CANADA & THE WAR IN UKRAINE, DEFCON I -OPERATION PHOTO OPPORTUNITY
Why is the Trudeau government going to such lengths to convince Europeans that Canada really is on their side?
I’m at it in my National Post column about this.
I should say this straight out, because it’s quickly becoming one of those touchstones we’re all supposed to take sides over and fight about: it’s not like the prime minister isn’t entitled to earn some air miles points on the Ukraine crisis, given the depth of the abyss we’re staring into now that Vladimir Putin has pushed us all to the edge of it.
Trudeau is taking advantage of the privilege that comes with his job. It’s the way power works. While Trudeau was giving a speech in Berlin, for instance, New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh had to settle for showing solidarity by popping into the local Taste of Ukraine deli at the Kingsway Plaza in his home riding of Burnaby.
If I’m being a bit wicked with the Trudeau Liberals it’s that it’s kind of my job. They’re the government. In an upcoming edition of this newsletter I intend to be quite wicked with certain elements of the Conservative Party (I’m an equal-opportunity scold) that are being every bit as promiscuous in their accomodation of police-state interests in Canada as the Trudeau Liberals have been.
But back to it.
With only a handful of exceptions (like CBC Parliamentary reporter Travis Dhanraj, which I’ll get to), Trudeau’s Press Gallery entourage has tended to take a tone that’s a bit too breathless about what is, for the most part, a brand-rebuilding publicity tour. I know jet lag is a bummer and a lot of people haven’t been traveling much owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and everything, but please. Let’s work a bit harder, shall we?
Total war is engulfing Ukraine, right now, and the courageous president Volodymyr Zelensky is giving the impression that he’s abandoning any hope of effective aid coming from the NATO capitals in time to prevent Ukraine’s cities from being reduced to rubble, ash and cinders. Two millon peole have already poured out of the country. Unknown hundreds have died. If the point of our efforts isn’t to fight that war on Ukraine’s behalf or at least help the Ukrainian resistance win it, right now, and by all means necessary, than we’re busying ourselves with peacetime activities.
And even though he took the time to be seen with grownup Europeans and pose for photographs with soldiers in Latvia, I don’t see much else in Team Trudeau’s travel itinerary. These are peacetime activities.
If it’s in that part of Europe outside the killing zone that we’re going to be visiting I’d have expected that by now, after all the clanging and crashing attending to the tectonic shifts in decades-old European diplomatic and military-policy paradigms, someone on Trudeau’s rolling-thunder tour might have had the nerve to ask Trudeau some saucy questions.
Like maybe the one I was asking here, last week: Where the hell has Stéphane Dion been all this time? I mean, he’s the Honourable Stéphane Dion, Ambassador to Germany and Special Envoy to the European Union and Europe. And as I pointed out - sorry to repeat myself - Dion was, as Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, the loudest voice in the G7 raised against the enforcement of proper sanctions on Putin’s gangsters and oligarchs — while Putin was committing the same war crimes in Syria that he is committing right now in Ukraine. And Dion was Russian foreign miniister Sergei Lavrov’s guy even after Putin had annexed Crimea and sent a proxy army into Ukraine to take over huge bits of Donbas.
And it is only now that Canada has joined with the United States and the European Union in a fusillade of deadly sanctions at the Kremlin oligarchy in a too-little, too-late and likely vain effort to contain Putin and make him stop with the mass murder and mayhem that anyone with a lick of sense could see was coming, ages ago.
I mean, who knows, I guess these things might at least partly explain the consistently plaintive and strenuous ‘we’re on your side, really we are’ messaging that ran through everything Trudeau said in Europe, and everything Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said too. It’s not like the German foreign office or the EU diplomatic corps would not have noticed that while all the applecart-upturning tumult was going on in Berlin and Brussels, Canada’s Man in Europe was down in Yerevan, Armenia, having a rare auld time with the nomenklatura of the only government in the 47-member Council of Europe to oppose Russia’s ejection from the Council for invading a European country.
If you’re curious about those contradictions, then you have a good reason to subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already. And you might want to buy a sub (only $5/month), because that will get you access to the deeper background stuff that’s reserved for paying customers. What follows is a preview of what I’ll have in the coming days in that department.
In my column I make passing reference to an especially weird contradiction.
On the one hand, Trudeau says he’s quite enthusiastic about the G7’s “rapid response mechanism” to deal with foreign interference in democracies (he’s just announced a $3 million expenditure on an initiative to smoke out Russian disinformation and propaganda). There’s a long story to be told about the ineffectiveness of that exercise, and why it seems to be employed rather selectively. Remember what happened during the last federal election? That wasn’t a Russian job, let me tell you. It was dezinformatsiya, with Chinese characteristics, to the Liberals’ advantage. But leave that aside for now.
On the other hand, both the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces have been lavishing tens of thousands of dollars on what you could call a Canadian reputation-washing exercise on behalf of Putin’s gangland oligarchy in Moscow, the Khomeinist theocracy in Iran, and the influence-peddling wings of Xi Jinping’s mammoth police state in Beijing. Oh look, here’s some loot the Department of National Defence gave them just a few days ago:
And what do you know, just last Friday, an IPD discussion forum: “CUTTING THROUGH THE SPIN: A discussion on Russia’s invasion, NATO’s provocation, the economic interests & Canada’s complicity in escalating the crisis.” The Kremlin spin, in other words. This goes back some long while: the Defence Department and the Canadian Forces thought it necessary two years ago to pay the IPD for guidance and counsel on the human security implications of the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you;re interested in the deeper background on all this that I’ll be laying out in an upcoming newsletter, you know what to do.
One reason this is a touchy subject is that the Ontario journalism eminence Steve Paikin (whom I admire greatly) is the dad of the former Liberal candidate Zach Paikin, a Russophile of a kind who’s been intimately associated with IPD for quite a while now. If you have any doubts about what’s up with these people, here’s the IPD’s director of research, Art Moeini, in a lengthy deconstruction of the massive outpouring of public solidarity with the Ukrainian struggle as merely the outcome of a sinister reality-manipulating operation carried off by the mainstream media and the capitalist elites of the liberal democracies. Read it all if you like.
Speaking of Zach Paikin, you might find it amusing that the reason he gave for bolting so melodramatically from the Liberal Party and dropping any idea of running as a candidate in Hamilton-West-Ancaster-Dundas, was this: Team Trudeau had intervened in a nomination race so that a certain star candidate would not have to risk losing a difficult nomination race in downtown Toronto.
And who was that star candidate whose favours from the party brass so upset Zach Paikin? The militantly pro-Ukraine, pro-democracy Chrystia Freeland, who would go on to replace the let’s-not-be-beastly-with-the-oligarchs Stéphane Dion, that’s who.
And speaking of Freeland, and of the necessity of asking saucy questions, here’s the CBC’s Travis Dhanraj. Say what you want about Freeland, but unlike Trudeau, she’s not afraid to answer forthrightly and elaborately, even if she’s sort of missing the point, and probably deliberately, in the bargain. She is no slouch:
If the rumors are true, the reason Freeland and Joly are there is b/c they both want Trudeau's job!
Trudeau and the carbon tax fly away little bird if you get my itinerary'