National Affairs by Claire Hoy — Trudeau tied to scripted clichés

February 1, 2016 · 0 Comments

While our pretty-boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was wowing the elites in Davos, Switzerland, hobnobbing with his fellow rich and famous beautiful people — and winning plaudits in the slavering mainstream media — not everyone at home was joining in the hero worship.
Indeed, Quebecer Yves Richard — whose wife Maude Carrier, his father-in-law and four other Quebec humanitarian workers were killed by terrorist in Burkino Faso — actually hung up on Trudeau after the prime minister had waited until three days after the attack to call him and then offered only his typical, Hallmark-style bromides.
The wanton murder of the six Quebecers came one day after another Quebecer, Tahar Amer-Ouali, was killed in a terrorist attack in the Islamic State in Jakarta, the most Canadians killed in terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2011 in the U.S.
“My prime minister called me and began speaking in such a canned manner, wishing me good luck, offering me his condolences and talking about them as a source of Canadian pride,” Richard told Montreal radio station 98.5 FM. “That’s when I told him to stop his political blabbing.
“If he’s going to call me, then at least he should know who the Carriers are. It wasn’t out of Canadian pride that they were doing what they were doing, but rather because they were basically good people.”
So Richard, tired of listening to Trudeau’s set-piece syrup, told the prime minister to go hug his wife and children and then hung up on him.
“It felt good,” said Richard.
It’s just another in a growing list of examples of Trudeau’s apparent inability to get beyond scripted clichés and actually offer some concrete answers to such vexing problems.
It even prompted prominent Quebec columnist Lysiane Gagnon — certainly not a noted Liberal basher — to lament that Trudeau’s office saw no point in changing their schedule to attend a memorial honouring the six victims. Yet the day before, Trudeau had attended a mosque in Peterborough that had been damaged by arson in the wake of the Paris Islamic terrorist attack.
To be sure, whoever torched the mosque should be brought to justice, but a)- nobody died in that fire and b)- the people of Peterborough showed their true colours by raising enough money to rebuild the mosque.
So it was pretty easy — and politically useful — for Trudeau to breeze into Peterborough and wring his hands about the mosque burning.
But it was far more difficult to go to Quebec and honour the six dead Canadians in light of the growing feeling that Trudeau, which means Canada in this context, isn’t taking Islamic terrorism seriously enough and isn’t carrying its weight in the fight against these murderous thugs.
To underscore that feeling, Camille Carrier — Richard’s mother-in-law, and the mother of Maude Carrier — publicly rebuked the Trudeau government for not standing with allies such as France to fight the growing terrorist threat.
“I was ashamed before this happened, but obviously the loss of my daughter has only made me more revolted about this situation,” she said. “I’m so ashamed of my own country.”
Indeed, we all should be ashamed, because this whole thing played out when Canada was pointedly excluded — by design, and with justification — from a meeting of defence ministers of the coalition of countries fighting the Islamic state militants.
While the U.S. invited Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands, to the meeting to discuss future military strategy, Canada’s Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan — a decorated warrior in his own right — was left the unenviable task of trying to spin this huge international embarrassment into a minor bump along the road to Trudeau’s so-called “sunny ways.”
It’s directly because of Trudeau’s oft-repeated pledge to pull our CF-18s from combat — Sajjan, absurdly, claimed it had nothing to do with that (I mean, really?) — that the allies have sent a message to Canada to either shape up or ship out.
You would think that the slaughter of innocents in Paris would have caused Trudeau to reconsider his unrealistic views that you can somehow solve this issue mainly by hugs and kisses. But it didn’t, although Trudeau keeps promising he’ll soon announce our new contribution to the fight.
It’s difficult to justify the death of innocent Parisians wasn’t enough of a wake-up call to move the needle for Trudeau, but it’s downright shameful that the subsequent murder of six Canadians — whose “crimes” involved building schools for local children — still isn’t enough to nudge him away from his ill-considered and internationally humiliating stance.
Hollywood might love him. But those on the front lines against terrorism are, for the moment at least, giving a big thumbs-down.
And so they should. hoy