Justin Trudeau is not a racist – but he is a fool

The election campaign was off to an unexciting start even by Canada’s standards. A well-known but fluffy incumbent, Liberal Justin Trudeau, faced a Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, whose strategy had been to lay low. The Trudeau message these past four years has been total  political correctness: equal numbers of male and female cabinet members, ‘peoplekind’ instead of ‘mankind’ and requiring summer employment project hirees to sign a pledge to uphold abortion rights. Probably as many Canadians groaned at these fatuities as were impressed by them, but it assisted the Liberals in taking votes from the left, as the Conservatives unhistrionically asked for common sense. The Liberal plan for 2019 was to send Justin around cooing about good things while his campaign office smeared Conservative candidates as closet homophobes, misogynists and bigots. It was a sensible plan for a party that can’t really ask to be re-elected on its record. Then it blew up.