The Barbarians At Justin Trudeau's Gates

On the Liberal MP's ill-advised battle over Canada's new citizenship guide.

Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner says that the government’s relentless attack on Justin Trudeau over his fleeting objection to the use of the word “barbaric” to describe honour killings in Canada’s citizenship guide has given us “another glimpse into the soul of what truly is the Harper government.” That soul, according to Gardner, is nasty, hyper-partisan, and generally rotten. While he has no problem with the use of the word “barbaric” himself, Gardner believes the “hot-button” term was deliberately inserted into the guide by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney as bait for some hapless liberal. He has no proof of this of course, it just sounds like something the Conservatives would do.

The Vancouver Sun’s Craig McInnes sums up Trudeau’s misstep neatly: “It was a position that might have found a sympathetic ear in an academic debate, but in a political arena where all sides are looking for an opening to turn the long campaign of attrition into the full frontal assault of an election, black and white are the only safe colours.” In other words, assuming Trudeau has any political instinct (which is not necessarily a safe assumption) it completely abandoned him. Having to explain to voters that you are not ‘soft on murder’ one week before a potential election call is not a good sign.

“Trudeau’s shambolic rhetorical dilemma is a very good illustration of the corner into which committed multiculturalists have painted themselves,” writes the National Post’s Barbara Kay. Her point is that liberals just don’t know how to react when confronted with troubling practices pervasive in other cultures, because their “reflexive political-correctness” forbids them from judging any culture inferior to our own. Perhaps, but it’s not clear to the Newsroom that that’s what Trudeau was doing. “Barbaric” has a very different meaning than “deplorable” or “immoral,” and history is littered with atrocities that have resulted from governments labelling people as barbarians. It’s possible Trudeau was just objecting to the dehumanizing connotations of the word, but why he may have expected that nuance to be understood in the rancorous echo chamber of Canadian politics is beyond us.