Canadian woman will be on next series of bank notes, Trudeau announces

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

One has to admire the choreography of this announcement on International Women’s Day with other related elements: the PM’s op-ed in the Globe ( Gender equality is an opportunity, not a threat) and the announcement of DM changes, which included four women (one of whom is visible minority) and one man – because its 2016?:

The image of an iconic Canadian woman will appear on the next issue of bank notes, Prime Minister Trudeau announced today.

“A Canadian woman will be featured on the very first of the next series of bills expected in 2018,” Trudeau said.

“Today, on International Women’s Day, the Bank of Canada is taking the first step by launching public consultations to select an iconic Canadian woman to be featured on this new bill.”

The government and the Bank of Canada did not indicate which denomination would showcase the iconic female Canadian.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who stood alongside the prime minister with other members of the Liberal caucus and former Mississauga, Ont., mayor Hazel McCallion during the announcement, noted that it is “high time to change.”

“One of the very first things I had the honour of doing as the new finance minister was asking the governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, and his colleagues at the bank whether it’s in fact possible to put a woman on the bank note,” said Morneau.

The finance minister said he was told the central bank had been looking into the possibility for some time and was keen to support the initiative.

Source: Canadian woman will be on next series of bank notes, Trudeau announces – Politics – CBC News

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Liberals shift immigration focus to family reunification, refugee resettlement

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

Immigration_Plan_2016One of the more comprehensive reports on the changes, but changes that some of my colleagues more expert in immigration characterize as ‘less change than meets the eye’:

Canada will seek to admit a record number of immigrants as the Liberal government shifts its focus on family reunification and the settlement of refugees, says Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister John McCallum.

“This plan sends a message about the importance of family,” McCallum said in Brampton, Ont., on Tuesday.

“It outlines a significant shift in immigration policy towards reuniting more families, building our economy and upholding Canada’s humanitarian traditions to resettle refugees and offer protection to those in need.”

McCallum said Canada will admit between 280,000 and 305,000 new permanent residents in 2016, a record increase from the 260,000 to 285,000 newcomers the previous Conservative government had planned to welcome by the end of 2015.

The Liberal plan will see Canada admit:

  • 151,200 to 162,400 caregivers, provincial nominees, and other skilled workers under the economic stream.
  • 75,000 to 82,000  spouses, partners, children, parents and grandparents of Canadians under the family reunification plan.
  • 51,000 to 57,000 refugees, protected persons and others admitted for humanitarian reasons.​

The Liberal plan also includes admitting 18,000 privately sponsored refugees, “three times more than in earlier years,” McCallum said.

The government has resettled some 25,000 Syrians, a mix of government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees, in four months. The Liberals have also pledged to resettle another 10,000 government-assisted Syrian refugees by the end of 2016.

Reviewing sponsorship conditions

McCallum said the government will review some of the conditions imposed on Canadians looking to sponsor their children and spouses living overseas, making family reunification a priority.

“The government of Canada will make family reunification an important priority because when families are able to stay together, their integration to Canada and ability to work and grow their communities all improve,” McCallum said in a much-anticipated report tabled in Parliament on Tuesday.​

“We will work to restore the maximum age for dependants to 22 from 19 and re-examine the two-year conditional permanent residence provision for sponsored spouses.”

In its annual report to Parliament, the Liberal government is also pledging to:

  • Eliminate the $1,000 labour market impact assessment (LMIA) fee for families looking to hire caregivers for family members with physical and mental disabilities. An LMIA is a document employers must file to prove the need to hire a foreign worker over a Canadian one.
  • Review the express entry system launched in January 2015 “to provide more opportunities” for applicants who have Canadian siblings.
  • “Expand and monitor the use of biometrics” to verify the identity of all temporary and permanent residents  who need a visa or permit to enter Canada.

Fewer economic immigrants

Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel denounced the government’s decision to admit fewer economic immigrants.

“These cuts to economic immigration come at a time when our workforce is aging, our economy is slowing, and refugees are waiting for months to have long-term affordable housing,” Rempel said during question period,

She said the government’s changes to the caregivers program would “leave the most vulnerable Canadians without care.”

