Prime minister Justin Trudeau recently told Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star that he was not his father. I knew that. I respected his father. His father respected the liberal party.
It was 50 years ago that Justin was born. Early that year the party held a large fund-raising dinner featuring Pierre Trudeau in the Canadian room of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) staff had kept those of us working on the dinner from knowing that Pierre was on his way to Vancouver to marry Margaret Sinclair. I should have seen it when the news media kept asking me about the syrupy speech he was giving on women’s rights. There were a lot of jokes afterwards that it was Pierre’s bachelor dinner.
The only times that the party connected with Pierre’s family life were in his Christmas cards. My wife still has her collection of Pierre Trudeau family Christmas cards and when she mentioned it to Justin, before he became party leader, she was immediately on the list for Justin and Sophie’s cards. And that is about the only way Justin is like his father.
One of the remarks in Susan Delacourt’s article was that “No one knows what would have happened to the liberal party if Trudeau had kept to (his) decision 10 years ago to sit out the leadership. And since he ran for the leadership, that decision was obviously bogus.
The one thing I believe is that the liberal party would have been better off without Justin. He acts as an elitist and he thinks he knows better than a party with the accumulated knowledge of this country since Confederation. He wasted much of that knowledge by barring the party senators from the liberal caucus. He cancelled the party’s minimal membership fee and opened the party to anyone who wanted to be on the party list. He left the party no role other than that as a quasi-automated banking machine where his office could go to ask for money.
Justin told Delacourt that he and his team in Ottawa made a decision to connect with the liberal grassroots. That, of course, is BS. Justin appears to be doing his utmost to destroy the party. He looks down on the grassroots and thinks all a party needs are selfies. He promised not to interfere in riding nominations and immediately, he became leader, forced out a candidate because he might not have liked her husband. He put elitists in charge of elections and loses ridings, that the liberals could have won.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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