When Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould publicly accused Justin Trudeau and his senior aides before a Commons Justice and Human Rights Committee in February of pressuring her to not criminally prosecute the Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin engineering firm for a host of corruption charges, Tory leader Andrew Scheer declared that the prime minister had lost the moral authority to govern and must resign.
“Justin Trudeau simply cannot continue to govern this country now that Canadians know what he has done,” Scheer said, describing Trudeau as a prime minister who allows his partisan political motivations to overrule his duty to uphold the rule of law and who has allowed a systemic culture of corruption to take root in his office and those of his most senior cabinet and public service colleagues.
“That is why I am calling on Mr. Trudeau to do the right thing and to resign.” Scheer stated. “I listened carefully to the testimony of the former Attorney General and, like Canadians, I was sickened and appalled by her story of inappropriate, and frankly illegal pressure brought to bear on her by the highest officials of Justin Trudeau’s government. All to let a Liberal-connected corporation off the hook on corruption charges.”
Predictably, Scheer’s demand was deemed an overreaction. How dare the opposition leader call for the PM’s resignation, the media harrumphed in unison.
Minutes later, Trudeau also rebuffed Scheer’s call for his resignation by touting “the independence of our judiciary,” and adding that Canadians will decide later this year – meaning in October – whether to re-elect the Liberals or hand power to the Conservatives.
“I strongly maintain I and my staff acted appropriately,” Trudeau stated from behind a podium on a strangely darkened stage where, alone and unrepentant, he boasted about what he regards as his two great achievements of the past four years: a new euthanasia law and legalizing the sale and use of cannabis – both formerly criminal practices. He neglected, however, to mention the third article of his unholy ‘freedoms’ – abortion – which he continues to promote vehemently as a sacred rite in the only country in the world with no abortion law whatsoever, leaving all preborn Canadians subject to parental whims and without any legal protection whatsoever.
This is the legacy of the Justin Trudeau government which has also seen every single file of their mandate – both foreign and domestic – severely damaged, from Saudi Arabia and China to pipelines. In addition, the Trudeau cabinet has broken ethics rules.
In one ruling, ethics commissioner Mary Dawson concluded that Trudeau had breached federal ethics rules when he and his family vacationed with the Aga Khan on his private island in the Bahamas in 2016. The December 2017 report also found Trudeau broke four sections of the Conflict of Interest Act, including Section 11, which prohibits the receipt of gifts unless they are from friends and relatives, making Trudeau the first sitting prime minister to be found guilty of violating federal conflict of interest rules.
Impoverishing Canada
There are many other scandals as well with inevitably disastrous outcomes including the Liberals’ destructive climate policies, carbon taxes and various other environmental proscriptions, all of which appear destined to beggar the Canadian economy, despite government claims and media reports that Canada is currently enjoying unprecedented prosperity.
Really? Countless small business owners disagree as does the average Canadian trying ever harder to balance his chequebook, as housing prices soar beyond reach and food prices skyrocket, the latter due to the imposition of carbon taxes. Both of which indicate that true prosperity is no longer possible in Canada so long as her leftist governments continue to spend money they don’t have, driving the nation into ever deeper debt in the service of a totalitarian ideology which can only further harm the country to the point of disintegration.
So, as Canada approaches the October election, one must ask how many Canadians, including Catholics, see what has actually been happening to their country since 2015 when Trudeau and his band of feminists formed a majority government after coming from a distant third in the polls mere weeks before voting day.
Since then not only has the Trudeau government has been embroiled in a laundry list of scandals, ineptitudes and shaming embarrassments such as the fiasco in India but Canadian voters would do well to focus their attention on an even deeper issue. Which is how the entire cultural and moral climate of Canada has been altered over the course of four years. And how the government of Trudeau the Younger has produced the full fruits of his father’s secular humanistic ideology which, in 1969, ushered in legalized abortion as a ‘right’ along with the moral obliteration of Christian Canada that was logically to follow. And from which there now appears no possibility of a return to the Christian moral order on which Canada was founded and flourished.
Half a Century of Decline
In fact, over the fifty pernicious years that followed, the culture of Canada has been upended so entirely and its moral fabric so torn that abortion and its associated vices are now treated by politicians of all major parties as sacrosanct ‘rights’ not to be challenged under any circumstances. So much so that no public criticism is allowed. And should anyone persist, punishment is assured by the legal system, thereby allowing all the heart-hardening and soul-destroying effects of abortion to take its full effect on this promiscuity encouraging culture. Take, for example, the case of Mary Wagner who’s been jailed for standing outside abortuaries, carrying red and white roses bearing Miraculous Medals and pro-life messages for mothers there to abort their babies. Nor has the orchestrated opposition to screening the anti-abortion film Unplanned in cinemas across Canada been accidental. Such is the power of ‘establishment’ thinking to control public and private thought from coast to coast.
All of which means that Canadians in general are now morally accountable for the millions of abortions (2,838,328 between 1974 and 2006 alone) which have stained this country for half a century allowing evil to be deemed good and good (public opposition to it) evil, just as the Bible has long warned against. And, in turn, this cultural upheaval has opened the door wide for euthanasia also to be deemed a ‘good’. And for so-called gender theory, now protected under C-16 which purports to add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the list of prohibited grounds of “discrimination”. Thus, ‘educators’ across Canada can now impose this brand new ideology on school children in classrooms and in libraries with no serious opposition. Because, apart from Professor Jordan Peterson, who else would dare?
