To be this incompetent is mind-numbing. To be this inept requires stratospheric levels of stupidity
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Welcome to Canada everybody, now recognized nationally and internationally as Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Not content with inviting a Nazi to Parliament last week, the Liberals want to expunge the embarrassment from the official record, presumably on the basis that if you can’t rewrite history, then just delete it.
Government House Leader Karina Gould asked members of the House of Commons Monday to “collectively work together to strike the recognition” of Yaroslav Hunka from Hansard, the official record of what goes on in Parliament.
Gould did not explain how deleting the record would stop the embarrassing headlines from around the world, or assuage the justified anger of Jews and Poles whose families were slaughtered in their thousands by the 14th Waffen-SS Division, of which Hunka was a member.
The Liberals, it would appear, want to embrace the policies of Joe Stalin while acting like Joey the Clown.
The Speaker of the House, Liberal Anthony Rota, who invited Hunka, a constituent, to Parliament, apologized twice. He appeared saddened and appalled at his mistake. But the damage was too great, too egregious, to be repaired by an apology. He had to step down, for the integrity of Canada and his own honour.
But there is something deeply unsettling and troubling about this whole terrible, awful farce.
How was it even possible for Rota to laud Hunka as a Ukrainian and Canadian “hero” who fought against the Russians in the Second World War?
A simple matter, perhaps, of Russians bad, Ukrainians good?
Except, of course, in the Second World War the Russians were fighting with allies such as Canada. Russia lost almost 30 million people in the war, the most of any nation.
So, Russians good, Ukrainians bad?
Except, of course, Stalin was a monster in human form, a tyrant to his own people and a hell of a lot worse to others, like the Ukrainians, a nation he tried to starve to death. And now Vladimir Putin launches an unjustified war against Ukraine.
That’s the problem with history; it’s complicated, sometimes ugly, often inconvenient, but always worth preserving — without it we would never really know how we got here or where we want to go.
But somebody — anybody — Rota, the Parliamentary Protective Service, the office of the minister for public safety, even the Prime Minister’s Office overseeing the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should have been able to figure out that the gentleman from the purported 1st Ukrainian Division was unworthy of a standing ovation by all parliamentarians.
To be this incompetent is mind-numbing. To be this inept requires stratospheric levels of stupidity. But just as the Trudeau government reaches peak theatre of the absurd, Gould suggests we forget all about the issue, delete the record and not mention it again, even pleading with the Opposition “not to politicize this issue.”
“Don’t mention the war,” said a concussed Basil Fawlty as he entertained a group of Germans in the classic comedy Fawlty Towers.
And thus does life imitate art with “Don’t mention the Nazi” becoming official Liberal policy.
But nobody’s laughing, how could they? Certainly not Jews and Poles, definitely not members of Parliament who found themselves applauding a Nazi unaware of his history; not Zelenskyy, who will have to push back against the Russian narrative that Ukrainians are all Nazis; not the headline writers around the world pointing a finger at Canada, and not Rota.
Embarrassing your party is one thing, embarrassing parliamentarians, your country and another country in front of the president of that country an entirely different matter. And Rota knew it, which is why he stepped down. But not before his colleagues were throwing him under the bus.
“The Speaker has acknowledged his mistake and has apologized,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters when he was chased down on Monday.
On Tuesday, Gould and Mélanie Joly, the foreign affairs minister, joined the NDP and the Bloc in calling for Rota to quit.
Trudeau cannot escape responsibility here. As the prime minister he has a duty to stand before Parliament and explain how this happened and why, and to apologize to Canadians and Zelenskyy for what happened.
He obviously wants to avoid that. Hard on the heels of the India debacle, he is desperate not to be associated with another train wreck. And so Rota became the fall guy.
But it’s not just Rota who should go, it’s the whole sorry Liberal lot of them. The Trudeau government’s best before date has long since expired. Now they only govern at the whim of Jagmeet Singh, the Rolex-bejewelled hypocrite who has betrayed the ethics and morals of the NDP for a mess of pottage and a taste of power.
If only Singh could examine his $2,000 bespoke suits — fashioned in the slim British style according to Toronto Life — maybe he could find the moral fibre he is so sadly lacking, do the right thing and withdraw his support from the Trudeau circus.
But Singh lacks the integrity, and Trudeau is too addicted to power: the Odd Couple writ large.
So here we are in Cloud Cuckoo Land, the laughingstock of the world.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/thanks-to-the-liberals-canada-is-now-the-joke-heard-around-the-world
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