Buh-Bye, Trudeau
A sort-of goodbye, anyway. Trudeau is retiring as head of the party and then once the party figures out who his replacement might be he will resign as PM as well.
Or something like that:
From [a] Canadian friend: He’s effectively shut down government until March and then will slow rollout a leadership race that will push the election out as long as possible.
That means the election likely won’t happen until October.
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Trudeau told reporters he decided to step down now because it’s become clear that he would not be leader due to internal party conflicts that he cannot be the one to carry the liberal standard into the next election.
And of course it’s all-important to the left that conservatives must be stopped! The consensus is that conservatives under Pierre Poilievre are poised to win the next election.
If it seems to you that Trudeau has been in power forever, that might be because he’s actually been PM for ten years. And if you wonder how long a Canadian PM can serve, the answer is that there are no term limits in Canada. Trudeau has served long enough to have thoroughly worn out his welcome, but he’s not even close to beating the previous Canadian record:
Under this system, William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, holding office for a total of 21 years and 154 days over three non-consecutive terms.
When I read that, I immediately suspected that (the aptly-named) King may have served at roughly the same time as our FDR, during the Depression and WWII. That turns out to have been the case, and he had other similarities to FDR as well:
William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who was the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.[a] King is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. In August 1944, he ordered the displacement of Japanese Canadians out of the British Columbia Interior, mandating that they either resettle east of the Rocky Mountains or face deportation to Japan after the war. He played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state …
There are parallels and trends among Western countries. FDR and King, Reagan and Thatcher, and now – hopefully – Trump and Poilievre.
There was a report that a Canadian PM said, of the Jews on the MS St. Louis–Jewish refugees in 1939–that taking in even one would be too many.
If that is correct and given the date, it would have been Mackenzie King. Given what’s been said about him on other matters, that seems unlikely.
Does anyone have something further on this?
Once Parliament goes back into session, on March 24, Poilievre is likely to call for a vote of no confidence. If the Sikh-led party doesn’t weasel out, that vote might succeed, in which case the election could happen in April. The sooner the better!
@Richard Aubrey:
I believe it was that wonderful Democrat, FDR, who refused that 1939 shipload of Jews fleeing the Nazis, to land in the USA.
Richard Aubrey; Cicero:
Here’s an article about Canada’s treatment of the Jews in general and the ship in particular.
Neo.
Good lord. I had no idea. But many of our betters hate America so much that Canada–so liberal and so forth–is necessarily better in all things. So this didn’t get much ink.
Even today, I can’t imagine a Jew wanting to go to Canada. But that was before I read the article.
Good lord.
There are parallels and trends among Western countries. FDR and King, Reagan and Thatcher, and now – hopefully – Trump and Poilievre.
And not just Poilievre. Milei, Bukele, Meloni, Orban, and maybe at some point Badenoch. Granted some of those are not from major countries, though some might argue Canada isn’t such a major country either, just important to us.
I highly recommend this Jordan Peterson interview of Pierre Poilievre:
https://youtu.be/Dck8eZCpglc?si=_GO0drhGSMoqsdjf
King’s personality was different from Roosevelt’s. He was more of a dour, uncommunicative Scotsman. It didn’t come out at the time, but he was a very eccentric character. He was a spiritualist who participated in seances. King’s grandfather William Lyon Mackenzie led a revolt against the provincial government in the 1830s and tried to get the US to interviene to overthrow it.
Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College, compared the Canadian truckers’ strike to the 1972 truckers’ strike in Chile. Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American. Feb 22,2022.
Dr. Richardson cited a NYT article by Seymour Hersh. C.I.A. Is Linked to Strikes In Chile That Beset Allende.
Unfortunately, Professor Richardson did not bother to include updates and a correction of Hersh’s NYT articles.
Several weeks later, Hersh revealed his source. DOUBT ON U.S. ROLE IN CHILE RECALLED.
Turned out that Hersh did not correctly quote Mr. Cline. Surprise, surprise.
Then the NYT published a correction. News Summary and Index TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1974.
But even this correction finds the NYT fudging. From Nathaniel Davis (US Ambassador to Chile 0971-73), The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende:
The CIA did find out that that there was an unauthorized diversion of $2,800 to the truckers.
From a majority of $8 million to several thousand. Oh well.
Ah, Seymour Hersh. NY Times. Not to be relied upon, ever.