Dear Justin:
What with your wife having left you so recently, I’m not sure how much your handlers are protecting you from information which might upset you.
Six weeks ago, an Abacus poll found that 56% of Canadians want you to resign before the next election. (Even 28% of Liberal supporters polled thought the Party would be better off without you.) Did your handlers tell you?
You should also be aware that your unpopularity with Canadians is not a new phenomena. Even as far back as September of 2021, a majority of Canadians wanted you to resign before the next election, mostly because of what a divisive and polarizing leader you had become.
The bad news doesn’t stop there. The Liberal Party of Canada has always depended heavily on the immigrant vote to win elections. The other constituency that propelled the Liberals from third place into a majority government in 2015 was young voters.
Recent polling data has the Liberal Party of Canada losing the immigrant vote.
That’s unprecedented, but hardly surprising. A lot of Canada’s immigrants came here fleeing one or other repressive regime. Having a Prime Minister who threw in jail those who opposed him, froze their bank accounts, and used the powers of Government to censor and silence those who opposed him - hell, a good chunk of Canada’s immigrant population came here precisely to escape despotic Governments like that.
If your father were still alive, I’m sure Pierre would have advised you that a live-and-let-live philosophy is essential to keeping the peace in a multicultural society.
Yes, it is sometimes necessary for Canada to set clear boundaries on cultural practices which are not permitted. (Honour killings, or female genital mutilation, for example.) But beyond that, Canada should support immigrants in keeping as much of their former culture and values as possible. Your father clearly believed that the law must be used gently and sparingly in a society with diverse beliefs and norms.
The idea that a Liberal Government would impose a radical Woke agenda on all Canadians - I’m sure that would have horrified your father, Justin, not simply for the cultural imperialism it represents, but also as a recipe for political suicide.
I heard you not that long ago lecturing Canadian Muslins had they been misled by watching too much right-wing American propaganda. Talk about a great way to infuriate the entire Muslin community - pretending that Muslims haven’t had conservative sexual and family attitudes of their own for a very long time. (Your father must be spinning in his grave over that one!)
The loss of the youth vote must be seen as the final nail in your political coffin. I suppose we have decades of anti-bullying training in Canada’s schools to thank for that; Canada’s young people can now clearly recognize a bully when they see one.
I haven’t seen any poll results about young voters’ intentions since you announced you were sending another 600 million Canadian taxpayers’ dollars to Ukraine.
Though I’m sure there will still be some young Canadians who will support that move, I suspect the response of most of Canada’s young people will be: Why are you supporting the continued slaughter of the flower of Ukraine’s youth? Haven’t you noticed that millions of young Canadians are having trouble paying the rent and buying groceries? Wouldn’t that money be better spent in Canada?
It is one thing for the Liberal Party to find itself ten points behind the Conservatives in numerous polls. It is quite another when the Liberal Party’s two primary bases of support have abandoned them. That’s a much bigger hole to dig yourself out of.
When a political leader becomes a distinct liability for their party, the selfless thing to do is to resign to limit the damage it will otherwise cause your Party.
I can remember when Brian Mulroney tried to hang on to power for far too long - well beyond the time most Canadians wanted him gone. When Mulroney did finally leave, he did so too late for Kim Campbell to establish a new direction and a new narrative for the Conservative Party of Canada.
If you remember, in the disastrous election that followed in 1993, the Conservatives were reduced to two seats in the House of Commons. It took the Conservative Party of Canada a decade or more to fully recover from that debacle.
Yes, with Jagmeet Singh desperate to stay in Parliament long enough to collect his pension, Justin, you and the Liberal Party can probably cling to power for two more years. But what happens then? If you think voters are unhappy with you and the Liberal Party now, just wait another 24 months. Then you’ll face the same kind of voter rage the Conservatives saw in 1993. Do you really care so little for the welfare of the Liberal Party that you are willing to see that happen?
My experience is that Canadians tend to forgive their former Prime Ministers a great many sins. Resign now and in a few years you’ll be rehabilitated as an elder statesman. But if you stay long enough to preside of the the complete decimation of the Liberal Party of Canada, you can be sure that forgiveness will take ever so much longer, if it ever happens at all.
PS: As I write this, a new war is spreading in the Middle East.
Some are arguing that it seems unlikely that Mossad and US Intelligence didn’t know an attack by Hamas was coming. Rather, the massacre of hundreds of civilians was allowed to happen because of the need for a distraction from America’s epic failure in Ukraine. (It’s also the perfect cover story: the US is forced to abandon Ukraine so that Israel gets enough weapons to defend itself.)
Others are saying that Hamas would never attack Israel so directly unless it knew other allies were waiting in the wings. Already it seems likely that Lebanon will be drawn into the war. If Israel decides to attack Iran - particularly with American support - the whole Middle East could explode.
Some would argue that war in the Middle East serves Russia’s needs by siphoning off weaponry that would otherwise go to Ukraine.
China will also benefit if America stumbles into a war with Iran. The US is already very short of weaponry after giving so much to Ukraine. If the US can be tricked into going to war with Iran, it then most certainly won’t have enough weaponry left to fight China any time soon.
Iran, for its part, would like to drive a wedge between Saudi Arabia and Israel - which the war has already done.
How is peace even going to be possible, when so many of the major players believe that war serves their best interests?
Just saying, he might have hair but he's not good looking.
Non PC, but people need to know this.