There’s a grim irony in seeing Justin Trudeau leave the country to find people still willing to buy his act. But find them he did in the U.S. media capital of New York where flash-frozen spares like Stephen Colbert or the ladies of The View are still re-living the 2016 presidential election.

Could it be that Justin’s real constituency all along has been these voidoids of Wokeness, not Canadians? Apparently so, judging from the cringeworthy interaction between Canada’s defrocked PM and Colbert. Like mammoths in a tar pit, fatuous Trudeau and fawning Colbert thrashed around in their irrelevance, steering clear of what will be a historic electoral drubbing of Mr. Happy Ways. It’s amazing Colbert didn’t hold Trudeau’s hand during the lovefest.

Colbert’s staff might have come up with multiple lines of questioning on why the former GQ squish is now reviled north of the border. Instead the two re-heated 2015 talking points from when Skippy was elected and Hillary was throwing away the 2016 election to Trump.

There were multiple softballs for a smirking Trudeau, but the PM’s entire detachment from reality could be summed up by a healthcare question pitched by Colbert. (Americans love the Canadian healthcare myth the way Kamala loves a suburban lawn). Trudeau was asked to reflect on the U.S. alternative.

“It would be a lot easier if you guys had universal health care,” he riposted. The self-satisfied grin on Trudeau’s face told us he knows he was among friends in the CBS TV studio. Colbert’s audience of midwits slapped their flippers after Trudeau inserted himself in the current American presidential election. As his Papa once said during the October Crisis: “There’s a lot of bleeding hearts around who don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau remarked jauntily. “All I can say is, go on and bleed…”

Anyone with a shred of journalistic integrity might have replied, “This year, Canadian patients faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner. That’s over six months—the longest ever recorded. It’s a slight increase from last year’s median wait—and a 198 percent increase from the 9.3-week median wait that patients faced in 1993, the year that Fraser Institute began tracking wait times. But let’s accept it as received that Colbert and the Kamala left are not given to intellectual rigour.

In his new persona as Michael Scott from The Office, Trudeau is the only guy not in on the joke he’s become while wielding power and teddy bears. (Dunning Kruger Effect states that some people are too stupid to know they’re stupid.) Politics can have that effect on those who take themselves just a little too seriously like (checks notes) Justin Trudeau. But Skippy has this syndrome to the Nth degree.

Trudeau makes a convenient avatar for the entire managerial class that sins greatly but uses its privilege to avoid accountability. Watching him slough off the poor clods he represents as PM, Trudeau is as stand-in for every politician and Blob creature who employed, to use one example, Covid to trample all that’s sacred in society without ever having to say sorry.

Sorry for what? 2023 meta-analysis of 40 high-quality studies shows that, despite the apocalyptic predictions off the elites, COVID death rate in 2020 for people younger than 70 was 0.07%. That’s 1-in-1,500. The death rate from COVID for those aged 0-19 years was 0.0003%. That’s 1-in-333,333. This is not a pandemic.

Still, while Skippy hid in the Rideau cottage, federal and provincial health officials churned out specious daily statistics on “positive cases” as justification to shut drown schools, work places and even the beaches. The social cost of grandparents dying alone and children denied schooling was incalculable. When Trump said the death rate from COVID was lower than 3.4 percent, the media angrily accused him of “misinformation.”

When the initial hysteria abated, bully boy Trudeau turned to vaccines to whip the herd. He removed the civil and financial rights of dissenters, incarcerating them in hotels. His followers actively talked of isolating vaccine deniers to work camps while denying them healthcare. When truckers objected he sent in the police on horseback. Because, as Naomi Klein bragged, events like the covid lockdowns are a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Make Our World More Equitable.

In this theatre of the grotesque Trudeau has become the epitome of the Ugly Canadian. As we wrote in the fall of 2015. “The scold impulse is never far from the Canadian id as we stare balefully south at the Excited States. In Canada it’s not so important that we have things such as single-payer health care and non-gun culture as that Americans don’t have them.

Trudeau represents that most vile class of Canadian, those who leap to print to disparage their nation in front of the world. Citing research (as yet unpublished) on attitudes in the Balkans, French Polynesia and Equatorial Guinea toward Canada, we are told that Canada’s reputation as a noble, compassionate nation is now in tatters. In Boy Trudeau’s Gatling-gun delivery, the government’s refusal to bend to the UN secretary general’s dictates has made us a travishamockery in the league of nations. See if Robert Redford ever comes here again.

This is always a rich vein to mine In Canadian politics. In a land that thinks Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lamenting Canada’s fallen status is considered a political kill shot by the media.” Trudeau embraces the model.

It’s hard to square his unapologetic tough guy with the obsequious Trudeau of the Colbert show. But he knows that as long as there are pandering cretins such as Colbert he doesn’t have to apologize for causing citizens for not taking a for-profit experimental product with manufacturer immunity. His future is assured. Were that Canadians’ futures looked as rosy.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

Most living in Canada would agree that a crumbling infrastructure and healthcare shortages could justify adding bodies to the public rolls. But a deep dive into those jobs extolled by the PM shows an explosion of new positions, not in public works or the military, but in the vanity areas of DEI, gender equality and climate change.

