Canada’s Corrupt Liberal Government

The holidays are often a time of reflection. And even as everyone is still shaking off their cheese-induced torpor, the internal calls for Justin Trudeau to resign as Liberal Leader are accumulating.

It emerged this week that a majority of the Liberal Quebec caucus wants Mr. Trudeau to step down, though no one involved seems willing to sign their name to their convictions. This follows a meeting of the Ontario caucus just before Christmas, at which more than 50 MPs agreed that the Prime Minister needed to resign, though they, too, wanted to remain anonymous.

The New Year promises to be a painful one for Canadian Liberals. As Isaiah Berlin, the renowned political analyst put it, sometimes in politics there are only two choices — the unpleasant and the unacceptable. Arguably, this is the most unpleasant nightmare the Liberal party has faced in a century.

Yes, Paul Martin’s hapless government bequeathed two incompetent leaders and third place in the political basement. Yes, Pierre Trudeau rescued the party from a likely electoral debacle only by a last minute agreement to come out of retirement.

What is Trudeau waiting for?

The prime minister is like the guy in the movie who finally finds himself surrounded.

The guy thought he could get away. He thought he was smarter than everybody else.

He thought he would face no consequences. He was bigger than all that.

Amid recurring calls from elected MPs and the Canadian electorate for the prime minister to step aside, Justin Trudeau is not telegraphing any future moves.

“We will see what he does,” Lori Turnbull, a professor in the faculty of management at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said of Trudeau, the man who has been prime minister since 2015.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he prorogues around the time of the U.S. inauguration (Jan. 20) and uses the instability of the Trump presidency as a reason why, look, we all have to hunker down and we all have to be Team Canada and we don’t have time for that BS that we have to find a new leader,” Turnbull said.

We are now, as Justin Trudeau said in a recently released Liberal Party video, in an election year. The only question remaining is whether the election will be triggered in January, in the spring sometime or if this beleaguered government will survive until October.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have cancelled his end-of-year interviews as he reflects on his future, but thankfully Canadians have had Mark Carney to lecture them on Liberal values.

In an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, sounded like a man who is running for the Liberal leadership.

Justin’s handpicked man.

“Stephen Harper has used prorogation to avoid difficult political circumstances,” the Liberals’ 2015 platform complained. “We will not.”

Well, that was then. Mr. Harper, it is true, had used the power to prorogue Parliament in the way the Liberals described: to escape certain defeat on a confidence vote, in December, 2008, and to cut short a parliamentary committee’s inquiries into the Afghan prisoners affair, in 2010.

In Canadian politics, 16 per cent is an ugly number with a lethal history.

The governing Progressive Conservatives won only 16.04 per cent of the national vote in 1993.

After ruling with a hefty majority since 1988, they were left with only two seats in Parliament.

It has been a tough year for journalism. The mighty White House press corps was caught covering up the age-addled state of U.S. President Joe Biden. The conspiracy necessarily involved the vice-president and first lady, but neither of them were expected to tell the truth. Journalists are supposed to do that.

Some don’t try. There were those who bestrode the world of new journalism like veritable colossi, but it was not clear that they were aiming at journalism. Pandering to Vladimir Putin and castigating Winston Churchill is something, and a rather popular something at that, but is it journalism?

Yet another steaming pile of “What a heroine Freeland is.”

OTTAWA — With a majority of his caucus now calling on him to resign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on a ski holiday, reflecting on whether to stay or go.

Trudeau is way down in the polls and facing challenges from within his party about whether he’s the right leader to unite Canadians. His decision comes as Canada braces for a tariff war when Donald Trump returns to the White House in three weeks.