The media are very busy likening Canada’s new Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. In regard to homeland security in Canada, however, there’s a wide difference between the son and the father; and this difference carries significant implications for our own security, given that we share a border with Canada.
One reason Justin Trudeau achieved office with a landslide is that Canadians have become fed up with the tough-minded security measures that had been advocated by the now displaced Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper had been a classic “enemy of the people” in the sense that he had squarely recognized the potent terrorist threat posed by immigrants from the Middle East and had attempted to impose stringent preventive measures.
Canadians, however, have softened toward young Islamic extremists to the point where they believe rehabilitation based on sympathy and human understanding is the course to take. And the new prime minister has bought into this mentality.
As I say, unlike the father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who countered militant separatist insurgency in Quebec (by the Quebecois) with immediate imposition of the War Measures Act. In fact, though he was of Canada’s Liberal Party, Pierre Elliot’s posture toward terrorists was a mirror image of Harper’s.
Now, with a tender-hearted prime minister leading Canada’s parliament in Ottawa, and with ISIL urging recruits to “carry out attacks in the U.S.,” we have to ask: Will the Canada-U.S. border become as porous as the Mexico-U.S. border? And we have to hope that our next president will have and act on the stony attitude Pierre Elliot Trudeau bore toward terrorism.
Tom Wright
Aztec
