The laughingstock

Jagmeet Singh has been gifted with a golden opportunity to finally, begrudgingly, turn on his compromised Laurentian liege lords. To the surprise of very few, he doesn't appear up to the job.

Jagmeet Singh cuts a ridiculous figure.

A Trotskyist by measurement of rhetoric, the bespoke suits, Oyster Perpetual Datejust and Submariner Rolexes, the crimson BMW coupe, and the seven (!) designer bicycles lend themselves to a less than charitable evaluation of his supposed socialist bonafides.

Not content with just personal hypocrisy, of late, Singh has been finding new and endearing ways to professionally stick it to good government, and the working-class Canadians he claims to care for.

His weakness an asset, his pliability part of the deal, the coalition agreement between Singh, a notoriously poor fundraiser and election performer, and a Trudeau government in its stubbornly drawn-out death-throes has never looked more absurd.

That ‘slow drip’ of Chinese interference intel has become a deluge, and the timorous bureaucrats tasked with protecting the PM’s backside on who knew what, and when, have advanced to the "sorry, didn’t see it, I forgot to check my emails” stages of denial.

The family friend and ski buddy golden parachuted in at the behest of Trudeau (and to the joy of the Mandarin bloc, no doubt), has already so tarnished his reputation that he’s hired his own crisis communications firm, on the taxpayers’ dime, to deal with the crisis of his very presence inside the more important crisis, being the one he was brought in to pretend to investigate in the first place. (My head’s spinning too; it’s a veritable Russian nesting doll of mailed-in corruption.)

As a swingman in this dirty coalition deal done dirt cheap, Singh holds the power to call Trudeau’s bluff. We could have a public inquiry today; even an election tomorrow.

Justin needs Jagmeet. In a serious government, Jagmeet needed Justin, up until that whole allowance for foreign interference, and 72% of the country wanting Trudeau out on his ass.

But this, of course, is no serious government.

As Singh sucks and blows — motioning for the dismissal of ‘special rapporteur’ David Johnston one day, and refusing to dissolve his Liberal partnership the next — even the Parliamentary Press Gallery has started laughing in his face.

And why wouldn’t they?

As for his latest act of duplicity? Voting to protect the same David Johnston — who morphed from eminent Laurentian grandfather to hostile foreign witness in what felt like the blink of an eye — from subpoena to testify on what he knew about successful Chinese efforts to line Trudeau Foundation coffers while Johnston was with the organization.

The ultimate litmus test for all matters of Liberal hackery and divine-right-to-rule over-indulgence continues to be thus:

How would I feel about this if Stephen Harper were prime minister?

On matters of Chinese interference, Liberal-Laurentian obfuscation, and the semi-sentient footstool speaking permissible TikTok ‘truths’ to partners who afford him a safer path to pensionhood, there is no question that if the roles were reversed, there’d be Freedom Convoys, sans fossil fuels, with more purple hair, and public sector employees staging ‘die-ins’ on empty atrium floors. (Hey, at least it would get them back to the office.)

All of this exists to serve Trudeau. With summer break approaching, the hits that Jagmeet and Johnston continue to take allow for Trudeau to sashay from town to town, spreading tall tales of designer injustices and ‘woke’ woe. Such cheap theatrics have lost much of their power, but the wedge isn’t wholly ineffective, not when there are still millions of Tru-Anon grandmas to woo.

This has never been about anything more than buying Trudeau time, and Singh is nothing if not an agent of the status quo. By the low standards of the modern organizing wing of the New Democrats, mediocrity is to be accepted if it means more funding for DEI hustlers and the expansion of pet projects for the rest of the professionally aggrieved — making the NDP less a federal party than a cottage industry made up of Zoom-class professionals who pretend they don’t own cottages.

There’s still time for Singh to finally, begrudgingly, turn on his masters — but what’s really in it for him?

Freedom? National security? Fair elections? The will of everyday people?

How quaint.

The suit may be empty, but it didn’t come cheap.

Alexander Brown is a writer, comms director, and part-time politico. For more from the author, you can follow him on Twitter or Instagram. If you enjoyed this piece and wish to support independent media, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.