In the tsunami of miserable economic and political news generated by the Trudeau government the past decade, party flacks have always tried to point to job growth in the economy as a sign that they’re doing something right.

But if you look carefully at the numbers of full-time jobs “created”, it soon becomes apparent that most of the highly touted  “new” jobs are public-service positions. At all three levels of government the number of workers in Canada’s public sector has soared in recent years, far outpacing the hiring in the private sector.

For example, the federal public service has grown by 38 per cent since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, according to MEI, a Montreal-based think tank. During the Covid years, nine out of every ten jobs created was in the public service.

Here was Trudeau in 2022 cheering on his aggressive hiring processes, which have also included a similar growth in the use of consultants. “Thanks to your hard work and the hard work of Canadians across the country, Canada’s unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since the start of the pandemic. In fact, more than 154,000 jobs were created last month — and … in the COVID-19 Era, more than one million jobs have been recovered.”

Most living in Canada would agree that a crumbling infrastructure and healthcare shortages could justify adding bodies to the public rolls. But a deep dive into those jobs extolled by the PM shows an explosion of new positions, not in public works or the military, but in the vanity areas of DEI, gender equality and climate change.

With their generous pensions and benefits these new employees are an expensive drag on the public purse. In addition, except for the very top of the pay scale, government salaries are typically higher than those in the public sector. Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland give Canadians the impression that their massive hiring binge— paid for by increasing debt— means a healthy growing economy. But the money that is moved from the private economy to public economies chokes productivity and creates inflation.

As a result, Canada’s GDP is lowest in the leading Western nations while its borrowing now sits at an unsustainable $713 billion. Carrying the debt is expected to cost the federal treasury $60.7 billion in 2028-29, according to the government’s own economic statement.

No wonder economists warn that this growth of government jobs is not sustainable in the long run. “If you look at how the private sector’s trending, it’s sharply decelerating,” Beata Caranci, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank,

As just one example of runaway government hiring, listen to Kareem Allam, former Vancouver city budget chief, who went on Vancouver’s CKNW recently to describe how runaway hiring has affected his city. “We had 1,200 city employees in 2008. We have about 9,000 now. There are 700 people in the city of Vancouver staff that work full-time on climate change. And (yet) our GHG emissions keep going up.”

While Americans are experiencing the same bloating of the civil service, Allam points out that they are more efficient than Canadians. “Dawn Pinnock is the head of the Civil Service in the city of New York. She’s their city manager. And not only is she responsible for being the city manager, she’s also got the same responsibility as (Vancouver’s) Translink, but in New York.

And it’s a city that has thirteen times the population of Greater Vancouver. Dawn makes US$ 240,000 a year. Our CEO of Translink, our CEO of Metro Vancouver, and our city manager combined make $1.4 million. The executive from New York doing the job of essentially three executives here in the lower mainland, and yet making a fraction of what they make here.”

Naturally these salaries have to come from somewhere. That somewhere is tax. “It is unbelievable the amount of money that is pouring into city hall and the lack of accountability we’re seeing around how that money was being spent,” says Allam. “When Gregor Robertson first got elected as mayor in 2003 the city budget was $894 million. It’s going to be well over $2.4 billion this year.

“That’s almost a tripling of our taxes. Is anyone in Vancouver thinking that we’ve gotten a triple in the benefit of services? Are potholes getting better?”

There are some exceptions to the bloating of the public service and its budgets. In Calgary, the multi-billion Green Line transit system has been chewing through hundreds of millions without any progress. The original estimate of track was shrinking with the southeast part of the plan mothballed. Now the unpopular Green Line has been stopped by the provincial UCP government of Danielle Smith.

Assessing the project as a “boondoggle” Transportation minister Devin Dreeshen said, “This is unacceptable and our government is unable to support or provide funding for this revised Green Line Stage 1 scope as presented in the city’s most recent business case… throwing good money after bad is simply not an option for our government.” Calgary’s progressive city council is seeking to find alternatives (they could always build a direct link to the airport) before they’re tossed out of office in the next municipal elections.

Would that Ontario and Toronto governments had paused before creating their Metrolinx Crosstown subway line, the 25-stop, 19-kilometre project. Work began in 2011 and Metrolinx previously announced completion dates of 2020 and 2021. Its budget has now soared to $13 billion with stories emerging of 260 cases of quality control issues still pending at the start if the summer.

One of Pierre Poilievre’s favourite attack lines against the federal Liberals has been getting control of spending, making government live within its means as taxpayers do. No one expects him to slay the dragon as Javier Milie has done in Argentina. But Canadians will be looking to him to at least change the Trudeau Spend, Spend, Spend philosophy before it ruins the nation.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.