View from Abroad | Understanding Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Hunter Biden

Justin Trudeau should know better by now. At 51 years old, he is a stolidly middle-aged prime minister, and as he wraps up his eighth year in office, he has some real experience on the job. Nonetheless, this September has been a bad month even by Trudeau’s standards. And those standards are shockingly low. Indians are of course aware of his Khalistani fraternisation, his accusations of Indian state terrorism and his applause for Ukrainian Nazis. But there is more. In the United States, Trudeau is more famous for his youthful indiscretions than for his official mistakes. From a biographical perspective, Trudeau’s poor judgment with regard to India is just a continuation of his poor judgment about everything. In 2001, as a 29-year-old high school teacher, Trudeau dressed up as an Arabian prince for a black-tie dinner. That might have been dismissed as mere bad taste—except that Trudeau apparently believed that Arabs are from Africa and accordingly blacked up his face for the event. In the United States, the use of “blackface” is an absolute taboo. Historically, African Americans were excluded from roles on stage and in film and white actors dressed in blackface to mock blacks and act out racist tropes. The news of Trudeau’s appearance in blackface was thus more controversial in the US than in Canada itself. One youthful indiscretion might be explained away or overlooked. But once the damn broke, it emerged that Trudeau had a long history of appearing in blackface. It was apparently his personal party trick. Trudeau actually admitted to the press that he couldn’t remember how many times he had appeared in blackface. That kind of history would be embarrassing enough for a banker or executive. But Trudeau was a high school teacher. Most teachers understand that they are expected to serve as role models for young people and are keenly aware of intense community scrutiny of their public behaviour. But that’s not all. Trudeau is also the son of a prime minister. His father, Pierre Trudeau, was prime minister of Canada from the time Justin was born until his early teens. Justin Trudeau has lived his entire life in or on the margins of top-level national politics. He is, in Indian terms, a dynast. We don’t have all the details of Trudeau’s many lapses of judgment, but we do know some things. Trudeau has admitted to marijuana use—while serving as a member of parliament. More seriously, Trudeau was repeatedly implicated in cash-for-access schemes, trading on his famous name (and later on his own leadership positions) for personal gain. And then there’s Khalistan. Indians are keenly aware of the many controversies surrounding Justin Trudeau’s embrace of Khalistani separatists. This may seem strange to outsiders, but it’s par for the course in Anglosphere politics. In Canada, Khalistan supporters form a single-issue lobbying group that raises money for and campaigns for Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Unlike other members of the Liberal Party’s broad coalition, they don’t particularly care about welfare policy, income taxation, environmental regulation, or gay rights. They care about only one thing: Khalistan. In Trudeau’s much smaller coalition partner, the New Democratic Party, the Khalistani influence is even stronger. In both cases, it works the same way: Sikh supporters of Khalistan get symbolic actions that cost the governing coalition nothing (in economic terms) in exchange for tangible financial and organizational contributions at election time. Like another political son south of the Canadian border, Trudeau has a long history of engaging in questionable behaviour while not seeming to be of the ethical boundaries that politically prominent people are ordinarily expected to observe. This is not to say that Trudeau is any less moral than other politicians. It is to suggest that Trudeau seems not to be aware that politicians are expected to at least pretend to be moral. Thus in 2018 when Trudeau hosted the Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal at a dinner party in Delhi, he seems to have accepted that the tangible benefits to his re-election campaign outweighed the international controversy it would spark. India, after all, accounts for less than 1 per cent of Canada’s exports. Maintaining good relations with India simply isn’t as politically important to Trudeau as maintaining good relations with Canadian Khalistan. The same phenomenon is at work in Trudeau’s bizarre use of parliamentary privilege to accuse India of official involvement in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Trudeau didn’t announce legal charges, or share intelligence, or bring the matter to an international forum. He simply made an informal accusation on the floor of parliament, presumably at the behest of his party’s Khalistani supporters. Any damage to Canada’s international relationships was purely incidental. The key to understanding Justin Trudeau is to realise that he is a not-very-bright, not-very-responsible son of privilege who has made a career of trading on his good looks and family connections. He is perhaps not so different from another son of privilege south of the border, except that Trudeau’s father was more successful—and more principled. Even if direct evidence of serious wrongdoing is hard to come by Justin Trudeau seems to have the transactional morality of a Hunter Biden. The only thing missing is the laptop. The author is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the executive director of the Indian Century Roundtable. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.