Poilievre promised to "make Canada the freest country in the world". What does freedom mean to him?
Canada will need to stand by our NATO allies, and count on allies to stand with us. Poilievre's rush to congratulate Trump was foolhardy and looks worse with each utterance from the White House.
If Putin or Xi removed Maduro and said they would be running Venezuela for a while and selling Venezuela’s oil to make profits from it, would you celebrate this as a great step for freedom?
Of course not.
Which begs the question, why did Pierre Poilievre skip quickly past some fairly obvious questions, to declare that Trump doing this was a cause for celebration and appreciation for the US President.
The origins of the term “fog of war” are a subject of debate, but the concept (if not the exact wording) is generally attributed to an unfinished book written about 200 years ago, by Carl von Clausewitz. The common usage today is as a warning against interpreting events too quickly, with incomplete information.
As political leaders around the world observed and gathered information about what exactly the US was doing in Venezuela, Canada’s Official Opposition Leader decided he'd seen enough, pretty early in the day.
At about 930 Eastern time, Poilievre congratulated Trump on removing Maduro, said he should spend the rest of his life in prison, and declared who should take office in Venezuela. He signed off with “Down with socialism. Long live freedom.”
The whole statement was premature and foolhardy.
If Poilievre thought he was embracing an ally, or even just a stalwart defender of the rights of people to self determine, Trump and his fellow travellers made that a laughable proposition, and quickly.
The US President has since made it clear over and over that the move was really about control over Venezuelan oil, and that he was not interested in input on who should run the country. America should run the country, with some cloudy combination of Vance and Rubio holding the reins, at least for the foreseeable future.
The business of restoring democracy?
Somewhere down the priority list …..after installing a regime to control the petroleum reserves.
Far from satiating his hunger for territorial expansion, the events in Venezuela appear to have emboldened Trump. In the last 24 hours he has suggested that he intends some sort of action in Cuba, Greenland and possibly Columbia. Like Poilievre, Trump may dislike socialism, but his interest can hardly be described as a passion for freedom.
Trump has routinely denounced the UN, ignored America’s undertakings as a NATO member, and broke with past practice of consulting with allies to establish a multi-state support for engagement on foreign soil.
In America, Democrats and Congressional Republicans have been sluggish in mounting a response to Trump’s action. In the first hours, it was simply easier to cheer the end of a brutal dictator and “narco-terrorist”.
But as Trump’s ambitions became more elaborate, as one cringeworthy social media post followed another, the scale of the problem Trump has dropped on the table became clearer.
As Canada’s and other national leaders prepare to meet in Paris this week to talk about the Russia-Ukraine situation, they now have to come to grips with what to do, if Trump follows through on his next stated territorial ambitions.
There’s no subtlety to what Trump is doing.
He’s not looking for more narco terrorists. He’s not looking to end socialism. He’s flexing American military muscle, telling the world America will do what it wants, to achieve political and economic ends, “because we can”.
This is a time when the rest of the world needs to try all the harder to find common ground. Unless and until America reasserts an independent role for Congress and the judicial system, the rest of the world is faced with an America we’ve never seen before, run by a politician the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
Canada will need to stand by our NATO allies, and will want to count on our NATO allies to stand with us. A sound strategy doesn’t necessarily start with expressions of outrage - there’s a lot at stake, and people are right to expect a duty of care more than searing social media comments.
But, they would also expect something more carefully considered from a man who believes he should be Canada’s next Prime Minister.
I completely agree Bruce. If we needed yet another demonstration that Poilievre is not up to the job of leading Canada in the current extremely challenging geopolitical context, he just gave it to us. I hope Canadians are paying attention.
Who is advising Poilievre? Anybody? If there is indeed somebody advising him, then that person should be fired immediately.
Why the rush? Just like the terrorist attack at the border that turned out to be a tragic traffic accident, Poilievre is quick to make a statement for the sake of making a statement that he believes reflects poorly on the Liberals (too slow, indecisive, etc.).
But the rest of the CPC is not much better. Michelle Rempel wrote a long essay justifying the actions of the Trump government. Clearly she sees no issue if a the US government would kidnap Carney because some US court indicted him for not doing enough on the Fentanyl trade.
The entire CPC is lost. Either firmly in bed with the Convoy, Dialogon types, or intellectually so weak that they cannot spell out a coherent position.