Flashback: The Trudeau family's love of tyrants
Political blind spots are inevitable when you have warm thoughts for oppressors
By Mark Milke
February 28, 2018
Back in the summer of 2006, Pierre Trudeau’s youngest son, Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau wrote a fawning happy 80th birthday column in the Toronto Star in praise of then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The piece included tributes such as how the revolutionary leader was a “great adventurer…a great scientific mind,” someone whose “intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found. ”
Castro, Trudeau claimed, was “an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets, on everything.” Alexandre pressed upon his readers to analyze Castro in “psychoanalytical terms”, to think of Cubans as children and Castro their father. Trudeau then fondly recalled his late brother, Michel, who when they were young kids complained to their mother that he had fewer friends than his brothers. Margaret Trudeau replied that unlike his brothers, Michel “had the greatest friend of all: he had Fidel.”
Alexandre Trudeau’s brother—the prime minister, and his weird, fantasy belief that another autocracy, China, is somehow efficient on economic and environmental matters. That belief helps explain his relentless pursuit of a free trade deal with a country whose economic model, while improving, is best described as crony capitalism and whose environmental practices would never be tolerated by citizens in a liberal democracy.
Having a soft spot for tyrants prompts multiple blind spots, whether on democracy, the economy or, more recently, on the environment. All have been on display in the Trudeau family’s ongoing infatuation with tyrannies and autocracies. in the comments from Alexandre, Margaret and Justin Trudeau. We see evidence of the Trudeau family’s long love affair with the world’s autocrats and tyrants. But the problem started with Pierre.
Bob Plamondon, author of a 2013 biography of Pierre Trudeau recounts how Trudeau the Elder visited the Soviet Union in 1952 to discuss economics, this accompanied by four Canadian communists. “It was there that he remarked to the wife of U.S. chargé d’affaires that he was a communist and a Catholic and was in Moscow to criticize the U.S. and praise the Soviet Union,” Plamondon writes. As the author recounts, Canadian diplomats thought Trudeau said such things out of “infantile desire to shock”.
Beyond Pierre Trudeau’s own history, and the Alexandre-Justin-Margaret reminiscing about an old family tyrant-friend in a warm weather lockdown communist paradise, the father and son Trudeau approach to China then and now is revealing.
As an example, from economics and the environment, recall Justin Trudeau’s unguarded comments made in 2013, where he expressed “a level of admiration I actually have for China” with his reasoning that “their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest, we need to start investing in solar.’”
Full article:
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-trudeau-familys-love-of-tyrants/
https://archive.is/rYfnW