(This week, professor and author Salim Mansur
was informed that he would not be permitted to run as a Conservative
Party candidate in the upcoming Canadian federal election. In this exclusive guest column, Mansur reflects on the state of Canadian politics today. PLUS: Watch David Menzies' interview with Salim Mansur here.)
This coming 2019 federal election is turning out to be about “Who Speaks For Canada?”
History is filled with ironies. This is the question that Pierre Trudeau asked Canadians ahead of the crucial 1980 election.
When Pierre Trudeau asked Canadians who speaks for them, it was clearly understood that on fundamental questions of national interests they were being asked to decide whether they would be represented by a coalition of provinces, or by Ottawa speaking for Canada. At the time within that coalition was present the separatist Premier of Quebec, Rene Levesque, demanding more powers from the federal government to address issues of national importance.
As the 2019 election approaches, Canadians are confronted with the same question of who speaks for Canada? The choice is stark, much more so than what Canadians faced forty years ago. This is because the path taken by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals since 2015 has brought Canadians to a crossroads, and on their decision will be contingent what sort of country they bequeath to their children.
On receiving the electoral mandate in October 2015, Justin Trudeau spoke glibly about the return of “sunny ways” in Canada. It did not take long for the “sunny ways” to turn grim. Canadians are now more dissatisfied and frustrated with the divisive policies of the Trudeau Liberals than they were with the previous government. Ahead of the 2015 election, the Harper Conservatives had warned Canadians that Trudeau was “just not ready” to head a G7 country. That warning was prescient, and it has turned out to be true.
Loaded with rhetoric and empty of ideas, Trudeau has displayed an arrogance that sets aside the history and tradition of the country to embrace policies that will radically alter Canada. He stated, for instance, in his first major interview, as Prime Minister, with Guy Lawson of the New York Times published in December 2015 that Canada “has no core identity,” and is “a post-national state.”
Trudeau’s first act was to head for France and sign the Paris Accord on Climate Change prepared under the auspices of the UN. He then adopted the UN Agenda 2030, as the blueprint for Canada’s foreign policy, and followed it with signing the UN Global Compact For Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. His adoption of Motion-103 on Islamophobia, and the $600 million buy-out of the news organizations in the country and turn them into docile Liberal-friendly and UN compliant media outlets, were right out of the UN playbook for both constricting freedom of speech under hate law legislations, and facilitating mass unfettered migration out of the global south to the global north, as described in Article 33 of the Global Compact on Migration.
Trudeau’s remarks to Guy Lawson of the New York Times were not made in jest. His full embrace of the UN agenda indicates that encouraged by Gerald Butts, his former principal secretary and alter ego, Trudeau bought into the ideology of Globalism and the Globalist vision of one borderless world. What this means was strikingly explained by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Addressing a meeting titled "Parliamentarianism Between Globalization and National Sovereignty" in Berlin in November 2018, Merkel said, “In this day nation states must today – should today, I say – be ready to give up sovereignty.”
Canada, according to Trudeau, is a post-national state without a core identity, and thus he erases a history of some four centuries in the making in order to turn this country of ours into a laboratory of UN-driven Globalism. This means, for instance, how we manage our natural energy resources has to comply with the UN agenda on climate change; how we set our economic and social priorities, and administer an immigration policy suitable to our national interests, have to be consistent with the requirements of the UN Global Compact; how we educate our citizens and invest in new technologies need to follow the directives of the UN Agenda 2030; and how the basis of our freedoms, which is free speech in a liberal democracy, needs to comply with the UN norms that embrace the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the OIC, including the Sharia code on blasphemy, as hate speech.
Moreover, Trudeau’s disregard for the rule of law, which was at the heart of the SNC-Lavalin affair, and disdain for individuals who live by a code of ethics, as in the case of the former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Canadian Forces, Vice Admiral Mark Norman, have revealed authoritarian traits that make him unfit to occupy the office of Canada’s prime minister.
Trudeau’s treatment of Vice Admiral Mark Norman stands in sharp contrast to the manner in which he embraced a convicted former terrorist, Omar Khadr, and for a payment of $10.5 million settled a lawsuit that Khadr had launched against the Canadian government for the breach of his Charter rights. Similarly, Trudeau’s expulsion of two courageous women in his cabinet and parliamentary caucus, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, for their principled stand in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, exposed the hollowness of his support for feminism and his fake politics of virtue signalling, selfies, and obsession with style over substance.
But while Trudeau has displayed an eagerness to indict episodes from Canadian history as shameful when judged by contemporary standards and apologize for them, he has refused to indict returning ISIS fighters for crimes against humanity and put them on trial. Instead, Trudeau and his Liberal Party have eagerly reached out to apologists of the Muslim Brotherhood and other related organizations among Muslims in Canada, and by adopting Motion 103 on Islamophobia has indicated that appeasement of Islamists is one of the key planks of his domestic and foreign policy. In contrast to appeasing Islamists, Trudeau’s policies on abortion and transgenderism are rightly viewed as direct assault on the belief and traditional values of orthodox Jews and Christians.