Source: Liberals shift immigration focus to family reunification, refugee resettlement – Politics – CBC News

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Laura Track: Citizenship comes with the same rights and responsibilities, regardless of birthplace

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

Citizenship - Conference Board April 2016.001Laura Track of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association supporting the Government’s planned repeal of the revocation for terror or treason provisions (the above chart has been revised with full-year data for 2015):

Critics point out that the government can still revoke someone’s citizenship on the basis that they lied or committed fraud in order to obtain it. How can that be a more serious offence than terrorism, some wonder? However, the two scenarios are fundamentally different. Citizenship obtained by fraud is a citizenship that should never have been granted. Revoking it is akin to correcting an error. Revoking citizenship from a Canadian based on a crime they committed after citizenship was legitimately obtained is a punitive response that amounts to the ancient punishment of exile. Such medieval practices have no place in a rights-respecting democracy.

It’s no secret who would have been targeted by the law: new Canadians of colour who arrived in Canada only one or two generations ago. This unequal treatment is why the BC Civil Liberties Association and Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers challenged the law in court last summer, arguing that it is discriminatory and violates key constitutional rights. It is also poor security policy, and fundamentally wrong.

We applaud the government for taking the first steps towards bringing about the law’s demise. The reforms are not perfect, and still leave too much power in the hands of government bureaucrats to revoke citizenship in cases of fraud or misrepresentation, without the involvement of a judge. But it’s a step in the right direction — the direction of equal rights for all Canadians.

Source: Laura Track: Citizenship comes with the same rights and responsibilities, regardless of birthplace | National Post

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Today’s feminist problem? Black women are still invisible: Anderson

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

More than an element of truth in this critique by Septembre Anderson:

A few weeks ago, I got a press release about the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote in Canada. The e-mail goes on about women’s suffrage and the commemoration of that fight for a few hundred words and then begins to catalogue when women got the right to vote throughout the country – women in Manitoba in 1916, those in Newfoundland in 1925 and so on and so on – and then, in brackets, near the end, “Unfortunately, the right to vote was withheld from indigenous women, as well as those of Asian and African descent, for years longer.”

Nowhere in the press release was there any mention of how anti-black many suffragettes were; how much of these women’s activism was about gaining the vote for white women only; and how championing eugenics for racialized women was also part of their politics. Heck, there wasn’t even a mention of when indigenous, Asian and African women got the vote in Canada.

And this is the problem with feminism as it exists today. Black women and other women of colour are continuously rendered invisible beneath the “women” banner. The default definition for women is white women – those with the most systemic power – and the issues of the most privileged of us take precedence over the trials and tribulations of the least privileged of us.

We saw this clearly during the Academy Awards. While white women used the hashtag #AskHerMore to bring awareness to and combat sexist reporting on the red carpet, women of colour were bringing attention to #OscarsSoWhite, created by movie critic April Reign, to protest the lack of racial diversity in Oscar nominees.

We saw this with the celebration of Justin Trudeau’s recent cabinet – that boasted gender parity “because it’s 2015” but not racial parity. We see this with continuing discussions about the gender pay gap – but there’s a greater disparity between race than gender.

While white women experience the repercussions of sexism, racism isn’t one of the barriers that they have to come up against. It’s actually one that benefits them. The unique issues that black women have to deal with are far too often overshadowed by the issues that white women deal with, leaving those of us with less institutional power to wait and hope for a trickle-down equity that history has shown us will never come.

Black women exist at the intersection of blackness and womanhood and, therefore, our feminism isn’t a single issue struggle. Our battle for equity and inclusion is with both misogyny and systemic anti-blackness, from within and without feminist circles. Feminism, as it is popularly practised, whitewashes the experience of racialized women and does not acknowledge the intersectionalities within womanhood. It does not acknowledge the distinctive ways different women experience sexism.

Through this myopic definition of womanhood, mainstream feminism is embroiled in elevating the women closest to the top rather than those struggling and suffering on the margins.

In Canada, black women and other women of colour find themselves missing not only from movements for gender diversity, but also from seats of power. Bank boards, newsrooms, hospital boards and executive positions are all spaces where white women see themselves better represented.

Source: Today’s feminist problem? Black women are still invisible – The Globe and Mail

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Canada has more women in cabinet, but fewer sit on Commons committees

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

The Globe picks up on the same issues I raised earlier in Diversity on parliamentary committees: Does it matter? | My piece in The Hill Times with interesting commentary from a variety of parliamentarians, but only focuses on gender:

Diversity on committees is important; women believe they bring a different view to issues.

