Trudeau Unrepentant: Sorry Seems to Be The Hardest Word

There’s a grim irony in seeing Justin Trudeau leave to country to find people still willing to buy his act. But find them he did in the U.S. media capital of New York where flash-frozen spares like Stephen Colbert or the ladies of The View are still re-living the 2016 presidential election.

Could it be that Justin’s real constituency all along has been these voidoids of Wokeness, not Canadians? Apparently so, judging from the cringeworthy interaction between Canada’s defrocked PM and Colbert. Like mammoths in a tar pit, fatuous Trudeau and fawning Colbert thrashed around in their irrelevance, steering clear of what will be a historic electoral drubbing of Mr. Happy Ways. It’s amazing Colbert didn’t hold Trudeau’s hand during the lovefest.

If Colbert’s staff might have come up with multiple lines of questioning on why the former GQ squish is now reviled north of the border. Instead the two re-heated 2015 talking points from when Skippy was elected and Hillary was throwing away the 2016 election to Trump. 

There were multiple softballs for a smirking Trudeau, but the PM’s entire detachment from reality could be summed up by a healthcare question pitched by Colbert. (Americans love the Canadian healthcare myth the way Kamala loves a suburban lawn). Trudeau was asked to reflect on the U.S. alternative. 

"It would be a lot easier if you guys had universal health care,” he riposted. The self-satisfied grin on Trudeau’s face told us he knows he was among friends in the CBS TV studio. Colbert's audience of midwits slapped their flippers after Trudeau inserted himself in the current American presidential election. As his Papa once said during the October Crisis: “There’s a lot of bleeding hearts around who don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau remarked jauntily. “All I can say is, go on and bleed…”

Anyone with a shred of journalistic integrity might have replied, “This year, Canadian patients faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner. That's over six months—the longest ever recorded. It's a slight increase from last year's median wait—and a 198 percent increase from the 9.3-week median wait that patients faced in 1993, the year that Fraser Institute began tracking wait times. But let’s accept it as received that Colbert and the Kamala left are not given to intellectual rigour.

The health care group Second Street adds, “Perhaps a single stat might wake Americans up about our health system: Over 17,296 Canadians died last year while waiting for surgery or a diagnostic scan (a low-balled figure based on incomplete data). In other words, that's an NBA-sized arena full of people. (The) government of Ontario letter to us about the number of patients that died in the province over a 10-year period while waiting for heart operations should also be a wake-up call – about a third died after waiting longer than the recommended wait time.”

In his new persona as Michael Scott from The Office, Trudeau is the only guy not in on the joke he’s become while wielding power and teddy bears. (Dunning Kruger Effect states that some people are too stupid to know they’re stupid.) Politics can have that effect on those who take themselves just a little too seriously like (checks notes) Justin Trudeau. But Skippy has this syndrome to the Nth degree.

Trudeau makes a convenient avatar for the entire managerial class that sins greatly but uses its privilege to avoid accountability. Watching him slough off the poor clods he represents as PM, Trudeau is as stand-in for every politician and Blob creature who employed, to use one example, Covid to trample all that’s sacred in society without ever having to say sorry. 

Sorry for what? 2023 meta-analysis of 40 high-quality studies shows that, despite the apocalyptic predictions off the elites, COVID death rate in 2020 for people younger than 70 was 0.07%. That’s 1-in-1,500. The death rate from COVID for those aged 0-19 years was 0.0003%. That’s 1-in-333,333. This is not a pandemic.

Still, while Skippy hid in the Rideau cottage, federal and provincial health officials churned out specious daily statistics on “positive cases” as justification to shut drown schools, work places and even the beaches. The social cost of grandparents dying alone and children denied schooling was incalculable. When Trump said the death rate from COVID was lower than 3.4 percent, the media angrily accused him of “misinformation.”

When the initial hysteria abated, bully boy Trudeau turned to vaccines to whip the herd. He removed the civil and financial rights of dissenters, incarcerating them in hotels. His followers actively talked of isolating vaccine deniers to work camps while denying them healthcare. When truckers objected he sent in the police on horseback. Because, as Naomi Klein bragged, events like the covid lockdowns are a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Make Our World More Equitable.

In this theatre of the grotesque Trudeau has become the epitome of the Ugly Canadian. As we wrote in the fall of 2015. “The scold impulse is never far from the Canadian id as we stare balefully south at the Excited States. In Canada it’s not so important that we have things such as single-payer health care and non-gun culture as that Americans don’t have them.

Trudeau represents that most vile class of Canadian, those who leap to print to disparage their nation in front of the world. Citing research (as yet unpublished) on attitudes in the Balkans, French Polynesia and Equatorial Guinea toward Canada, we are told that Canada’s reputation as a noble, compassionate nation is now in tatters. In Boy Trudeau’s Gatling-gun delivery, the government’s refusal to bend to the UN secretary general’s dictates has made us a travishamockery in the league of nations. See if Robert Redford ever comes here again.

This is always a rich vein to mine In Canadian politics. In a land that thinks Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lamenting Canada’s fallen status is considered a political kill shot by the media.” Trudeau embraces the model.

It’s hard to square his unapologetic tough guy with the obsequious Trudeau of the Colbert show. But he knows that as long as there are pandering cretins such as Colbert he doesn’t have to apologize for causing citizens for not taking a for-profit experimental product with manufacturer immunity. His future is assured. Were that Canadians’ futures looked as rosy.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.