EDITORIAL – Please, change the channel and give us the old Justin back
Trudeau taking questions at Kamloops town hall. (Image: Mel Rothenburger)
An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.
I’M GETTING SO INCREDIBLY BORED with the soap opera in Ottawa. Day after day, the Conservatives do everything they can to keep this spent series on the air.
Day after day, Justin Trudeau is asked by reporters to say something about what the Conservatives are saying. And he ignores the question, whatever question it happens to be, and assures everyone that Canadians can be confident that their government is protecting the rule of law and the process.
Rule of law. Cover up. Moral authority. Trudeau and Andrew Scheer trade the same words back and forth at every opportunity.
Trudeau flashes that smirky grin. Scheer looks intense and indignant. It’s hard to tell who’s winning or losing.
It’s enough to make you beg for more stories on canola exports.
What happened to Justin Trudeau and sunny ways? What happened to the man who went into a subway station days after being elected prime minister of Canada and took selfies with commuters? The grin was genuine, then.
He said he’d do politics differently. Right now, he’s doing politics just like everybody else, trying not to say the wrong thing or saying nothing at all. It’s the politics of survival and it doesn’t look good on him.
The old Justin is in hiding. Give us back the guy who stood up to those nasty protesters at a town hall in the TRU gymnasium and showed us what political grace under pressure is all about.
Another day, another Liberal-dominated committee refuses to let Jody Wilson-Raybould speak. Just give her the word, Justin. Stop playing the opposition’s game and set her free.
It’s all so incredibly, depressingly dull that I’m tempted to change the channel. Maybe there’s a better plotline on Another World.
Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and newspaper editor. He publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
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Maybe the game of politics just simply gets to both the best of us and also the worst of us.
If politics has changed Justin from a fun-loving guy into what he is now, maybe it’s time to pull the pin and try to go back. Or, the other school of thought is that politic’s ugly world is showing what Justin is really like once the charismatic sheen has been removed.
It’s likely time for him to consider what the future holds for him and his family.
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Should we start jailing “journalists” for spreading amorphous stuff which causes pointless uproar? That wouldn’t be amorphous nor pointless.
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What does one think if one finds out that Cinderella cheated with the glass slipper, and Snow White tyrannized the dwarves? Changes the story, doesn’t it?
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So another day and another apology while out on the election/fundraising tour. Absolutely no reason to be in Ottawa looking out for Canada’s interests with China, dealing with the fiasco in his caucus. It is more important to be out making promises that will not be kept, apologizing for putting his foot In his mouth, spending like a drunken sailor and driving the debt into infinity. It is all about staying in power, nothing else matters. Having to subsidize steel and aluminum companies because of Trump’s tariffs but still agreeing to a trade deal with him. The talking point of Canada being a “rule of law country” is wearing thin real quick when your actions show you do not believe that applies to you. It is 31/2 years now and I am still looking for the transparency he promised and doing government differently. One Trudeau in the life of a country was more than enough.
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The old Justin is 100% the same Justin that you say is a different Justin. It’s The Armchair Mayor who has changed. Perhaps Canadians are seeing at last the Emperor in his “sartorial splendour;” ie., no clothes at all.
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