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OPINION

Once upon a time there was a youth named Icarus. His father Daedalus was a successful Athenian craftsman who for reasons not important to this story invented wings of feathers and wax so he and his son could fly off an island. Warning Icarus to follow in his path, not too close to the sea lest he fall in yet not too close to the sun lest the wax melt, Daedalus flew off in hopes that his son would follow. There is, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, nothing new under the sun, and Greek mythology has allegories for pretty much everything, including Canadian politics.

Flapping onto the national stage with shirt off and boxing gloves on, his glowing locks and father's name dancing about his head like ethereal sunshine, Justin Trudeau made up in prettiness and pizzazz what he lacked in substance. It worked for a while until it didn't. The galloping gong show of today's Liberal Party is living proof that life is stranger than the weirdest writer's wildest fantasy... not tragicomedy of the Greek variety, but rather a plot line so ridiculously tragic that it makes people snicker in embarrassed disbelief.

The comedy is obvious. Whether it's general arseclownery in foreign lands, wearing silly socks, or inflicting his excruciating selfies on the nation, the least qualified Prime Minister in Canadian history continues to be a source of Saturday night howlers. What Canadian doesn't enjoy watching Trudeau's mumble-mouthed avoidances in the House, a skill he carries into the hallway, the driveway, and anywhere else he opens his chops? His dodgy circumlocutions over his part in the latest cabinet controversy are, as far as entertainment value goes, on a par with Clinton's “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is” or the intellectual meanderings over angels and pins that sprang from Aquinas's Summa Theologica. And once off his script one never knows what might pop out of his mouth, so “Peoplekind” has become an intellectual tongue-twister and watching the economy balance itself an economist's drinking game. His antics have propelled him to questionable fame as a gadfly of climate alarmism, the laughingstock of a subcontinent, and a national embarrassment to Canada.

The tragedy is darker, stewing in its own ironies, glaring with hypocrisy and narcissism. The spectacularly lesser child of a famous father cemented his credentials as a self-professed “feminist” by abruptly expelling two MPs from caucus (Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti), over unwanted sexual advances without much thought. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, Trudeau had long previously wandered into his own behavioural bog with a reporter, an incident he explained away later with the fatherly intonation that “people may experience things differently.” Whatever may have happened between our racey princeling and the reporter in 2000, his otherwise reasonable analysis was noticeably absent in the cases of Andrews and Pacetti, who either stopped when they were asked or were not asked to stop.

The story is much the same on the economy, electoral reform, environmental protection, and gender legislation, with lots of rightspeak, hypocrisy, and selfies, but very little substance. Indeed, the only real success in his original platform is legalized weed, much to the chagrin of junior governments who have to try to clean up the mess.

As everyone knows, Icarus flew too close to the sun, with predictable results. Our Canadian princeling soared high too, losing feathers with each sweep of his insubstantial wings. Although his party has tried to keep him in a closet of late, he can still be glimpsed occasionally in the hallways of Center Block, flapping away in a cloud of feathers, barely cognizant of the fact that he has already fallen with the bone shuddering thud of the Wilson-Raybould affair.

— Scott Anderson comments and analysis from a bluntly conservative point of view.

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