“It’s not that it’s a right or a wrong perspective. It’s just different,” said Pam Damoff, the newly elected Liberal MP for Oakville North-Burlington and the only woman on the public safety and national security committee. “It’s early going so far, but I do think it [female membership] gives a slightly different lens to look at things.”

There are 10 members on each committee – six Liberals, three Conservatives and one New Democrat. The numbers for each party are based on their representation in the House.

Mr. Trudeau’s promise to make committees more independent has also added to the dearth of female representation. There was criticism among opposition during the past government about having parliamentary secretaries, who are considered junior cabinet ministers, on their respective committees. The view was that the Harper government was using parliamentary secretaries to do the bidding of their minister, hijacking the committee’s independence.

Mr. Leslie said his government was “determined not to repeat that.”

And so, parliamentary secretaries are not on committees, giving Mr. Leslie even fewer female MPs to work with (the Prime Minister, cabinet ministers, opposition leaders, and the Speaker are also not appointed to committees).

“Do we need more women in caucus? Absolutely,” Mr. Leslie said.

And not just in the Liberal caucus, but in the entire Commons, where there are a total of 88 female MPs and 250 male MPs; women account for 26 per cent of the 338 seats.

The Conservatives elected 99 MPs – 17 are women. They are allowed to appoint three MPs to each committee. The third-party NDP has 44 MPs, 18 of whom are women. They are allowed one MP on each committee.

“We made a decision to put women on key committees,” Ms. Mathyssen said. Her party purposely put women on the foreign affairs committee and also on international trade, given that the massive trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is one of the most important issues facing the Commons for the NDP.

Ms. Mathyssen suggested that women are more pragmatic and work harder than their male counterparts. “We go in prepared … We’ve always had to be very efficient in terms of time management because of all the things women do.”

For Ms. Damoff, being the only woman on the public safety committee was a surprise. She had asked to be on the infrastructure committee. “When I first got appointed, I thought, ‘Wow, I’m the only woman on here.’” she said. But she quickly realized she could play an important role.

“I do bring a different perspective,” she said. Recently, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson appeared before her committee on issues around sexual harassment in the police force. She asked him what he was doing to promote women into leadership roles.

“The only way you change the culture in any organization, whether it is business or politics … is to have women in leadership roles,” she said about why she asked that question. “Not that men may not have thought of it. But it was just a different perspective I was bringing to the issue.”

Government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc recognizes that there are too few women on committees, but says the Prime Minister made the commitment to put women in leadership roles in government. “One objective is to encourage more women to run for nominations and get elected to Parliament,” he said. “This would be a direct way to increase the number of women serving on committees of the House.”

Nancy Peckford of Equal Voice, the non-partisan organization advocating for more elected women, says it’s important to have gender parity in cabinet, but the trick now is not to be complacent and think that women have somehow won.

“What this points to is that you have a House that is only 26-per-cent women … so, really, it comes down to electing more women,” she said.

The print edition also has a neat graphical representation.

Source: Canada has more women in cabinet, but fewer sit on Commons committees – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Perception of politicization of the public service is a problem for Liberals | Ottawa Citizen

2016/03/09 Leave a comment

Not unexpected to hear this kind of criticism from the opposition, as well as the more-balance assessments from others:

The appointment of Matthew Mendelsohn, who helped write the Liberal election platform, as a senior-ranking bureaucrat is a “clear, unprecedented and blunt” politicization of Canada’s non-partisan public service, says former Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney.

Kenney said the previous Conservative government — which had a rocky and sometimes hostile relationship with the bureaucracy — would have been vilified if it “plunked” such a key election player into the top ranks of the Privy Council Office (PCO).

“The real shocker here is his appointment to a No. 2 position in the PCO, the summit of the entire public service,” said Kenney in an interview. “A fellow who worked as a partisan political Liberal on the election campaign … I don’t think there is any precedent for this.”

That perception has dogged the Liberals since Mendelsohn was appointed in December as a deputy secretary in the PCO to head a new “results and delivery” secretariat to ensure election promises are tracked and met.

Results and delivery are big priorities for the Liberals and the public service has a lousy track record at both. By all accounts, Mendelsohn is working hard to get buy-in from ministers, deputy ministers and departments on creating a “delivery culture” in government.

