Prime minister’s ‘kumbaya’ Canada offensive to many
Khadr settlement may be wake-up call country needs
Living in a border region that sometimes feels like Wayne County South, where shoulder-shrugging indifference toward Canada is just part of the culture, it’s uplifting to discover that many citizens remain fierce defenders of a country they see as under siege.
My column last Saturday about the Omar Khadr settlement and the ongoing war on history in Canada ignited an outpouring of reaction, nearly all of it supportive, from people who believe Canada is being betrayed by our social justice warrior prime minister.
I haven’t seen people — including a police intelligence officer, a former Liberal cabinet minister and a current senator, as well as lots of regular folks — this worked up since a long-ago column calling for a ban on pit bulls that had frothing canine supporters demanding my skull on a doggie dish.
The message, loud and clear, is that Canadians see the $10.5 million Khadr sellout, with its craven apology, as Exhibit A in a crusade by the country’s first post-national prime minister to obliterate its past, illustrious or otherwise, and engineer a shining model of social correctness for a grateful world to follow.
The world still loves Justin Trudeau. My relatives in Australia, big fans of the guy, say people there think he’s gorgeous and pretty much the coolest dude on the planet.
But the Khadr handout may be the wake-up call Canadians needed.
I admired his dad, especially for his rhetorical skills, but started worrying about this Trudeau when he picked his first cabinet based mainly on gender equity. That move, however wellmeaning, put people with meagre resumes at the table while pushing individuals with stellar managerial backgrounds, including former Toronto police chief Bill Blair and former lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie, into thankless secondary roles.
Then came Trudeau’s 2016 decision to pull Canada’s CF-18 fighter jets from the battle against ISIL in Iraq. Piqué? Embarrassment because he had previously mocked, in a vulgar schoolboy way, aircraft in which Canadians were risking their lives? That move remains a puzzle.
People are seething over many issues. They’re not happy that the Trudeau regime is meddling with our national anthem in its eternal quest for correctness. They’re not happy that it planned to turn Canada Day 2018 into National Pot Legalization Day, which would make July 1 an annual smoke-filled mockery of the country’s anniversary. That date is now, thankfully, being reconsidered.
People are furious that the recent passage of Bill C-6 slashes the citizenship qualification period to a mere three years. In countries where citizenship is taken seriously, like the U.S. and Switzerland, it can take from five years to 12. Pretty soon we’ll be handing out citizenship at airport welcome kiosks.
Even more infuriating is that legislation’s confirmation that a terrorist whose multiple passports include one from Canada can never be deported because, as Trudeau puts it: “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” Never mind that many progressive European countries have provisions to deport offenders with more than one citizenship.
One perceptive reader was furious that the media gave the Trudeau government a pass on its flippant announcement that the former U.S. embassy, on the most strategic site in our capital, which was intended to be a national portrait gallery honouring Canadians of all backgrounds, will instead be handed over to our First Nations where it will no doubt become a permanent reminder of our collective guilt in arriving here late.
Khadr’s taxpayer lottery win will, in the view of one former senior police officer, undermine Canada’s already crippled intelligence sharing efforts and bring more former terrorists out of the woodwork.
“The lawyers get rich and the bad guys win,” he scoffed. “I imagine the queue into civil courts by (ISIL) types will be long as they look forward to a payday after their rights were trampled in a faraway war zone.”
These are strange times here in kumbaya land.