Joe Oliver: Justin Trudeau should resign or call an early election
For someone used to getting his own way for most of his life, public hostility, repeated failure and relentless bad news must be terribly trying for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His government began in 2015 with high hopes and widespread good wishes. Now that it is all coming crashing down, he refuses to accept blame and either change course or resign — a personal shortcoming that has become a national problem.
Here’s a skill-tester. What do Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Olaf Scholz, Malcolm Turnbull, Claudia Sheinbaum and Benjamin Netanyahu all have in common? Answer: each has reason to dislike Justin Trudeau. In a couple of cases their scorn can be worn as a badge of honour, but the list’s impressive diversity testifies to Trudeau’s repeated own-goals.
His current desperate effort to revive a government on life support is founded on the premise that, unlike the untried Pierre Poilievre, he has experience handling Donald Trump. He certainly does. But it’s not as if his experience has been good. The president-elect has ill-concealed contempt for this supposed Trump-whisperer, having called him “two-faced” and a “far-left lunatic.” The “experience” started with Trudeau’s self-indulgent expression of disdain for the once and future leader of the free world, who is notoriously sensitive to criticism.
The two could not be more different — an alpha male and a beta-male feminist with starkly opposing ideologies and world views: nationalism over globalism; common sense and traditional values versus wokeism and identity politics; deep-seated belief in free enterprise and mistrust of the deep state in contrast to faith in big government and bureaucracy; rejection of “fake news” versus financial
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