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Six days after acknowledging that his country was guilty of genocide, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a press conference outside of Montreal and announced that Canada was going to take a hard line on single-use plastic items such as straws, water bottles and cutlery. The leader of the nation he agrees is actively trying to destroy a segment of its population went on to add, “We need to cover all of Canada with this decision and that’s why the federal government is moving forward on a science-based approach to establishing which harmful single-use plastics we will be eliminating as of 2021.”
If you’re pressed for time, dear reader, you can probably just stop now. I’m going to keep going for a while to actually fill out the column, but if there is anything you should take away from this, it’s that the prime minister pivoted from a crime against humanity to the crime of the drinking straw in your smoothie in about 140 hours.
This is the problem the prime minister faces — arguably more than even the average Canadian PM would. This prime minister has spoken often of his desire for a better relationship with Indigenous communities and people. He’s spoken a lot about reconciliation. He’s had some major flops on that front, too, of course, from his flippant “Thank you for your donation” dismissal of a protest over poor environmental conditions on a First Nations reserve (for which he apologized) to the obvious damage inflicted by the prolonged and public battle between the Prime Minister’s Office and former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous woman. Still, if only as a matter of political branding, the PM has tried to sell himself as the federal leader most committed to reconciliation.
So what do you do when a report your government commissioned and spent almost $100 million on concludes that the government you’re running is genocidal?
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