Rabble — There’s something about Justin Trudeau and his PR-spinning Liberal Team that reminds me of the Tennessee Williams character Harvey “Big Daddy” Pollitt from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Pollitt famously uttered the line:
What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odour of mendacity in this room?… There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odour of mendacity… You can smell it. It smells like death.
Mendacity, for those without instant dictionary access, is a code word for behaviour that is disingenuous, two-faced, deceitful, hypocritical. In other words, a term that more and more Canadians will soon be applying to Mr. Trudeau, whose PR perfume will not be able to cover up the mess he and his team are making in Ottawa much longer.
Case in point is a disingenuous crew who call themselves feminists and tout their gay pride credentials while arming misogyny and homophobic violence in Saudi Arabia, where members of the LGBTQ community face execution by a regime bolstered by $15 billion in Trudeau-approved weaponry. Or perhaps there’s the “we love the environment and Indigenous folks” meme, symbolized by sending lots of Canadians to the Paris climate conference while continuing to do their best to support new pipelines and tar sands expansion, and refusing to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People nor to properly meet the most basic of education funding…