And there seems little debate Mendelsohn is qualified. He is an academic, founding director of the Mowat Centre, an Ontario think-tank, a former deputy minister of several provincial portfolios; an associate cabinet secretary in Ontario and a one-time public servant.

But his bona fides include a leave from the Mowat Centre to work on the Liberal platform and help pen Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mandate letters for ministers.

He is also part of the Dalton McGuinty-Kathleen Wynne brain trust that has joined the Trudeau government.

He worked with Queen’s Park veterans Katie Telford, now Trudeau’s chief of staff, and Gerald Butts, his principal secretary. (Mendelsohn’s wife, Kirsten Mercer, was Wynne’s justice policy adviser who moved to Ottawa to become chief of staff for Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould but has since been replaced.)

“The closer you fly to the action the bigger the risk of being branded,” said David Zussman, who holds the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa. He was recruited into PCO to help lead the Jean Chrétien government’s massive program review.

Zussman also cautions the government has to be careful about the perception that it is too Ontario-centric when staffing ministers’ offices.

“They need a national perspective in ministers’ offices and they have to be careful about that. They could all be meritorious appointments but if they all come from the same place they are not as valuable to ministers as people who come from across the country,” he said.

Ralph Heintzman, a research professor at University of Ottawa, was a harsh critic of the Tory government for politicizing the public service particularly for using government communications to promote party interests.

Heintzman, a key player in writing the public service’s ethics code, feels Mendelsohn’s appointment is within bounds. He was tapped as a policy expert for the platform but wasn’t a candidate or campaign worker.

But perception is reality in politics and Heintzman said Mendelsohn had “sufficient involvement” with the Liberals that the government will now have to be sensitive to all future appointments.

“The very fact the appointment created a perception, fair or not, creates a new situation for the Liberals in the future because it will have to be very sensitive about any future appointments from outside the public service to make sure those impressions aren’t reinforced,” said Heintzman.

That could pose a problem for a government that is anxious to renew the public service and bring in new talent and skills to fill many policy and operational gaps.

The public service has long been criticized for monastic and a “closed shop.” In fact, former PCO Clerk Janice Charette made recruitment, including bringing in mid-career and senior executives, one of her top three priorities.

Source: Perception of politicization of the public service is a problem for Liberals | Ottawa Citizen

From a different angle, Geoff Norquay, a former staffer to former PM Mulroney, argues for greater movement between the two spheres:

We learned this week that a significant number of public servants have been joining ministerial offices in the new Liberal government.

The knee-jerk reactions of some Conservative commentators were predictable enough: “It absolutely feeds into the perception that the civil service favours the Liberals, and that the public service is becoming more political,” said Michele Austin, a former chief of staff to two Harper government ministers.

I believe these reactions are wrong, for several reasons.

Canada has a non-partisan public service, but people have been crossing back and forth between the public service and political offices for many years. It used to be a normal process and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Actually, it’s a good thing.

Until the Harper era, these movements were openly acknowledged and positively sanctioned, because people from ministers’ offices wishing to cross over to the public service were given a priority for hiring in the bureaucracy.

As part of his effort to close “revolving doors,” Stephen Harper put a stop to the priority system. That was a mistake. Once it has worked through its top priorities, I hope the new government considers bringing the priority system back.

Ministers’ offices are the nexus where the public service and politics meet. They are the place where political judgments are applied to bureaucratic recommendations, where political desires meet practical realities, and where executive decision-making confronts the art of practical execution.

Far too often, these two sides operate as non-communicating solitudes. When relationships between ministers’ offices and the public service become strained, it’s usually because they don’t understand each other’s motivations, priorities, imperatives and constraints.

Many of these tensions and frustrations can be made more manageable if public service recommendations to ministers are more politically sensitive, and if requests and instructions from the political level are tempered by respect for bureaucratic considerations.

open quote 761b1bCreativity comes from your ability to see the different and conflicting sides of complex issues, and apply what you’ve learned from one field to the challenges of another.

The odds of this happening are much better if at least some people making these calls, and negotiating the interface, have experience on both sides. That’s certainly been my experience through more than forty years of working in and around provincial and federal governments.

Trudeau’s blurring the line between ministries and the public service. Good for him.

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Québec met en avant les avantages d’accueillir plus d’immigrants

2016/03/09 Leave a comment

Express Entry, the Quebec version:

La nouvelle politique de l’immigration, présentée lundi par la ministre de l’Immigration, de la Diversité et de l’Inclusion, Kathleen Weil, fait miroiter les avantages de hausser de 50 000 à 60 000 le nombre d’immigrants reçus annuellement au Québec.

