The Trudeau government is pushing the narrative that white nationalism is a dire threat to Canada and the world. According to Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland, “Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, ‘incels,’ nativists and radical anti-globalists who resort to violent acts are a threat to the stability of my country and countries around the world.” The prime minister and other cabinet ministers have echoed similar messages over the past month.
It’s a dangerous pattern this government has displayed in playing identity politics. The Liberals are singling out and magnifying the infinitesimal minority of “white” Canadians who are extremists, all while ignoring or even covering up the extremism coming from minority groups, such as removing “Sikh extremism” from a government report on terrorism.
Instead of condemning extremism from all sides, the Trudeau government has decided to exploit and overstate the threat of white nationalism as a scapegoat to distract from its own failures in power, and to link these fringe groups to the Conservative Party of Canada and its leader Andrew Scheer. It’s a desperate attempt from a government struggling in the polls to try and change the channel. (“We might not have been great, and might even look pretty bad, but the other major party is full of neo-Nazis!”)
The Trudeau government has racked up consecutive large deficits over the past few years, adding tens of billions of dollars in national debt with no end in sight for the borrowing to stop. Yet, despite blowing billions, as much as his government claims that Canadians are better off under his leadership, many aren’t.
The real winners under a Trudeau government have been large corporations raking in massive amounts of money Trudeau has poured generously out of the public coffers. Most recently, it was revealed the Liberal government gave billionaire Galen Weston’s Loblaw $12 million for energy-efficient fridges. As galling as this example is for average, struggling Canadians to swallow, it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corporate welfare (i.e. crony capitalism) in this country.
For example, Bombardier fights to conceal the substantial money it gets from the federal government. Trudeau’s $35-billion Infrastructure Bank looks like it will only take this grotesque graft of taxpayers to new heights. Meanwhile, as some billionaires and major corporations have done very well under Trudeau, his government cracked down on small businesses — the little guy — as his government acted like this was going after the very rich. Sure, some wealthy people fall into this bracket, but overall the uber wealthy and major corporations went unscathed.
Even though the Liberal government is grossly overstating the problem of white nationalism in Canada, it’s definitely a problem, especially with the internet being a powerful tool for evil people to find and radicalize disaffected male youth. If the Liberals were seriously concerned about combating white supremacist extremism — and extremism more generally — they would be focusing on ensuring young men in Canada can find good jobs. Instead, the government has only cared to look at where women are underrepresented in some professional fields, completely ignoring that some male-dominated industries, which women don’t tend to want to pursue (e.g. longer hours, dangerous work) have been hit hard in recent years.
To not only ignore that young men on average are not doing as well (higher suicide rates, lower completion of post-secondary education, vast majority of workplace fatalities), but to also continue to push for gender quotas for women in some professional fields (while ignoring areas where women dominate, like public sector employment), the Liberal government is setting the kindling for a much larger fire to rage.
Often the main reason extremism and tribal violence occurs within a country is because a government blames one group of people for the problems that it created on its own through gross mismanagement and corruption, which leaves the masses destitute and angry. If white nationalism and extremism in general rise in Canada, it will be of the Trudeau government’s own making.
