Our great shame.
This election may have begun as an opportunistic whim of a self-involved prime minister, but it is clearly something else now.
One presumes that the PMO, despite the raging pandemic, thought that a Canadian election in August, with the Liberals (at that moment) riding high in the polls and the PM’S approval versus other leaders high as well, it would be a romp. A great time to crisscross a beautiful country in your own jet, shake a few hands, utter the usual platitudes, and — presto — we, the Liberals, have a solid majority and can go ahead pursuing our dearest fantasies without the trying burdens of a minority.
Well that state of mind, that projection has been hurled to the four winds. Turns out, for Liberals, August is the cruelest month.
I’m not talking about their mess of a campaign, with a prime minister who’s piled a deficit of upwards of $400 billion, and $1.3 trillion in national debt, and then with his trademark insouciance announces he “doesn’t think about monetary policy” (possibly because with this PM he doesn’t know what it is).
I’m not talking about the contrived attacks on the Conservatives on all the usual scare issues — abortion, our health care system, conversion therapy, the whole parade of horrors the Liberals always latch on to when they fear they’re falling.
I’m not talking about Chrystia Freeland’s dive into amateur-film making, particularly the kind that doctors a public statement to say the exact opposite of what the statement actually imports. Freeland was or is supposed to be the banner cabinet minister. To have her revealed as just another misleading politician doesn’t help the cause, and actually contributes to the growing impression the Liberals are running scared. Their premature, idle, needless and opportunistic election is creating more than a little backlash.
Nor am I speaking of Maryam Monsef — though at this stage it is very difficult not to speak of Maryam Monsef — minister of the Liberal’s dearest obsession next to global warming, diversity.
Monsef has the utterly bizarre conception that the Taliban are “our brothers.” I take it she has never in her entire public career ever met a single Canadian soldier, male or female, and for sure never a single Canadian soldier who served in Afghanistan. For had she, this insulting and weird and almost demonically ill-timed slush of a public pronouncement could never have escaped the most unguarded of lips.
Should Canadians reward a party that has Monsef as one of its principal ministers? Is she representative of the team that Trudeau plans on calling to “build back better?”
However it is neither Trudeau on monetary policy, Freeland’s freelance editing, or Monsef’s pathetic mewling that is at the core of this election.
It is the concept of honour. Canadian honour. That commitments we made as a nation, and substantiated by sending our young men and women in conflict to support them are now so abruptly and unconscionably terminated, and almost blithely so. It is also about character, character in the deepest sense, our character as a nation and how we are seen by those in other parts of the world. They will ask — what does it mean when Canada speaks of such high virtues, expresses its support for the downtrodden, speaks with such urgency of the plight of women and girls — and then when a crisis point comes, (a) has not prepared, (b) elevates its own partisan games over the fates and lives of allies and friends, and (c) abruptly ends the feeble mission it did have for the rescue of its citizens, those who helped its military and their families. The handling of the Afghanistan crisis by the current government is a matter of national shame.
For people who think that national honour is not a passé concept from an antique era, this week, and events of the very recent days are hitting them like a wound. Monsef ’s brutally ignorant comment — that is how I see it — merely provides a marker for the attitude of the whole government of which she is a part.
As for Mr. Trudeau, the Canadians who are still stranded, still under threat from “our brothers” the Taliban, along with the stranded interpreters and their families, he wishes them well and deplores the terrorist attacks of recent days, but hey, there’s a sunny August campaign to conduct. There are videos waiting for Freeland’s inventive representation, and perhaps Monsef has a couple of more vital observations to reorient our understanding of the Taliban.
The theme of the campaign has become Canadian honour and the Canadian character. There is nothing the government administration has done or said in the last two weeks that merits anything but rejection and something close to anger.
I can think of several outcomes to this election. But one should be completely off the table: rewarding the Liberals for their carelessness and callousness in calling it when they did.
TURNS OUT, FOR LIBERALS, AUGUST IS THE CRUELEST MONTH.