« Selon les perspectives démographiques, à partir d’un niveau de 60000 personnes immigrantes admises annuellement, le Québec éviterait un recul de sa population en âge de travailler en dessous de son niveau de 2011 » alors qu’avec le maintien du seuil d’immigration actuel de 50000 nouveaux arrivants par année, « la taille de la population en âge de travailler connaîtrait un recul marqué entre 2016 et 2031, entraînant une rareté de main-d’oeuvre, particulièrement dans certaines régions et secteurs d’activité », peut-on lire dans le document de 61 pages décrivant la nouvelle politique d’immigration du Québec et accompagné d’une stratégie d’action 2016-2021. Dévoilé en mars 2015, le Plan économique du gouvernement Couillard prévoyait consacrer 42,5 millions de dollars en cinq ans à cette stratégie.

En février, lors de la consultation en commission parlementaire portant sur le projet de loi 77 qui refonde la Loi sur l’immigration adoptée en 1991, des participants, notamment l’économiste Pierre Fortin, mettaient en garde le gouvernement contre une hausse des seuils d’immigration qui pourrait s’avérer « destructive » pour la cohésion sociale, tout en ne présentant pas d’avantages économiques pour la population d’accueil. La politique d’immigration dévoilée lundi insiste plutôt sur le « rôle important[de l’immigration] pour accroître la prospérité du Québec ».

Distincte de la politique, la consultation sur les seuils d’immigration triennaux doit se tenir plus tard cette année.

Entre sélection et besoins

La nouvelle politique préconise de mettre en place « un système d’immigration novateur qui permettra une adéquation optimale entre la sélection et les besoins du marché du travail », a déclaré la ministre Kathleen Weil en conférence de presse à Montréal.

Le projet de loi 77 permet l’implantation de ce nouveau système reposant sur une déclaration d’intérêt de la part des candidats à l’immigration dite « économique », c’est-à-dire les candidats choisis par Québec. « Il mettra fin au principe du premier arrivé, premier servi », a souligné la ministre. Les délais imposés au candidat avant son arrivée au pays, variant de un à quatre ans à l’heure actuelle, passeront de trois à six mois, a promis Kathleen Weil.

Le gouvernement Couillard entend accentuer ses efforts pour recruter des immigrants parmi les étudiants étrangers et les travailleurs temporaires. Un peu moins du quart de ces étudiants et travailleurs décident de s’établir au Québec, une proportion que la ministre souhaite augmenter substantiellement. La moitié des étudiants étrangers souhaitent immigrer au Québec, a signalé la ministre, citant un sondage commandé par Montréal International.

Kathleen Weil a présenté la connaissance du français comme « la clef de voûte de la réussite de la participation économique et sociale des personnes immigrantes ». Le Québec sélectionne une majorité d’immigrants qui connaissent le français. Entre 1990 et 1994, ils étaient 35,1 % de l’ensemble des immigrants reçus contre 61,3 % entre 2010 et 2014, a-t-elle mentionné. L’immigration est « une contribution à la vitalité du français » au Québec. Les cours de français destinés aux immigrants seront mieux adaptés aux besoins particuliers des immigrants. Tout immigrant, quelle que soit sa date d’admission au Québec, aura droit à des cours à temps partiel.

Source: Québec met en avant les avantages d’accueillir plus d’immigrants | Le Devoir

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My secret debate with Sam Harris: A revealing 4-hour dialogue on Islam, racism & free-speech hypocrisy – Salon.com

2016/03/09 Leave a comment

A very good long-read and effective take down of Sam Harris, a major figure in the anti-Muslim cottage industry, by Omer Aziz:

On that same podcast, Harris reflected with astonishment that I “didn’t even seem to be religious!” When I heard him say this, I burst out laughing. Unlike the charlatan Maajid Nawaz, I forthrightly admit that I am a skeptic and make no claims to being a “reformer”—such titles are for self-anointed prophets, not writers. Harris referred to me as a “young Muslim writer,” echoing his remarks during our debate where he referred to the same Middle Easterners he considers backward subhumans as “your fellow Muslims.” Imagine the grotesque stench of anti-Semitism if I called Sam Harris a “Jewish neuroscientist” or referred to Jewish terrorists in the West Bank as Harris’s “fellow Jews.” This is what white supremacy does: It reduces another person’s complex humanity to a two-dimensional stick-figure and allows the objectifier to remain so ignorant of how other people actually live that this ignorance becomes a privileged badge of honor rather than a mark of impoverishment. One should pity individuals like Harris, so blinded by arrogance that they live in a world removed from the struggles of every day people who they assume to be knaves and fools.