By weighing these issues and more, such as the recurring Liberal budget deficits and accumulating debts that make Canada increasingly less attractive for foreign investments, or the costly foreign policy mishandling that has brought China to punish Canadian farmers by restricting imports of canola, Canadians will decide why Trudeau must not be re-elected.
There is, however, a much greater urgency for conservatives in Canada, irrespective of what some or many of them might find lacking in the present leadership of the Conservative party, that they set aside their differences and vote together to make certain their party – the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and John Diefenbaker, of Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper – wins enough seats in the House to indisputably form a majority government. If the Conservative Party fails to win a clear majority of seats, it might well mean that not in our lifetime will the party ever be in a position to form a government in Ottawa.
Following the 2008 election, when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did not win for the second time enough seats to form a majority government, there was an attempt by the other parties in the House to form a coalition government. It failed because the coalition effort led by Stephane Dion of the Liberals and Jack Layton of the NDP depended on the support of Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois, a pro-separatist party, which horrified the country. In the current circumstances, a coalition effort put together by the Liberals, the NDP and the Green party to deny the Conservatives forming a minority government should Andrew Scheer fail to win an outright majority, will not suffer the fate of the failed 2008 attempt.
Conservatives across Canada must think deep and hard the implications of the 2019 election in which not only the future of the Conservative Party, if denied a majority, is at stake, but also and far more urgently the fate of the country itself.
A coalition government of the left led by the Liberals, with the NDP and the Green Party in tow, will invariably be a party driven by the Globalist agenda. Such a coalition will relegate the Conservative Party in perpetuity to a minority oppositional role in the parliament and, hence, will effectively deprive Canadians of any parliamentary means of changing the course of their government in Ottawa, except by raising the stakes of separatism and threatening the break up of the Canadian federation.
The 2019 federal election might, therefore, be the last election for Canadian patriots, who cherish freedom and love for their country, to rescue their country from the ideology and politics of Globalism; and for Conservatives it might be the last election to form a government in Ottawa, failing which it would be consigned to the unenviable fate that befell the once mighty Liberal Party of Palmerston and Gladstone in Britain, defeated in the aftermath of World War I and not since has ever been elected to form another government.
(Salim Mansur is professor emeritus, political science, Western University, London, Ontario.)
This coming 2019 federal election is turning out to be about “Who Speaks For Canada?”
History is filled with ironies. This is the question that Pierre Trudeau asked Canadians ahead of the crucial 1980 election.
When Pierre Trudeau asked Canadians who speaks for them, it was clearly understood that on fundamental questions of national interests they were being asked to decide whether they would be represented by a coalition of provinces, or by Ottawa speaking for Canada. At the time within that coalition was present the separatist Premier of Quebec, Rene Levesque, demanding more powers from the federal government to address issues of national importance.
As the 2019 election approaches, Canadians are confronted with the same question of who speaks for Canada? The choice is stark, much more so than what Canadians faced forty years ago. This is because the path taken by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals since 2015 has brought Canadians to a crossroads, and on their decision will be contingent what sort of country they bequeath to their children.
On receiving the electoral mandate in October 2015, Justin Trudeau spoke glibly about the return of “sunny ways” in Canada. It did not take long for the “sunny ways” to turn grim. Canadians are now more dissatisfied and frustrated with the divisive policies of the Trudeau Liberals than they were with the previous government. Ahead of the 2015 election, the Harper Conservatives had warned Canadians that Trudeau was “just not ready” to head a G7 country. That warning was prescient, and it has turned out to be true.
Loaded with rhetoric and empty of ideas, Trudeau has displayed an arrogance that sets aside the history and tradition of the country to embrace policies that will radically alter Canada. He stated, for instance, in his first major interview, as Prime Minister, with Guy Lawson of the New York Times published in December 2015 that Canada “has no core identity,” and is “a post-national state.”
Trudeau’s first act was to head for France and sign the Paris Accord on Climate Change prepared under the auspices of the UN. He then adopted the UN Agenda 2030, as the blueprint for Canada’s foreign policy, and followed it with signing the UN Global Compact For Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. His adoption of Motion-103 on Islamophobia, and the $600 million buy-out of the news organizations in the country and turn them into docile Liberal-friendly and UN compliant media outlets, were right out of the UN playbook for both constricting freedom of speech under hate law legislations, and facilitating mass unfettered migration out of the global south to the global north, as described in Article 33 of the Global Compact on Migration.
