Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau really a bot? Yes, it’s a ridiculous question on the surface, but he chronically acts like a robot endowed with artificial intelligence – though not very much of it – who spits out the same talking points no matter how waist deep he is mired in scandal and mendacity.
Trudeau clearly knew that Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka was going to be a featured attraction during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech to Canada’s Parliament. He had to know.
Despite House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota’s willingness to take a bullet for Trudeau and insist the decision to invite Hunka was “entirely” his own, this rings as hollow as anything that emerges from the Trudeau government. Nonetheless, Rota did his best.
"I wish to make clear that no one, including fellow parliamentarians and the Ukraine delegation, was aware of my intention or of my remarks before I delivered them," he added. "This initiative was entirely my own, the individual in question being from my riding and having been brought to my attention."
Rota resigned at the beginning of Question Period Tuesday. It was good riddance and inevitable, as much of the Liberal caucus wanted him gone as a sacrificial offering for their party’s sins.
Rota’s willingness to take the fall really impressed one mainstay of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, legacy media columnist Andew Coyne, who declared “That’s what taking responsibility looks like.” I responded to him on X: “And that’s what being a government apologist looks like.”
Rota’s most visceral error – one that can only be accounted for through gross ignorance or outright imbecility – is for not knowing that any Ukrainian who was “fighting the Russians” from 1941-45 was also fighting Canada and the United States – because we were all allies with Russia at that time. It was Nazi Germany that was locked in a titanic, life and death struggle with the Soviet Union, where Hitler had 80 percent of his military forces fighting.
And Rota didn’t know that? For this reason and for inviting and celebrating Hunka, Rota needed to resign.
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has documented how Trudeau was fully aware that Hunka would be making an appearance and that Rota would be introducing him as a “Ukrainian and Canadian hero.”
Doesn’t that just make you grimace.
But Trudeau has decided not to apologize, not to admit this catastrophe was his fault, not to even ask for forgiveness – especially from Canada’s veterans who really are heroes.
Instead, Trudeau told Canadians that if you keep talking about his stupidity you are guilty of promoting – you guessed it – Russian disinformation.
"I think it's going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda," Trudeau said, "Russian disinformation and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine, as we did last week, with announcing further measures to stand with Ukraine in Russia's illegal war against it.
Another member of the Canadian Hall of Shame on this file is Government House Leader Karina Gould (Lib-Burlington). Gould just got this coveted position in last summer’s cabinet shuffle, so she’s a rookie but she’s already learned how to bury bad news like a good Trudeau Liberal.
Gould had the gall to seek unanimous consent of the House to amend the historical record so that all mention of Hunka’s presence, the Speaker’s adulation of him and the standing ovation that the former Nazi received from the house would be stricken from Parliament’s official historical record.
Thankfully the Conservatives did not want to give their consent and pushed back.
Can you imagine? Can you have a more literally Orwellian moment in any government, whether it be supposedly democratic or a dictatorship? Gould actually wanted to rewrite the past – this is precisely what Winston, the lead character in George Orwell’s 1984 actually does for employment as a member of the Outer Party that rules the Big Brother state of Oceania.
Although Poilievre was quick to expose Trudeau’s prevarications and to demand that the prime minister take responsibility for his actions, the official opposition leader wants Trudeau to apologize to Zelenskyy for putting him in this embarrassing position.
But being around Nazis is nothing new or strange for Zelenskyy, who supports the neo-Nazi Azov battalion that uses the symbolism and mythology of the Waffen-SS. Homicidal anti-Semitism was a strong characteristic of Ukraine when the Nazis invaded in 1941 and masses of Ukrainians supported the Germans. Many of these actively participated in Nazi’s Final Solution of the Jewish Questiion, otherwise known as genocide. The fascination with Nazism remains a poltical dynamic in Ukraine today.
Poilievre is way off base. He and the entire Conservative caucus have been sucked into Trudeau’s war hysteria and are unapologetic supporters of Zelenskyy – a corrupt clown dressed in an army costume – and diehard advocates of Ukraine miraculously winning the war against Russia.
Poilievre even attended Trudeau’s “solidarity with Ukraine” rally in Toronto on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Poilievre has done no more research on the issue than Trudeau and isn’t mentioning that the war did not begin when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine but when Ukraine sent its military into the Donbass region in 2014 to subjugate the Russian population there. He won’t talk about how aid to Ukraine is being siphoned off by its corrupt government nor about how Canada cannot afford to dole out billions in military assistance to Ukraine when our own military is chronically underfunded.
Neither Poilievre nor Trudeau seem to have the vaguest notion that NATO should not have expanded ever eastward after the end of the Cold War; that Ukraine should not be added to the ridiculously long membership list; that NATO is pushing the world towards a nuclear cataclysm with Russia; and that the war in Ukraine must be resolved through peace negotiations, not some mythical Ukrainian victory “no matter how long it takes.”
So, as bad as it is to celebrate a former Nazi soldier in the Canadian Parliament, a nuclear war would be even worse. And unfortunately, neither Trudeau nor his obvious successor seem to understand that.
