Scorned by Canada, Trudeau pitches his agenda to the Americans

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In the wake of a 2024 “fairness” budget that has largely failed to salvage his plummeting poll numbers, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s post-budget media tour has taken the unusual step of pitching his agenda to Americans.

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Last week, Trudeau was the featured guest on two U.S. podcasts: Vox’s Today, Explained and Freakonomics Radio, where he outlined his plans to bring “fairness” to the Canadian economy and hold the line against what he framed as a populist uprising.

“I’m not worried about innovation and creativity,” he told Vox against claims that his budget would scare away investment. “I’m worried about people being able to pay their rent and eventually buy a home.”

Trudeau also described Canada as being seized by a focus on “individualism that I think is counterproductive to the kind of world we need to build.”

The Vox interview began with an actor doing a faux Canadian accent and pretending to be a kind of Trudeau-esque superhero. The Freakonomics interview introduced Trudeau as “possibly the most polite prime minister in the world; he most definitely stands on guard for thee.” So it’s clear from the outset that the interviewers only have a cursory knowledge of Canada and its contemporary political situation.

As such, Trudeau was able to get away with claims that even the friendliest of Canadian interviewers wouldn’t have tolerated.

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Below, a quick summary of how Trudeau his pitching his re-election in the U.S.

He frames opposition to his government as a form of mass hysteria

Both interviews did note at the outset that Trudeau is polling quite poorly and that he faces likely defeat in the next election. As to why this is happening, Trudeau described his citizenry as being in the grip of a worldwide trend towards irrational populism, and expressed his hope that Canadians would ultimately come to their senses.

“In every democracy we’re seeing a rise in populists with easy answers that don’t necessarily hold up to any expert scrutiny. But a big part of populism is ignoring experts and expertise, so it sort of feeds on itself and relies on a lot of misinformation and disinformation,” he told Vox.

While he never mentions Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre by name, Trudeau says he’s facing opponents who offer naught but “easy shortcuts,” “buzzwords” and “clever TikTok videos.” The Conservatives, he said, are arguing that “everything I’ve done” is “why life is difficult right now.”

“When in actual fact … all those things have made life better in meaningful ways and it would be much worse if we hadn’t done all those things,” he said.

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Several times, Trudeau said he “trusted” that Canadians are ultimately going to come to their senses in the next election and remember “who they’ve always been.”

“I’m confident that Canadians are going to remain responsible, ambitious and optimistic about their future,” he said.

Absolutely nothing wrong is his fault

This is a theme that Trudeau has similarly pursued in his domestic interviews: That every decision of his government has been correct and necessary, and that any perceived failure of his leadership is due to external factors beyond his control.

Every politician externalizes failure, but there is not a single acknowledgement in either interview that he has ever made a mistake or had to alter course.

As to what’s causing the problems, Trudeau credits “the hangover from COVID,” “wildfires,” “global inflation” and “wars.”

“People look at the person in charge and say ‘the world’s going to a bad place it must be your fault,’” he told Vox.

The closest he came to acknowledging fault was when he told Freakonomics that temporary immigration (particularly in the realm of temporary foreign workers and foreign students) had surged to unsustainable highs. Given that the federal government has sole discretion over migrant intake — with the exception of in Quebec — this problem is almost entirely on the Trudeau government.

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But Trudeau blamed “universities and the provinces” for the influx of foreign students, and “restaurants and convenience stores” for becoming too dependent on foreign workers.

He says he’ll be “a teacher” when he leaves politics

It is very rare for Trudeau to acknowledge a future in which he is not prime minister anymore, but he did hint at such when Freakonomics asked him what he would be doing if he hadn’t gone into politics.

“I would be a teacher, and when I leave politics I will look to teach again in one way, shape or form,” he said, before emphasizing that this won’t be happening for a long time. “I’m ultimately a social activist who’s going to look to how I can have a positive impact on the world. I did it as a teacher, I’m doing it now as a politician.”

He’s accused of endorsing the “false accusations” of the unmarked graves controversy

Ironically, it was in the midst of an otherwise softball interview that Freakonomics actually threw a question at Trudeau that he’s never really had to answer in Canada. Interviewer Stephen J. Dubner referenced the 2021 unmarked graves controversy, in which Canada was seized by the alleged discovery of hundreds of previously unknown graves at the site of former Indian Residential Schools.

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While the schools did indeed feature outsized rates of student death (many of whom were buried onsite), the hundreds of supposed new discoveries in 2021 were largely a mixture of known graves whose markers had rotted or been removed, and anomalies found by ground-penetrating radar that have not been archaeologically confirmed as graves.

“You endorsed what turned out to be that false accusation,” Dubner told Trudeau.

But Dubner didn’t pursue the question any further after Trudeau responded with a brief history of Indian Residential Schools and said “there’s a lot of work we’re actually trying to do to identify those remains.”

He decries framing opposing views as illegitimate (while emphasizing that his own defeat would destroy Canada)

At the end of several minutes of describing his Conservative opponents as threats to the basic fabric of the country, Trudeau suddenly switched gears to decry a toxic political environment in which citizens can no longer tolerate being governed by someone with opposing views.

Speaking to Vox, the prime minister said that voters in both Canada and the U.S. had tragically lost touch with a time when they could be comfortable under the rule of a politician they hadn’t personally supported. Rather, he said they had fallen a “really scary” scenario of “if someone you didn’t support becomes leader, then your life is over and the economy is ruined and there’s an illegitimacy there.”

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Since we’re on the subject, it wasn’t only Poilievre that Trudeau framed as a threat to Canadian identity. In his Freakonomics interview, Trudeau agreed with the interviewer’s suggestion that his predecessor, Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, had been “un-Canadian.”

“It’s an accurate read, it’s just one that we tend to minimize … because we’re polite,” he said, accusing Harper of having pursued an agenda of “far-right incrementalism.”

In the middle of a speech about democracy, he absent-mindedly unplugged his mic

It was in the midst of Trudeau’s “illegitimacy” speech — right when he was starting to blame the whole phenomenon on Russia — that his microphone suddenly cut out.

“Quite frankly, it’s one of those things that our authoritarian opponents or adversaries, from Russia to a whole bunch of different countries, actively encourage —” he said, just before the line went dead.

The culprit? While warning about Russian disinformation destroying Canadian democracy, Trudeau had been absent-mindedly fiddling with the connection on his microphone.

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“That was totally my fault, I was fiddling with the power cord but it’s also the connection cord. Totally my bad on that,” he said once the connection was restored.

IN OTHER NEWS

Last week, Honda became the latest foreign corporation to expand their Canadian EV operations provided that taxpayers cover almost all of it upfront. Like all the previous times this has happened (Stellantis, Volkswagen, Northvolt), Honda will be getting $5 billion in subsidies and tax credits from the Ontario and federal governments. And just to put that in context; $5 billion is one-quarter of the $19.4 billion in revenue that the Trudeau government’s controversial new hike to the capital gains tax is expected to bring in over the next five years.

It was a big weekend for terror supporters in Canada. Anti-Israel demonstrations in Montreal and Vancouver featured some of the most brazen and explicit celebrations of the October 7 massacres yet seen. And Khalsa Day celebration in Ottawa featured a chant of “Long live Khalistan” – a reference to a Sikh separatist movement linked to Canadian extremist groups considered terrorist threats by the Indian government. Notably, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was at that Khalsa Day celebration, for which he was officially reprimanded by the Government of India.

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