Trudeau’s remarks to Guy Lawson of the New York Times were not made in jest. His full embrace of the UN agenda indicates that encouraged by Gerald Butts, his former principal secretary and alter ego, Trudeau bought into the ideology of Globalism and the Globalist vision of one borderless world. What this means was strikingly explained by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. Addressing a meeting titled "Parliamentarianism Between Globalization and National Sovereignty" in Berlin in November 2018, Merkel said, “In this day nation states must today – should today, I say – be ready to give up sovereignty.”
Canada, according to Trudeau, is a post-national state without a core identity, and thus he erases a history of some four centuries in the making in order to turn this country of ours into a laboratory of UN-driven Globalism. This means, for instance, how we manage our natural energy resources has to comply with the UN agenda on climate change; how we set our economic and social priorities, and administer an immigration policy suitable to our national interests, have to be consistent with the requirements of the UN Global Compact; how we educate our citizens and invest in new technologies need to follow the directives of the UN Agenda 2030; and how the basis of our freedoms, which is free speech in a liberal democracy, needs to comply with the UN norms that embrace the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the OIC, including the Sharia code on blasphemy, as hate speech.
Moreover, Trudeau’s disregard for the rule of law, which was at the heart of the SNC-Lavalin affair, and disdain for individuals who live by a code of ethics, as in the case of the former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Canadian Forces, Vice Admiral Mark Norman, have revealed authoritarian traits that make him unfit to occupy the office of Canada’s prime minister.
Trudeau’s treatment of Vice Admiral Mark Norman stands in sharp contrast to the manner in which he embraced a convicted former terrorist, Omar Khadr, and for a payment of $10.5 million settled a lawsuit that Khadr had launched against the Canadian government for the breach of his Charter rights. Similarly, Trudeau’s expulsion of two courageous women in his cabinet and parliamentary caucus, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, for their principled stand in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, exposed the hollowness of his support for feminism and his fake politics of virtue signalling, selfies, and obsession with style over substance.
But while Trudeau has displayed an eagerness to indict episodes from Canadian history as shameful when judged by contemporary standards and apologize for them, he has refused to indict returning ISIS fighters for crimes against humanity and put them on trial. Instead, Trudeau and his Liberal Party have eagerly reached out to apologists of the Muslim Brotherhood and other related organizations among Muslims in Canada, and by adopting Motion 103 on Islamophobia has indicated that appeasement of Islamists is one of the key planks of his domestic and foreign policy. In contrast to appeasing Islamists, Trudeau’s policies on abortion and transgenderism are rightly viewed as direct assault on the belief and traditional values of orthodox Jews and Christians.
By weighing these issues and more, such as the recurring Liberal budget deficits and accumulating debts that make Canada increasingly less attractive for foreign investments, or the costly foreign policy mishandling that has brought China to punish Canadian farmers by restricting imports of canola, Canadians will decide why Trudeau must not be re-elected.
There is, however, a much greater urgency for conservatives in Canada, irrespective of what some or many of them might find lacking in the present leadership of the Conservative party, that they set aside their differences and vote together to make certain their party – the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and John Diefenbaker, of Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper – wins enough seats in the House to indisputably form a majority government. If the Conservative Party fails to win a clear majority of seats, it might well mean that not in our lifetime will the party ever be in a position to form a government in Ottawa.
Following the 2008 election, when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did not win for the second time enough seats to form a majority government, there was an attempt by the other parties in the House to form a coalition government. It failed because the coalition effort led by Stephane Dion of the Liberals and Jack Layton of the NDP depended on the support of Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois, a pro-separatist party, which horrified the country. In the current circumstances, a coalition effort put together by the Liberals, the NDP and the Green party to deny the Conservatives forming a minority government should Andrew Scheer fail to win an outright majority, will not suffer the fate of the failed 2008 attempt.
Conservatives across Canada must think deep and hard the implications of the 2019 election in which not only the future of the Conservative Party, if denied a majority, is at stake, but also and far more urgently the fate of the country itself.
A coalition government of the left led by the Liberals, with the NDP and the Green Party in tow, will invariably be a party driven by the Globalist agenda. Such a coalition will relegate the Conservative Party in perpetuity to a minority oppositional role in the parliament and, hence, will effectively deprive Canadians of any parliamentary means of changing the course of their government in Ottawa, except by raising the stakes of separatism and threatening the break up of the Canadian federation.
The 2019 federal election might, therefore, be the last election for Canadian patriots, who cherish freedom and love for their country, to rescue their country from the ideology and politics of Globalism; and for Conservatives it might be the last election to form a government in Ottawa, failing which it would be consigned to the unenviable fate that befell the once mighty Liberal Party of Palmerston and Gladstone in Britain, defeated in the aftermath of World War I and not since has ever been elected to form another government.
(Salim Mansur is professor emeritus, political science, Western University, London, Ontario.)
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