The Logic of Perversity
So why should anyone be shocked that experts at Sick Kids Hospital have been considering euthanizing children without parental consent? Or that psychiatric patients appear to be next in line to be given the ‘right’ to be killed under Canada’s ‘medical assistance in dying’ protocols? Indeed, doctors and ethicists at Canada’s largest children’s hospital have said they are open to considering the killing of a child under the country’s new euthanasia legislation without informing the child’s parents because they’re anticipating such a scenario where a child wants to be euthanized without parental consent, or even knowledge.
Yet isn’t such thinking merely the logical result of the very legislation – Bill C-14 – that decriminalized euthanasia in 2015 and that Jody Wilson-Raybould drafted and is so proud of? Known as “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID), the legislation made it a right of competent adults suffering from a “grievous and irremediable” medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) to have a doctor or nurse in the public health system assist them with ending their lives.
The legislation currently limits euthanasia to patients over age 18. But in a paper published last September in the British Medical Journal of Medical Ethics, employees of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (aka SickKids) and the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics reviewed the procedural options for killing pediatric patients and said that “we write our policy with an eye to the near future when capable young people may gain access to MAID.”
In Canada, where public health is strained to the breaking point, where emergency rooms are crowded and where in some areas people wait months to be assigned a GP, it’s reasonable to conclude that public health money is likely to influence end-of-life care decisions.
By contrast, St. John Paul II taught in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, (The Gospel of Life) that “euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person.” The Catechism also states that any action that “causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded.”
Moral Ignorance
Today, such teachings may seem quaint to morally untutored Canadians now living not only in the world’s first ‘post-national state’, as Trudeau has deemed Canada, but also in a ruthlessly de-Christianized country where all of life’s natural-and-therefore-moral protections have been thrown out with both hands – in an attempt to thwart the salvific power of the blood of the Canadian martyrs, to demonize their Godly vocations, to completely secularize the land they claimed and civilized for Christ and to keep as many Canadians as possible ignorant of God’s eternal moral truth – that human beings are not simply bits of matter, but creatures made and loved by God with immortal souls in need of salvation.
Yet in the current moral climate, no Canadian should be surprised by the news earlier this month released by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition that there were 774 reported assisted deaths in the first six months of 2019, 1,499 reported assisted deaths in 2018, 841 reported assisted deaths in 2017 and 189 reported assisted deaths in 2016. All deemed a merciful blessing, a ‘right’ and a ‘good’.
Nor should any Canadian be surprised by the decadence and general deterioration in the character of Canadians indulging in the regular use of recently and recklessly legalized cannabis, despite plentiful warnings by such experts as Alex Berenson who, in his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence, documents what a devastating drug cannabis really is. And how it has caused schizophrenia in many young users who, as a result, become lifelong mental patients unable to conduct their own lives as responsible adults. “Psychosis is not fun,” he said in a recent interview. Neither is violence which is increasing as a direct result of cannabis use. Plus, over the past decade, as legalization has spread, patterns of marijuana use—and the drug itself—have changed in dangerous ways, Berenson adds, becoming far more potent and often increasing the intensity of already existing mental illness in some patients.
This is a statement of fact the Trudeau government appears to have ignored. It’s also confirmation of what too many grief-stricken parents already know, despite the media’s perennial claims that cannabis is harmless and not a gateway drug to other death-dealing drugs used for ‘recreational purposes’. Of course, scientists have accused Berenson of erroneously drawing inappropriate conclusions from his research, primarily by inferring causation from correlation, as well as cherry picking data to fit his narrative, and falling victim to selection bias via his use of anecdotes to back up his assertions.
But they would say that, wouldn’t they? Particularly after marijuana has been legalized in Canada. Indeed, what government can afford to admit the devastation it has just unleashed? And with almost no preparation as happened under Trudeau’s watch?
Bottom line: The Justin Trudeau years have been years of dramatic demoralization in Canada. Literally. And returning him to the PMO will make things worse as, under his continued mantra of diversity, Canada will become ever more incoherent, divided, fractured and fragmented by an ideology-driven government touting ‘freedom’ as the rationale for its socialistic policies of deviance, destruction and death.
All exemplary of what John Paul II described so aptly as the Culture of Death where Man, not God, is on the throne and where a deified ‘environment’ begins to unleash the wrath of God on a deluded, self-worshipping, increasingly impoverished population convinced of its own virtue.
What Populism Really Signifies
Nevertheless, there are signs of significant pushback against the tyranny of the mindless Leftist ideology emanating from the seats of power in Ottawa and around the world. In a fascinating interview last month on TVO’s The Agenda, Walter Russell Mead, a Wall Street Journal columnist, professor of Foreign Affairs and scholar at the Hudson Institute, made a fascinating observation about what he regards as the true nature of populism, its most recent wave said to have been triggered by the election of Donald Trump. Naturally, the political world and the entire mainstream media regard today’s ‘populism’ as a symptom of ‘hate’ when, in truth, they quietly understand its direct threat to their power.
But what today’s populism really means, Mead observes, is that the average voter is withdrawing his consent from the elitist establishment and the socialistic institutional architecture the establishment has been installing directly and through NGOs such as the UN for the past several decades. All in the name of these same voters and almost invariably acting without these voters’ best interests in mind, these political, bureaucratic, academic, media and social establishments have been operating in their own self interest and in the service of the powers and principalities of this world.
In fact, so very little of this bureaucratic and ever-more-socialistic architecture is working in the ways promised to voters, Mead notes — referring to such contrivances as NAFTA among other failing schemes — that predictably, voters are now rebelling, resulting in the so-called populism of the Trump era which is nothing more or less than the average voter saying: ‘No, we see your failures and your lies and your corruption and we don’t want any more of your power-mad utopian schemes.’
If Mead is correct, the question now is: will evidence of this pushback be seen at the Canadian polls in October?
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