Was It Something He Said and Did?

Oh, it always is!:

Saying he never forced anyone to get vaccinated 

In an April talk at the University of Toronto, Trudeau said he never forced anyone to get a COVID-19 vaccine. “While not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure that all the incentives and all of the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated,” he told the crowd. 

The claim is technically correct in that Trudeau never personally held someone down and jabbed a syringe into them. But it fails on many of the conventional definitions of “force.”  

By pandemic’s end, unvaccinated status was sufficient to get you fired from a federally regulated industry, barred from most forms of transportation and severely restricted in your ability to exit and re-enter the country. 

Saying he never condemned “parental rights” protesters as bigots

This one could also skate through on the slimmest of technicalities. On Sept. 20 Canada’s single most high-profile political happening was the 1 Million March 4 Children. Conceived by Muslim activists, it was intended to protest against “sexual orientation and gender identity” in public school curricula – and in particular, the widespread school policy of accommodating the social transition of minors by allowing them to adopt a new name and pronouns without informing their parents. 

Trudeau issued his “we strongly condemn this hate” statement amidst a flurry of other statements from federal and provincial politicians targeting the march – but he didn’t technically name the 1 Million March 4 Children.

Thus, with Trudeau now saying that he “never suggested” the marchers were filled with hate, the claim holds only under the very specific circumstances that the prime minister sent out a generic anti-transphobia statement aimed at nobody in particular that just happened to coincide with a nationwide Muslim-led demonstration against gender identity curricula in schools. 

Saying the Globe and Mail made up the SNC-Lavalin Affair 

“The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false,” said Trudeau in Feb 2019, just hours after the Globe and Mail had published the first details of what would come to be known as the SNC-Lavalin Affair.

The story in question alleged that Trudeau had “directed” his justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to defer prosecution of international bribery charges against the Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin. And according to Trudeau, it had simply never happened. “Neither the current nor the previous attorney general was ever directed by me, or by anyone in my office, to take a decision in this matter,” he said in his initial reaction to the story.

In the months-long denouement that followed, Wilson-Raybould would proffer testimony (and even write a book) alleging quite the opposite. “For a period of approximately four months … I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” she told the House of Commons justice committee just three weeks after Trudeau’s “the allegations … are false” comment. A later investigation by ethics commissioner Mario Dion would determine that Trudeau’s action in the affair constituted a violation of the Conflict of Interest Act.

Claiming police asked for the Emergencies Act to be invoked 

Shortly after the Emergencies Act was invoked in early 2022 to clear entrenched Freedom Convoy blockades in Ottawa, Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons to say that he’d done it primarily because police had been asking for it. “We have heard from the commissioner of the RCMP, police chiefs, experts and political leadership that it was essential to the police response, and that it offered precision and clarity as they did their important work,” he said on March 1, 2022. 

One of the first major discoveries of the Emergencies Act Inquiry, however, was that no police force had asked for the Emergencies Act. This is particularly true of then RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, the only specific individual named in Trudeau’s House of Commons statement. 

Correspondence tabled before the commission would find that Lucki had raised doubts about the act being invoked, saying that law enforcement hadn’t yet expended “all available tools” in clearing the blockades. 

Saying he’d never been told about Michael Chong’s family being harassed by China 

In May, an unnamed source within CSIS leaked to the Globe and Mail that, two years prior, they had uncovered information indicating that Conservative MP Michael Chong appeared to be the focus of targeted harassment by the People’s Republic of China. Despite the CSIS source saying that they’d compiled these findings into a report, so little was done about it that nobody had even bothered to tell Chong.    

Trudeau’s immediate reaction was that he hadn’t heard about the Chong allegations because CSIS had never told him. The intelligence agency “made the determination that it wasn’t something that needed to be raised to a higher level because it wasn’t a significant enough concern,” Trudeau told a scrum of reporters.

But it took mere hours until this account was contradicted by Trudeau’s own national security adviser, Jody Thomas. In a phone call, Thomas told Chong that there was indeed a CSIS report about him written in July, 2021, and that it had been sent not only to her office, but also several cabinet offices and the Privy Council Office – which works directly with the prime minister.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he never suggested that individuals concerned about their rights as parents were hateful when he issued a statement in response to the thousands who attended recent protests about "gender ideology" in schools.

 

Yes, now, about that:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Muslim parents who object to their children being taught about gender identity issues in schools are being fed “misinformation and disinformation” by “the American right-wing” and the “far right.”

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Easter weekend vacation in Montana cost taxpayers nearly a quarter of a million dollars, CBC News has learned — far more than the sum reported to Parliament.

The price tag for the April 6-10 trip comes to more than $228,839, once the costs carried by the Canadian Armed Forces, the Privy Council Office and the RCMP are included.

That sum does not include the regular salaries of the RCMP officers tasked with protecting the prime minister, the Royal Canadian Air Force aircrew or the Privy Council official who normally accompanies the prime minister with the equipment needed to communicate securely.

That price tag is far higher than the figure the government reported to Parliament two weeks ago. In answer to a question placed on the order paper by Conservative MP Luc Berthold, the government disclosed $23,846 in spending on the trip by the Canadian Armed Forces and the Privy Council.

That lower figure did not include the $204,993 the RCMP spent on overtime and costs such as accommodations, meals, incidentals and travel associated with Trudeau's holiday. 

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“If Trudeau skipped just one of these vacations and instead stayed at his taxpayer-funded cottage at Harrington Lake, then he’d save taxpayers what most people make over a couple of years,” he said. “It’s not lost on Canadians that when we’re struggling, we’re still being billed six figures every time Trudeau goes on vacation. Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to pay so much money every time a prime minister goes on vacation.”

The Trudeaus’ three vacations this year — New Year’s in Jamaica, skiing in Montana and the August Tofino trip — have cost taxpayers around $678,000, Terrazzano said. “And there’s still three months left in the year.”

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The high costs — both financial and political — of the Trudeau family vacations are common topics of discussion in Ottawa.

The PM’s trip to Jamaica over New Year’s cost taxpayers nearly $160,000, the National Post reported in March. That trip incurred $115,526 in security costs via the family’s RCMP protection detail, $29,951.92 in transportation and crew costs by the Department of National Defence (DND,) and $13,588.99 by the Privy Council Office.

While in Jamaica, the Trudeaus stayed at an estate owned by an old family friend of the Trudeaus, with ties dating back to the 1970s. Staffers and crew members accompanying the family were lodged at a nearby all-inclusive resort.

In 2016, a family vacation at the Aga Khan’s private island in the Bahamas triggered an ethics investigation, finding that Trudeau had breached conflict of interest rules. That trip cost taxpayers $215,000.

During a 2019 spring break vacation in Florida, Trudeau was criticized for using a government Challenger business jet to quietly fly back to Ottawa for in-person meetings. He returned to Florida the next day.

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In August 2022, the Trudeaus embarked on a two-week trip to Costa Rica, staying at the same resort the family used during their 2019 Christmas vacation, one that cost taxpayers $200,000.

The last time the Trudeaus were in Tofino was September 2021, when the prime minister left Ottawa to spend Canada’s first Truth and Reconciliation Day on vacation — despite his official itinerary listing him attending private meetings in Ottawa.

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HA! Governance is funny!:

When Fergus called upon Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to speak, as is the role of the Speaker, he said the “honourable prime minister,” speaking in French. With a wink, Trudeau responded with “the right honourable,” while winking at Fergus and roguishly sticking out his tongue at Fergus.

Fergus is a Liberal MP, who also served as parliamentary secretary to Trudeau.