Image: Flickr/Mohammed Jangda

The emperor has no clothes. Only the most Liberal-intoxicated refuse to acknowledge it. Son chien est mort. Like the famous parrot, he’s no more. He has ceased to be.

Emerging after weeks of absence, Justin Trudeau could do no better than to defend his pitiful support of Bill C-51. A flailing performance, it reinforced (if such were necessary) the man’s utter lack of principle, not to mention his unbearable lightness of being. He might have made, he said, a “strategic error,” given the backlash his support, and that of his Liberal trained seals, attracted. “I didn’t think that people would be so divisive and so aggressive as to somehow make it seem like the Liberal party doesn’t care about the Charter,” he complained.

In fact, he went where he thought Canadian voters would go, but didn’t count on the ability of Canadians, immediately supportive of C-51 when it was introduced, to read, and think, and change their minds. He took us all for rubes, in other words, and now he’s been left holding the bag — one empty of principles or scruples. It was a spectacular display of unvarnished opportunism gone wrong.

That’s cost him. Liberal voters are switching to the NDP in droves. He’s just lost a candidate over it, a former Canadian Forces member, no less. “The whole idea of serving in the military was to protect the rights and freedoms of Canadians,” said David MacLeod, “When they come up with a law like C-51, I couldn’t live with it….The Act is a very disturbing piece of legislation that undermines Canadian democracy and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Like grumpy Diogenes with his lantern, I’ve finally found an ethical Liberal. “My resignation is a principled, not political, decision,” said MacLeod, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Kudos.

But back to the Hair Apparent. Not content with supporting legislation that gives unchecked power to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, he endorsed a star Liberal candidate in Toronto, one Bill Blair — head cop during the G20 fisaco in 2010, who oversaw the illegal detention of more than a thousand innocent citizens, the kettling and beating of peaceful protesters and bystanders, and other truly vile acts of police aggression.

“I’m not going to Monday morning quarterback decisions made five years ago by the chief of police,” said he.

If folks have been paying attention, Trudeau has been playing Stan Laurel to Harper’s Oliver Hardy almost from the beginning. Best re-think that coalition idea, I’d suggest, or we just might get one we don’t like. I wouldn’t put it past him for a moment.

Take no notice whatsoever of his “32-point plan” and other policy posturings inserted into his mouth by his backroom handlers. Recall that his father fought the 1974 election against wage and price controls, and instituted them when he was elected. Remember if you can the Liberal Red Book, torched when they came to power in 1993. Remember NAFTA? The Liberals campaigned against it, then signed the agreement almost immediately after the 1993 election.

Liberals cannot be trusted. They stand for nothing other than power. The record is there to back me up to the hilt.

At last Canadians appear to have a choice at the polls: the red and blue wings of the Librocon Party, or the NDP. I’m not convinced that it’s much of a choice, to be frank — Mulcair is the Canadian Tony Blair, minus the warmongery — but it offers a kind of hope to an electorate that (judging by turnout rates) has become mired in apathy and perpetual disillusionment. And one positive outcome of that would be the overdue burial of a dead parrot.

 

Image: Flickr/Mohammed Jangda