"China-worship" runs in the Trudeau family

Admiration for totalitarian Communist regimes including China is a Trudeau family affair.

The Trudeau family's love of tyrants | Maclean's - Mark Milke:

February 28, 2018 - "Back in the summer of 2006, Pierre Trudeau’s youngest son, Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau wrote a fawning  happy 80th birthday column in the Toronto Star in praise of then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.... Castro, Trudeau claimed, was 'an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets, on everything'. Alexandre pressed upon his readers ... to think of Cubans as children and Castro their father. Trudeau then fondly recalled his late brother, Michel, who when they were young kids complained to their mother that he had fewer friends than his brothers. Margaret Trudeau replied that unlike his brothers, Michel 'had the greatest friend of all: he had Fidel.'

"I thought of Alexandre Trudeau’s fawning 2006 tribute recently given it was 10 years ago this month that Fidel Castro resigned.... But the anniversary also brings to mind Alexandre Trudeau’s brother — the prime minister, and his weird, fantasy belief that another autocracy, China, is somehow efficient on economic and environmental matters.... Having a soft spot for tyrants prompts multiple blind spots, whether on democracy, the economy or, more recently, on the environment. All have been on display in the Trudeau family’s ongoing infatuation with tyrannies and autocracies.... [I]n the comments from Alexandre, Margaret and Justin Trudeau ... [w]e see evidence of the Trudeau family’s long love affair with the world’s autocrats and tyrants.  But the problem started with Pierre.

"Bob Plamondon, author of a 2013 biography of  Pierre Trudeau recounts how Trudeau the Elder visited the Soviet Union in 1952 to discuss economics, this accompanied by four Canadian communists. 'It was there that he remarked to the wife of U.S. chargé d’affaires that he was a communist and a Catholic and was in Moscow to criticize the U.S. and praise the Soviet Union,” Plamondon writes....

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau meets Mao Zedong
in Beijing, 1973. Credit: Government of Canada.

"Similarly, in 1960, Trudeau accepted an invitation from the Chinese government to visit along with Jacques Hébert, a friend whom Trudeau would appoint to the Senate. They travelled around China for six weeks on a state-sponsored tour. 

"And they did so smack dab in the middle of a wrenching state-imposed famine courtesy of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward 'reforms', which began in 1958 and would last until 1962 ... [and]  would take the lives of 'somewhere between 20 million and 42 million people' as French authors Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot recounted in the Black Book of Communism.....

"[T]he father and son Trudeau approach to China then and now is revealing....  Canadians, then as now, are treated to an over-eager approach which mirrors Justin’s father’s mindset and reveal his enduring influence on his son.... As an example, from economics and the environment, recall Justin Trudeau’s unguarded comments made in 2013, where he expressed 'a level of admiration I actually have for China' with his reasoning that 'their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say "we need to go green fastest, we need to start investing in solar"'.... 

"These comments reveal a modern Trudeau fascination with autocracies; in particular, the notion that China’s severely polluted environment can be helped by central, top-down planning from Beijing. Beijing can announce all the windmills and solar panels it wants. But recall the politically-centralized model in existence since Mao which forestalls the political consequences of issues (pollution in China today as a severe example), which would explode in a liberal democracy.

"The very Chinese model of governance, which represses dissent, was not only unsuited to economic growth before the 1979 reforms by Deng Xiaoping, it has been deadly to Chinese health. That’s because public pressure cannot swap sub-par politicians out for accountable ones. In an economy of state-owned companies, no one is responsible for pollution, or to enforce pollution laws in the private sector.... In China, public pressure at the ballot box and even by consumers is either nonexistent or feeble. And Chinese government statistics are unreliable, a fact which additionally complicates environmental reform. Anyone, including the prime minister, who thinks China has an effective or enlightened policy on the environment is unaware or blithely ignoring just how corrupt, ineffective and inefficient autocracies are....

"The father-son reunion on China is not mysterious. Nor are their basic flawed assumptions about how political power can solve all problems if only the rulers somehow have enough control. The Trudeau family’s dewy-eyed approach to tyrants has always been unfortunate. Their family-tyrant friends were economically illiterate and, just as often, deadly to their own populations. Central planning was of no use and was of much harm to Russians, Chinese and Cubans.

"The elder Trudeau’s acolytes always thought of him as a 'philosopher king' — that he knew better than markets and ordinary mortals and business owners how to manage the economy efficiently from the top down. His son has imbibed the same conceit. Justin has continued in that tradition in his own political life, with his fawning Castro comments and his weird China-worship on environmental matters."

Read more: https://macleans.ca/opinion/the-trudeau-familys-love-of-tyrants/