FILDEBRANDT: Trudeau found the crown of Canada, and dragged it through the gutter

Napoleon Bonaparte is believed to have said, “I found the crown of France in the gutter. I picked it up with the tip of my sword and cleaned it, and the people of France placed it atop my head.”In the end, Old Boney lost. But boy, did he sure give it the old college try.Justin Trudeau by contrast, found his country's crown gleaming; with a strong economy, a balanced budget, growing national pride and regional secessionist movements either dead or dying.He leaves office with an anaemic, uncompetitive economy that has been steadily eclipsed by the Americans and — by some measures — even by traditionally poor Italy(!).He ran a deficit during the entirety of his prime ministership, doubling the national debt in just nine years.He took the modest recovery in Canadian national identity that he inherited and told the people that they were bigoted, genocidal settlers on stolen land.He found an Alberta happy to pay more than its fair share to the ROC (Rest of Canada) in exchange for a modicum of respect and left it seething with sovereigntist and even secessionist rage.He inherited a strong, stable and sovereign country and left it without any legitimate leadership for months to help his party in the polls, as US President Donald Trump openly preys on its independence.It is the legacy of a fool, a narcissist, and an internationalist without any sense that a country is more than a mere patch of land with transactional fiscal transfers.Both Trudeau the prime minister, and Trudeau the man, are contemptible. As are his enablers and successors. His successor as Liberal leader and prime minister, Mark Carney, has been intimately involved in Trudeau's regime for most of its tenure in one form or another. Notably, he has not spoken a single word of condemnation against Trudeau's parsimonious decision to hang onto power until Canada was left defenceless against Trump's trade war and annexation designs. Prime Minister Carney will retool some of the most hated Trudeau policies into convoluted alternatives and try to sell it to voters in an expected imminent election. Carney and Trudeau may be different men, but they are the same prime minister. The succession of one from the other represents the continuation of the other from the one. Carney's cabinet is Trudeau's cabinet; 97% of it in fact. This is not a party and a government that has admitted to and learned from its mistakes. It is a cartel of anti-national statists intent on continuing their project to remould Canada in the image of a Davos PowerPoint presentation. Trudeau and Carney now call Canadians to the ramparts to defend the True North, at the literal exact moment that they announce that they are stealing yet more firearms from law-abiding citizens. I'm sure those gun owners will be eager to defend their government against those who would give them Second Amendment rights. The same party that tells Canadians that they have "no core identity" and that Canada is a "post-national state" now try to politically profit from latent Canadian nationalism. The same people that lowered the Canadian flag for months and literally bowed before Black Lives Matter (BLM) racialists calls upon us to stand tall and fly the flag that they were so recently repentant of. The same party that declared Canada to be a genocidal settler state on stolen land now tries to claim the moral high ground as the rightful claimant to this territory. If Canada is truly an illegitimate state on stolen land, then what right do we have to tell the Americans that they cannot claim it for themselves? The people who encouraged or sat silently by as statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Queen Victoria were toppled now claim the moral right to tell us that our history is worth defending. The people who have replaced tanks with tampons in the men's washrooms at our military bases warn the Americans that we will beat them in battle if they were ever to invade. Trudeau has left Canada weak and utterly unprepared for the struggle it now faces. And his chosen successor is just the man to keep it that way.