes endured throughout his time in office.
During his visit to the Soviet Union in May 1971, Plamondon writes that Trudeau wanted to gain favour with that brutal regime by telling Soviet leaders that “he had reduced Canadian troops in Europe by 50 per cent. (When he cut our NATO commitment, he told our al- lies the reduction would not be noticed by the Soviets, so perhaps he felt the need to draw it to their attention).”
Even more dastardly, the elder Trudeau praised how the Soviets built the Siberian city of Norilsk. “It was a Soviet dissident who later reminded Trudeau that Norilsk had been built by prisoners. ‘When he praised it, he praised this thing built on human bones,’ said Vladimir Bokovsky, a man who spent 11 years under Soviet lock and key.”
Sound familiar? The elder Trudeau admired the Soviets’ ability to just get stuff done, kind of like his son. Democracy is a pretty messy business and kind of gets in the way of using slave labour or turning an economy around on a dime.
In 1981, when Poland’s Soviet-controlled government arrested union leader Lech Walesa and banned the Solidarity Movement, “Trudeau expressed his sympathy, not with the oppressed, but with (the oppressive regime). Standing in the House of Commons on December 18, 1981, Trudeau declared, ‘If martial law is a way to avoid civil war and Soviet intervention, then I can say it is not all bad.’ He added that he hoped the military regime would be able to keep Solidarity from making excessive demands.”
Excessive demands? The push for freedom is an excessive demand? Trudeau’s tenure was an utterly shameful era in Canadian foreign policy. Luckily, Trudeau’s dishonourable and anti-democratic views were drowned out by the leaders he so derided — U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who clearly stood on the right side of history.
Trudeau showed little empathy for Soviet dissidents either. “He referred to Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov as ‘hooligans,’” writes Plamondon.
In 1983, when the Soviets shot down Korean Air Flight 007 after it inadvertently ventured into Soviet air space on Sept. 1, 1983, killing all 369 people on board, including 10 Canadians, Trudeau stood in the House of Commons and acted as an apologist for the Soviets. “At this stage we won’t get more from the Soviet Union by treating them as murderers. We might get some de-escalation in the Cold War by treating them as human beings.” If only the Soviets had treated those passengers and staff on that brightly lit commercial airliner like human beings.
Poor Justin. He’s read all his famous dad’s books and was raised at his knee. Why, oh, why aren’t his parroted ramblings treated with the same reverence as his dad’s?
The answer? The curtain was pulled back on those communist regimes and they were proven to be the most murderous, oppressive and corrupt regimes in human history. Time to freshen up your reading list, Justin.