By Shachi Kurl, President
Feb. 16, 2024 – This week, the federal Conservative leader called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “two-faced phoney” over the latter’s stance on the Middle East. Perhaps someone needs to bring Pierre Poilievre a mirror.
This latest chapter of Trudeau’s contradictory and, at best, garbled approach to the war in Gaza was written when comments from Liberal MP Rob Oliphant (who did not know he was being recorded) were exposed by the CBC, showing the parliamentary secretary for Foreign Affairs deeply conflicted over his own government’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. “My heart hurts,” he is heard to say, expressing to a constituent his unhappiness with the federal response to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its decision to suspend funding to UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for helping refugees.
Neither statement aligns with what Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly or Trudeau have been saying on these issues. Whatever they have been saying has left much of the country, including Oliphant, dissatisfied. (Is Oliphant, who is not a full member of cabinet, subject to cabinet solidarity? Should MPs of all stripes be freer to speak their minds? That’s a column for another day.)
Indeed, when asked in a recent Angus Reid Institute poll about how this government has conducted itself since the events of Oct. 7 , only 20 per cent of Canadians felt the it has been “striking the right balance” in its statements and actions. A little over half (52 per cent) say the Trudeau government has been doing a “bad” or “terrible” job representing Canada internationally; more (57 per cent) say it has botched the job of effectively communicating what, precisely, Canada’s stance has been.
So far, it appears to be one of trying to walk a line on a conflict that has divided Canadians nearly equally.
Read more from the article in the Ottawa Citizen here.
Image Credit – Adam Scotti/PMO