The Eternal Sunshine Of The Progressive Mind Pt. 2
The prime minister of record forced himself before the microphones Tuesday to tell a waiting nation that he and his impeccably woke circle of savants has suddenly made the connection between completing the Trans Mountain Pipeline and Canada’s prosperity. “You now, we might put some people to work this way!”
It’s been a while coming. Previously the shape-shifting Trudeau seemed to think that twinning an existing pipeline was about the chinook salmon, the tetchier element of the native population and Elizabeth May’s fevered brain. So this has to qualify as progress.
In his best I’ve Got Better Things To Do voice Trudeau said that he was going to make good on his government’s $4.2 B purchase of the pipeline from private hands. Shovels were going to enter the sacred earth of Gaia by the fall. At least until he rides his father’s electoral calculus to another term as PM in October. In which case, forget it.
Having made this elemental gesture of concern to citizens who’ve lost jobs, tax revenues and homes to his stewardship of this file, Trudeau then abnegated himself to the green extremists perched on the Burrard Inlet and Salish Sea who see this project as End Of Days. Having lived in the lower mainland himself, he described his pain in a prosaic word salad of guilt. (There was no discussion of the pain felt by 100 K workers who lost jobs a little east in Alberta.)
He is the Lean Green Fighting Machine and woe betide any who question his passionate concern over one extra ship being added to the 100-plus leaky skows, cruise liners and Chinese coal boats that frequent the Vancouver harbour daily. He is so concerned about the environmental Armageddon promised by his climate evangelist Catherine McKenna that, in a single day, he flew on a government jet from Ottawa to Toronto for a parade, then on to Montreal and finally flew back to Ottawa.
All in time to miss the vote on his government’s latest Chicken Little climate proposal. (The kind currently being force-fed to 12 year olds in public schools.) Now if that’s not climate leadership I don’t know what is.
It’s easy to spoof the mannered metrosexual stylings of M. Trudeau. And contrast them with the One Size Fits All dictator who insists his caucus agree on unlimited abortion, fiery climate models and bribing the media with its own money. Or the evangelist who travels the world to lecture foreigners on their home soil about binary gender issues.
But we should be grateful. Without his foppish posturing, cant-spouting, and virtue-signalling we’d have no window into the progressive culture that has absconded with the sanity of the nation. Watching his fatuous performance at the Raptors parade and then the TMP announcement one sees inside his hermetically sealed universe of trust fund sycophants and eco-terror Marxists.
They simply can’t imagine that there exists any reality but their own. The notion their friends and followers don’t sum up the totality of existence is a foreign concept. Rather than wonder if they might learn from the Donald Trump or Brexit embarrassments they fall back on their prejudices.
So you have the befuddled CNN progressives and disenfranchised Republicans raging that the current occupant of the White House is illegitimate because, “I didn’t know anyone who voted for him.” In this petulance these bird-slicing eco-crucifiers label any opposition as the bitter fruit of racists, sexists, privilege whores and so on.
But if Quebec, wellspring of Liberal power, decides to ban religious symbols or parse signs for renegade English then it’s simply a cultural celebration of oneness.
It’s a worldview Trudeau shares with the ever-more-unhinged progressive tribe of America’s left wing. They share a failure of imagination, a sealing-off of stimuli that might explain the Disaster of November 2016. We can sum up the species with three words: Alexandria Cortez Ocasio.
The excitable 20-something Congresswoman from NYC has become a Woody Allen parody of politically engaged gender studies major. AOC’s latest salvo, delivered at a distance from the Mexico border, is that America operates concentration camps on the border for the genteel folk who’ve wandered across the U.S. border seeking comfort— and dispensation from the arduous five-years-plus process of legally immigrating.
The claim is so preposterous on its face that, naturally, her pom-pom pals at MSNBC, CNN and the Washington Post have heralded it the way the mobs in Galilee attached themselves to the saviour’s sandal in Life Of Brian. Forget that Obama ran similar detention centres, the camps POTUS 44 used are now the latest cudgel to disqualify Trump.
Trump’s crude, histrionic MO appalls the people of rare earth. Never is a thought given to what he might have to teach them if they wish to destroy him in November 2020. None of their friends or tennis partners is anything like Orange Man. Ergo, nothing to see here.
It’s why a giddy Alberta has yet to break out the confetti at Trudeau’s pipeline largesse. They know when the going gets tough on TMP Happy Ways will get tough on his enemies first.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available.