This is a summer special edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.
Way back when Joe Biden was still trying to get re-elected as president, the Liberal Party of Canada strategy of threatening voters with the notion that a change in U.S. government would bring about Maple MAGA was just old and tired. But now that America is in the throes of Kamalamentum—and the vibe has shifted towards joy, freedom, and laughing about JD Vance having sexual intercourse with a couch? Justin Trudeau is now looking more fragile and confused than Biden ever was.
Let us take the full measure of this sudden vibe shift, away from Donald Trump: The Survivor Who Had Just Been Literally Shot vs. Joe Biden: The Barely Animated Corpse, to a Democratic Party that has finally dropped the shrill obsessions with disinformation, cancellation, and violent liberation. Kamala Harris is instead coasting free and easy as the imminent nominee, unburdened by her campaign disasters that have been, and telling protestors who would make her into “Holocaust Harris” to be quiet because she’s speaking.
She turned down Josh Shapiro—the loudly and proudly Jewish governor of swing state Pennsylvania—in favour of Tim Walz, the avuncular Muppet from Minneapolis. And if she’s worried about Jews migrating to Trump as a result, she’s not showing it. It’s OK to be a white… person for Kamala, that is, and as shown by former governor of Minnesota and Kamala-endorser, wrestling legend Jesse “The Body” Ventura, it’s even OK to believe in non-harmful conspiracy theories again!
Now, you would assume that our Liberals would take their cue from the Democrats (as they often do) considering it was just a month ago that Trudeau was inviting unflattering comparisons with the unlamented Biden as leaders stubbornly hanging on past their expiry dates. But just like I told you last time after the Liberal byelection loss in midtown Toronto, the deification of Trudeau was a dumb idea in 2015, and it’s a really dumb idea now—and so was assuming that the U.S.A. had really, truly, honestly this time entered its final decline into senility.
Is the Kamala-inspired ‘Brat Summer‘ strategy going to pay off, or is it a dead cat bounce? No one seems less interested in finding out than the Liberals, who have lamely and unoriginally appropriated the Walz-ian epithet of “weird” to describe Pierre Poilievre and the voters who might be leaning towards him.
In fact, not only has Poilievre beaten the Liberals to this particular punch by pre-emptively labelling the Prime Minister as “wacko” in the House of Commons back in April, but Trudeau and his front bench have had more than their share of deeply weird moments themselves.
How easy would it be to whip up a video of Chrystia Freeland’s greatest hits and misses behind the podium, or Health Minister Mark Holland’s bizarre statement about the regressiveness of the turn-of-the-century classic teen cheerleading movie Bring It On? To say nothing of Trudeau’s personal tendencies with respect to clothing choices, other people’s personal space, and uh, let’s say, fondness for full-face makeup?
But perhaps the most Biden-esque aspect of Trudeau’s regime is the way they ignore the obvious looming problems in favour of catnip for their own dwindling faithful.
The most current example is to cheerlead every medal won by our athletes in Paris for two weeks as some validation of the sunny ways approach and deride the Conservatives for insufficient commitment to Team Canada by not noting their collective Olympic accomplishments until the end.
By contrast, there appears to be no space for Liberals publicly responding to, say, the Montreal Pride parade being interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters while the upcoming parade in Ottawa has all but officially stated Zionists aren’t welcome, or the government’s hand-picked antisemitism czar deigning to blame changing demographics for the rise in Jew-hatred, or even Kamala’s continued personal connection to her Westmount High School years in Montreal through her Jewish BFF Wanda Kagan.
Rest assured, the more the Liberals try to control our national vibe, the more it’s going to shift away from them.
Josh Lieblein can be reached at [email protected] for your response to Doorstep Postings.