Harris ought to retire from the Islam industry altogether, or at least take a long vacation from spouting bile for a living. If this is too much to ask, he should at least have the integrity to admit that his attempted ambush on the “young Muslim writer” who “didn’t even seem to be religious” backfired and so he deprived his customers out of the truth.

For all of its shortcomings, this unpublished debate was not a waste of time. It illuminated one thing for certain: that Harris and his brigade of  reactionary pseudo-liberals are not at all interested in the questions they raise. It is about power for them, and maintaining a belief in their own superiority. No debate will rob Harris and his ilk of such a satisfying elixir, that they are civilized, while those people over there, in their ghettos and their mosques, they are barbaric, they are criminals, they are animals. Why escape Plato’s cave if you are the one holding the chains?

Source: My secret debate with Sam Harris: A revealing 4-hour dialogue on Islam, racism & free-speech hypocrisy – Salon.com

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Nova Scotia celebrates 100th anniversary of all-black unit: ‘Fighting to fight’

2016/03/09 Leave a comment

Anthony Sherwood continues to tell needed stories:

Despite making an award-winning docudrama on Canada’s only all-black military unit in 2001, director Anthony Sherwood says he’s still amazed how little is known nationally about the No. 2 Construction Battalion.

Sherwood will present a special screening of his film Honour Before Glory, at the new Halifax Central Library on Tuesday as part of celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the formation of the battalion in 1916.

“Nova Scotia is one of the provinces where the story has flourished and has been told several times,” said Sherwood. “But I’m amazed that there is still a lot of people who don’t know this story.”

The military unit formed during the First World War was the only predominantly African-Canadian battalion since Confederation. The segregated battalion allowed black men who had previously been turned away by recruiters to enlist in the military.

Sherwood said the unique story of the battalion is an important piece of Canadian history because it shows that there were black Canadians who served their country during the first great global conflict.

“I think that participation and that service should be recognized,” said Sherwood.

Sherwood, a Halifax native, said he came to be interested in the battalion through the diary of his great uncle, Reverend William White, who served as the unit’s chaplain. That diary became the basis for the film, which won a Gemini Award in 2002.

“I strongly believe he wanted somebody to read this (diary) and tell this story,” said Sherwood.

Source: Nova Scotia celebrates 100th anniversary of all-black unit: ‘Fighting to fight’ – Macleans.ca

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Trudeau on Trump: Not ‘smug’, Mr. Kenney — just sensibly alarmed: Kheiriddin

2016/03/09 Leave a comment

Tasha Kheiriddin on Trudeau’s comments and Jason Kenney’s reaction:

Some criticized Trudeau’s remarks as ungracious. “Regrettably smug comment by PM Trudeau,” sniffed Jason Kenney on Twitter, “re our American friends, who help to defend Canada & our interests globally.” The American Spectator’s Aaron Goldstein called Justin Trudeau “smug and condescending just like Obama.”

But Trudeau wasn’t being smug. He was speaking truth to power, or power-in-waiting — at a time when many in the U.S. would do well to listen. Like his father, Trudeau pointed out something about Americans that Americans are seldom going to notice themselves — that they are all too often oblivious of the interests and experiences of the people with whom they share the planet. The elephant won’t crush the mouse out of malice — but he might do it out of ignorance.

In Trump’s case, the ignorance is wilful — even celebrated by those who profess it. Anti-elitism has combined with racism to fuel Trump’s rise. Malicious verbal — or physical — attacks are visited on those who disagree with him. The ends aren’t justifying the means this time, because the ends have nothing to do with protecting American values or interests. They’re all about Donald Trump — what he wants, the lies he’s willing to tell to get what he wants.

Trump’s campaign carries all the hallmarks of tyranny — towards other nations, towards the American people themselves. And it won’t help Americans defend themselves … or us.

Trudeau on Trump: Not ‘smug’, Mr. Kenney — just sensibly alarmed

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