Friday, June 02, 2023

Today's News: Throwing mud


I think Poilievre and the CPC brain trust have realized that they're not going to get Trudeau to resign over ancient CSIS briefings about Chinese political donations.
So now the short-pants boys in the Leader of the Opposition office have had to come up with other ridiculous smear attempts against Trudeau. 
Whether or not Poilievre ever gets one of these anti-Trudeau smears to land, he is rapidly convincing Canadians that PP himself is not fit to be a prime minister - temperamental, hysterical, judgemental.
  This came up before, during the 2019 election campaign, and Canadaland published the definitive story on Oct. 8, 2019:
In recent weeks, rumours and innuendo have swirled suggesting that The Globe and Mail has been working on a hot scoop about Justin Trudeau’s departure from West Point Grey Academy, the Vancouver school he worked at in his late 20s.
.....The trouble with this is that it’s all bullshit.
Let’s start with the Globe: journalists there had been looking into the reasons behind Trudeau’s departure from the school. But they didn’t find anything nefarious.
Reporters at the paper have been confused, for weeks, about this rumoured story.
At a press conference late last week, Globe reporter Marieke Walsh asked Trudeau about what she described as “unfounded rumours” about why he left. “I moved on,” Trudeau said. He was also asked about whether he signed a non-disclosure agreement. His answer, simply, was “no.”
.......In his 2014 book Common Ground, Trudeau wrote that he left West Point Grey over a dispute around the student paper, of which he was in charge. A student took a pointed stance in its pages, earning reprimand from the administration — which also shut down the paper itself. “[That] convinced me that West Point Grey was not the best fit for me as a teacher, nor I for them. Shortly after, I took a teaching position in the Vancouver public school system,” Trudeau wrote.
It’s a Sorkin-esque stand on principle that sounds a bit contrived, but it’s actually backed up.
In his 2017 unauthorized biography of Trudeau, writer Alan Hustak largely reinforced the story, but in a slightly less flattering light. Turns out the offending article, which Trudeau signed off on, “savaged” an English teacher at the school. Hustak, citing former headmaster Clive Austin, wrote in Magnetic North that Trudeau himself also got reprimanded for putting the paper out. “Justin advanced the argument that his students had the right to ‘free speech.’ Austin didn’t buy it. West Point Grey released Justin from his contract.”
Austin put out a statement last week amid all this mess.
“I recall the day that Justin visited me in my office near the end of the 2000-2001 school year and told me he had enjoyed his first few years of teaching, yet was considering a return to Montreal,” the statement read. It added that “we parted company on good terms.”
Here is a tweet which includes the Austin statement from 2019: The Canadaland story continues:
A 2015 Global story, which spoke to former students and faculty, reported that Trudeau left “to pursue new challenges.” The same year, CBC spoke to former students and collected social media posts, with no mention of the supposed affair. There’s a Reddit thread with some of his former students sharing stories as well, also with no mention. Publicly, at the time (as is played up by the Tories) Trudeau said he was moving on to give speeches.
There is nothing to this story. There is no evidence that Trudeau was fired for an affair. There is no gag order. There is no Globe story...
Truth, of course, doesn't stop our PeePee, does it. 
Meanwhile, CPC flying monkeys are flying to PP's support and adopting the "just asking questions!" mantra: There is a broader picture here, too: And here's the nut graf:

4 comments:

rumleyfips said...

One of my dogs killed a rat eating sunflower seed under the birdfeeder today. I call Rat Patrol. About an hour and a half later Pierre Pollievre showed up.

lungta said...

I loved Rat Patrol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rat_Patrol

Cap said...

Thanks for the deep dive into PP's latest trail of slime. Our national nattering nabob of negativity never has anything good to say. It must be demoralizing and exhausting to work with a man like that, let alone to live with him. As much as Trudeau is reaching his sell-by date, I hope that Canadians don't see Poilievre's Cons as a viable alternative. That would be a grave mistake.

Cathie from Canada said...

Thanks, Cap. Personally, I would take Trudeau as our PM for the next decade, rather than a single day with PP!