By Barry Weisleder
Should Justin Trudeau resign because he dressed up in blackface and brownface at age 29, when he was a teacher, and earlier, for mocking people of colour and not apologizing for it — until Time magazine exposed him last week?
Well, consider this.
Should Justin have resigned when he amended the law to offer corrupt corporations a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, and leaned on his former Attorney General to let SNC Lavalin off the hook, and then booted her when she refused?
Should Justin have resigned when he spent billions of dollars to buy a leaky pipeline, and pledged to double-track it, against the wishes of Indigenous people whose unceded lands the line traverses?
Should he resign because his policies, including the carbon tax, don’t touch the monopoly power of huge energy corporations, and make a tragic mockery of the modest goals of the Paris Climate Accord?
Should he resign because he blatantly broke his promise that the 2015 federal election would be last ‘first-past-the-post’ vote, to be replaced by a more democratic system of proportional representation?
Should he resign because social inequality has grown, and precarious employment has surged, with no action by his government to make certain that big corporations, giant banks and the super-rich pay significantly more taxes?
Should he resign because he broke the postal workers’ strike in 2018, still hasn’t paid federal public service workers what they are owed, has done nothing to raise the federal minimum hourly wage, or to implement a long-promised national childcare system, or to stop the gouging of consumers by Big Pharma and Big Telecom?
Should he resign because he increased the budget for the Canadian military by 70 per cent, and condones the sale of highly destructive weapons to the authoritarian, misogynist regime in Saudi Arabian, which uses said weapons to perpetrate genocide in Yemen and repression at home?
Should Justin resign because he is waging a one-sided economic war against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, and because Ottawa is a founding member of the Lima Group (which includes repressive, anti-democratic states like Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras) that seek to starve Venezuelans and overthrow their constitutional government? Or because Justin is a prime ally of the Zionist apartheid state and the Hindu chauvinist regime of Narendra Modi in India?
I’d say it was time for Justin Trudeau to resign a long time ago.
But we should be very clear that it is the rotten capitalist system that must go, and not just the pretentious Trudeau.