Trudeau Resigns

After nearly 10 years as prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau has announced his resignation.  For most of my life, Canada was a land to the north that rarely made news.  It was a great place for generating talent, kind of like the minor leagues for baseball.  So many famous entertainers come from Canada, like Bob and Doug McKenzie.  Take off, hoser.  With the arrival of Trudeau, Canada started being newsworthy, and not in a good way.  Here is a handsome and charming man whose policies are clearly terrible.  Things have gotten demonstrably worse in Canada during his tenure.

The timing of his resignation is interesting.  If Kamala Harris had won the presidency, would Trudeau be on his way out?  Rather than a clearly contentious relationship with Trump in his near future, is he bowing out to let some other member of the Liberal Party get browbeaten by the Orange Overlord?  With a coming election this year that he is unlikely to win, why stick around for the coming turmoil.  Apres moi le deluge.

Though it is almost certainly a joke, the idea of Canada as a 51st state isn't such a bad idea.  Clive Cussler had it happen in one of the Dirk Pitt novels and that was pretty cool; I forget which novel that was, but a treaty where the UK sold Canada to the US for WWII aid was discovered in some sunken hulk.  As far as population and GDP, it is about the same as California.  Huh, Gavin Newsome and Justin Trudeau have that same quality of handsome charmers who sell snake oil policies.

Canada has turned a corner and better days lay ahead.

Legislating Pronouns?

Justin Trudeau has announced the "Great news" via twitter that a bill has passed the Canadian Senate that criminalizes discrimination on gender identity or expression.  Professor Jordan Peterson, a fierce critic of the bill, claims that it will infringe on free speech.  Last year, he very openly declared that he would not be coerced into using preferred gender pronouns.  Peterson stated:  I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words "zhe" and "zher."  The University of Toronto responded with warning letters but, so far, no formal disciplinary action.

 

If Bill C-16 is signed into law, will it be considered discriminatory to refer to a biologically female student who identifies as a male as 'she' or 'her?'  If Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner were to vacation in Canada, would it be a crime to say, "He visited Montreal?"  Those are just the tip of the iceberg.  There are a vast array of non-traditional pronouns that date back to the 70s: E, Ey, Hu, Peh, Per, Thon, Ve, Xe, Yo, Ze (which comes with a trio of possessive variants: hir, mer, or zir) and Zhe.  Could failure to keep track of everyone's preferred pronoun result in prosecution?  In the case of Peterson, who has preemptively declared that he will not use them, he may now be in legal jeopardy if he persists.

 

You will use the words that the government has decreed or suffer the consequences.  Of course, what I'd like to see in the wake of this foolishness would be for wave after wave of non-traditional pronoun people confronting Muslims to see which side the government takes.  In the US, no Muslim baker has been driven out of business by an outraged media and malicious lawsuits.

Trudeau's Calming Touch

Maybe things are different in Canada but I just don't buy this.  If a visibly upset person is approaching the head of state, how is it that the head of state confronts the person rather than the Royal Canadian Mounted Police escorting him?  Again, maybe things are different in Canada but if this sort of thing happened in the US, the Secret Service agents on scene would be reprimanded (at the very least).  Or the meeting was staged, like the little girl who offered Hillary a hug a few hours after her collapse on 9/11.

 

That another encounter went very badly for someone else upset with Trudeau on the same day makes me even more suspicious.  Ute Schmid-Jones of the Green Party was tackled when she threw pumpkin seeds at Trudeau.  She was arrested, identified, and released.  The angry man - who looks like more of a threat than the matronly Schmid-Jones - was not identified.  Peculiar.  Suspicious.

Leftists Love Autocracy

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, is in a bit of hot water for praising China, shown here.  Many are baffled by why a man from a Western Democracy would admire 'basic dictatorship.'  I am not.  Liberals have a long history of admiring dictatorships.  Cuba is beloved by the left, getting praised for its universal healthcare and education by the likes of Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders.  Sean Penn was a booster for Hugo Chavez.  Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, like Trudeau, praised the one party autocracy of China, noting that they were reasonably enlightened.  Many New Dealers thought very highly of Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's Russia.  Lefties love autocrats.

 

Liberals and Progressives want to use the power of the state to impose their policy preferences on the populace.  Consider: freedom is silence of the law.  If there is no law on a given subject, you are completely free to do whatever appeals to you.  Law is an abridgement of freedom.  In many cases, that is necessary.  However, why aren't we free to plan (or not plan) for retirement without government interference?  Social Security is mandatory.  Why aren't we free to arrange (or not) our health care?  Medicare is a mandatory tax and the Affordable Care Act makes it a crime to lack health insurance.  Why aren't we free to drive with (or without) a seatbelt?  There is a lot of nanny-statism on the left.  Really, we have gotten to limiting the size of soda bottles in some jurisdictions.

 

There was a time before all of these programs and yet we don't read stories about the dead piled in the streets for want of retirement savings or health care.  As Jefferson observed, the tendency is for government to advance and liberty to retreat.  Those in power want more power.  Each new generation of politicians want to exercise a little more power than their predecessors.  As such, they always admire those who already have more power, especially when there is no opposition to prevent such power grabs.  Ah, the joys of dictatorship!

 

Any politician who admires 'basic dictatorship' should be voted out of office as soon as possible.  Any politician who offers praise for any authoritarian government should be immediately rejected by the voters.