Watching Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announce that he was quitting on a chilly Monday morning in Ottawa, I was reminded of the moment when battered prize fighter, Roberto Duran, raised his hands in a boxing ring and said: “No mas [No more].”
It was a merciful and predictable denouement to an unexpected political career that had begun with promise and expectations and has ended engulfed by rejection and recriminations.
“I’m a fighter,” the soon-to-be-ex-prime minister said.
Clearly, the fight had drained out of Trudeau after some of his closest allies in cabinet abandoned him, and the party that once celebrated his youthful exuberance now considered the Liberal boy wonder a loser and a liability.
Faithful readers know of my longstanding antipathy and, at times, disgust of a prime minister who struck me, from the first, as a dauphin whose hollow acts of performative nonsense were a trite substitute for conviction and intelligence.
But much of the international press was smitten by Trudeau’s craven persona and empty antics, heralding him as a shining antidote to United States President-elect Donald Trump’s politics of anger and grievance.
Trudeau was a “progressive” fraud. Rather than mounting a sustained and determined challenge to the status quo, he devoted his almost 10 years as prime minister to defending it at home and abroad.
He was adept at making practised speeches about the urgent need to bridge the chasm between rich and poor and then not doing anything tangible about it.
Trudeau and parochial company only agreed to pass legislation making universal, affordable day and dental care available to struggling Canadian families as part of a deal with the New Democratic Party to keep his minority government afloat – such was the Liberal Party’s calculated commitment to fairness and equity.
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