I’m familiar with absentee landlords from grade school history. The concept of an absentee prime minister is a brand new one to me.
Justin Trudeau has been a week now waltzing around Africa while, day by day back here in carbon-tax Canada, the country is seizing up. For the same past seven days apparently, Canada has been under the administration of what the media insists on calling “anti-pipeline” forces.
Anti-pipeline is far too narrow. These are the anti-industry, anti-energy, anti-Alberta, climate-change save-the-worlders who have been harassing the country for years. The difference is in the past week they’ve upped their opposition, and from one end of the country to another decided to muscle their way to a victory by a storm of blockades, protests, traffic obstruction, and in the case of Victoria, B.C., actually shutting down the people’s legislature.
Meantime PM I’m-out-of-the-country-again sends bulletins of feeble non-assurance from sunny Senegal. And such bulletins they are. “PM urges quick resolution …” As VIA Rail shuts down, and his own deputy prime minister is denied entrance to the Halifax mayor’s office, the globe-trotter PM “urges quick resolution.”
When there is a national crisis, and there is a national crisis, to whom do we justly look for a resolution? Why the prime minister of the nation. Instead of leadership in this case however, we get a statement that surely implies he thinks the “resolution” is in some other hands. Further in the same statement — and I love this — he called for “all parties to dialogue.” Whenever in any really tense situation a politician hauls out the infinitive “to dialogue,” you may take it to the bank he has not a clue about how to handle it.
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See Also:
(1) Blockades ring hollow amid Indigenous support for pipeline
(2) A vocal minority who hardly speak for First Nations are grinding our country to a halt
(5) Where are the solidarity protests for the First Nations that support Coastal GasLink?
