Good riddance, Justin Trudeau | Opinions

Watching Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announce that it was abandon on a cold Monday morning in Ottawa, I remembered the moment when the prize boat, Roberto Duran, resurrected his hands in a boxing ring and said: “No mas (No more).”

It was a merciful and predictable denouement to an unexpected political career that had begun with promises and expectations and ended up engulfed in rejection and recriminations.

“I’m a fighter,” said the future ex-prime minister.

Clearly, the fight had rubbed off on Trudeau after some of his closest cabinet allies abandoned him, and the party that once celebrated his youthful exuberance now considered the Liberal boy wonder a loser and a liability.

Loyal readers know of my long-standing dislike and, at times, disgust of a prime minister who struck me, from the first, as a dolphin whose hollow acts of performative absurdity were a banal substitute for conviction. and intelligence.

But much of the international press has been struck by Trudeau’s angry persona and empty bluffs, heralding him as a brilliant antidote to US President-elect Donald Trump’s politics of anger and grievance. Trump.

Trudeau was a “progressive” fraud. Rather than mount a sustained and determined challenge to the status quo, he has spent his nearly 10 years as Prime Minister defending it at home and abroad.

He was adept at making practiced speeches about the urgent need to bridge the gap between rich and poor, and then doing nothing tangible.

Trudeau and the Parish Corporation just agreed to pass legislation that would make universal, affordable day care and dental care available to struggling Canadian families as part of a deal with the New Democratic Party to keep its minority government at float – such was the Liberal Party’s calculated commitment to fairness and equity. .

Time and time again, Trudeau has made it clear that he is an establishment man – through and through – who relishes playing Cold War warrior vis-a-vis Ukraine and handmaiden to Israel’s apartheid regime. led by an accused war criminal who is committing genocide in Gaza. and raid the occupied West Bank.

On the two geopolitical issues that define this terrible era, Trudeau not only towed, but also parroted, to the letter, the lines dictated by his superior in the Oval Office – the President of the United States Joe Biden – a good obedient commission page that was.

However, if Trudeau had a true sense of the duties and obligations of the Prime Minister, he would have taken it into account call to resign when his racist days wearing blackface, well into adulthood, were exposed in 2019.

Instead, Trudeau and his pack of short-sighted managers put the interests of the prime minister before those of the country.

It was a humiliating affair that confirmed, to me at least, that Trudeau had given up the privilege of holding any public office, let alone prime minister.

True to infantile form, Trudeau and company weathered the brief storm by having the prime minister issue a succession of empty and unconvincing excuses that added to his misery.

Perhaps the episode that best established Trudeau’s essential character—and, unsurprisingly, escaped the notice of both his devoted supporters and his apoplectic detractors in the corporate media and beyond— was his shameful about-face in deserting the wounded Palestinian children.

Anyone, at any time, who reneges on a promise to help innocent victims of war in order to appease racists and xenophobes in and out of parliament is a despicable hypocrite.

Justin Trudeau did just that, turning his displeasure to children in desperate need. This obscenity will forever stain his legacy.

As I explained in many columnswhile the Liberal leader sat in opposition, Trudeau openly and repeatedly threw his imprimatur behind an initiative organized by the famous Canadian Palestinian, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, called Heal100Kids.

Dr. Abuelaish had recommended the support of provincial politicians, doctors, nurses, hospitals and other volunteers to arrange for 100 injured Palestinian children – accompanied by members of their immediate families – to travel to Canada for treatment to repair their minds, bodies and damned spirits. .

After Trudeau won the majority in 2015, Dr. Abuelaish – who suffered the murder by invading Israeli forces of three of his daughters and a granddaughter in Gaza in 2009 with remarkable grace – made several public and private openings to have Trudeau keep his word.

Trudeau never responded.

Dr. Abuelaish—a distinguished man not prone to hyperbole—told me that Trudeau was a liar and that history would judge his betrayal harshly.

He is right on both counts.

Trudeau betrayed others for other reasons.

He betrayed his so-called “feminist” credentials when he fired female ministers, including an indigenous colleague, for daring to challenge him at the cabinet table or defend the rule of law.

As I he wrote in September 2023, the supposed “champion” of climate “action”, bought a collapsed oil pipeline for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.3 billion).

The supposed “champion” of human rights and the “rules-based international order”, he tried, with a little help from his insurgent friends in Brazil, to install a malleable marionette in Venezuela.

The supposed “champion” of the situation of hurting “ordinary” Canadians, has allowed the predatory corporate monopolies to continue to earn extraordinary profits while the division between the uber-rich and the other, much less fortunate 99 per hundred, it developed.

Despite the anguished rhetoric of amnesia in the House of Commons and in newsrooms across Canada, Trudeau’s departure is not evidence of a national “crisis” or that the capital is gripped by “chaos” or “paralysis”.

It is further proof that, given the inexorable cycle of politics, prime ministers – Liberal or Conservative – have a natural life expectancy.

Trudeau’s conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, lasted just shy of 10 years as prime minister before voters soured on him.

Harper’s Liberal predecessor, Jean Chretien, spent a decade as prime minister before voters soured on him.

Chretien’s conservative predecessor, the late Brian Mulroney, also held office for nearly a decade before, you guessed it, the voters got upset.

I suspect that the same fate awaits the current leader of the Conservative, Pierre Poilievre, who seems ready – if the consensus among the polls is accurate – to win a nice majority during the next federal elections that are likely to happen in the spring.

Meanwhile, frantic liberals will choose an impatient sacrificial lamb — not named Trudeau — to take on the repellent, schtick-addicted Poilievre in a futile effort to stave off the inevitable.

So, to borrow a phrase made famous by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, “welcome to” 2025, Justin.

Good riddance to you.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.