If Donald Trump were a woke Canadian, he’d be Justin Trudeau

Then US President Donald Trump welcomes Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House in 2017.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Donald Trump for the first time five years ago this month. The moment became legendary for many Canadians who relished the sight of our young, charismatic leader imposing his cheery manners on the bumptious American president. “Sunny ways” had been one of Mr. Trudeau’s campaign mantras. The whole scene was peak Trudeau. It wasn’t simply that Mr. Trudeau stood up to American protectionism during trade negotiations. He also projected a genuinely patriotic vision of Canada at a time when Canadians, Europeans and some Americans were eager to applaud leaders who rejected Mr. Trump’s political style.

That’s all changed, as demonstrated by Mr. Trudeau’s shrill response to the Freedom Convoy, the trucker protest against vaccine mandates, which occupied downtown Ottawa until last weekend. The cheeriness has been gone for a while. Over the past few years Mr. Trudeau has attacked his critics in vicious ways, including a 2021 rant in which he linked vaccine scepticism to racism and misogyny. This month he and his Liberal Party colleagues went further, calling protesters right-wing extremists and suggesting they were Nazi sympathisers.

What is most astonishing about Mr. Trudeau’s metamorphosis from upbeat unifier to dour social-justice scold is its speed.

When questioned in Parliament about his decision to declare a nine-day national emergency in response to localised protests, Mr. Trudeau declared that some of his Conservative critics were allied with “people who wave swastikas.” The direct target of his outburst was Melissa Lantsman — a member of Parliament and a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

What is most astonishing about Mr. Trudeau’s metamorphosis from upbeat unifier to dour social-justice scold is its speed. If you read his 2014 memoir, “Common Ground” (on which I worked as an editorial assistant), you’ll find plenty of soaring language about Canada, but nothing about a supposed epidemic of white supremacy and Nazi-inspired hate that he now describes as a major threat.

A key shift occurred three years ago when Mr. Trudeau publicly acceded to the farcical claim that Canada is perpetrating a genocide against indigenous women. Last year he had the Canadian flag lowered for more than five months in response to the discovery of a presumed burial site near a former boarding school for indigenous children. Each passing month seemed to bring new and more flamboyant gestures of contrition.

Mr. Trudeau deserves the scorn he is now receiving — including from principled liberals who understand that invoking emergency powers to silence political enemies sets a terrible precedent. But in fairness, Mr. Trudeau isn’t solely responsible for the climate of hysteria that now suffuses Canadian progressive politics. His rise to power coincided with America’s Great Awokening, and neither Mr. Trudeau nor anyone around him could have predicted how radicalised the social-justice movement would become.

Trump and\ Trudeau attend the NATO summit in 2019.

Canada had its own Great Awokening in 2017, a few months after that famous meeting between Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump. That year marked Canada’s 150th birthday. But instead of joining the national party, many indigenous leaders refused to help celebrate a country created at their ancestors’ expense. The ensuing culture-war eruption was volcanic, with Canadian media (especially the already-quite-woke Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) launching into maudlin spasms of national self-recrimination.

Mr. Trudeau, who had succeeded in politics by presenting himself as both a great patriot and an unimpeachable progressive, couldn’t have it both ways. When Canada’s defining national ideal had been resistance to American laissez-faire capitalism and bellicosity, Canadian patriotism and progressivism went hand-in-hand. But, suddenly, an alliance with progressive true believers required agreeing that Canada is a racist and genocidal hellhole.

When in 2019 Mr. Trudeau was revealed as a hypocrite who’d lectured the world on social justice while hiding evidence of his wearing blackface — he can’t remember how many times he painted himself when young to look like a black person — that only turbocharged his performative approach. The white son of privilege had even more to prove. When George Floyd was killed in 2020, Mr. Trudeau took a knee — though Minneapolis isn’t a Canadian city — making clear that he was beholden not only to the parochial rites of Canadian wokeism but also to the American variant.

I didn’t support the Freedom Convoy because I didn’t agree with the protesters’ demands, and I was put off by some of the genuinely radical elements among the original organisers. But as the days passed, I became far more alarmed by the hyperbolic response from Mr. Trudeau and his allies — especially his wholly unnecessary invocation of the Emergencies Act. (Thankfully, Mr. Trudeau abruptly revoked Canada’s emergency status on Wednesday, only two days after ordering his caucus to vote for it, when signs emerged that its implementation might be blocked by the usually quiescent Senate.)

“We become what we hate,” goes the old expression. Even so, Mr. Trudeau’s transformation is a shocking one. In 2017, when I watched him take the stage in Washington, I’d never have believed anyone who told me that, in only five years, the two men shaking hands would be practising the same divisive style of politics.

– The Wall Street Journal