Canada is always on the right side of History,” President Volodymyr Zelensky declared in the House of Commons last Friday. Who would have thought that the-best-country-in-the-world would be quick to contradict him?
For once, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, who always sees everything in black, was right: the unanimous tribute that the deputies paid to a former SS soldier presented as a hero of the fight for the independence of Ukraine , leading Mr. Zelensky himself into a sinister and cruel misunderstanding, is perhaps the most embarrassing incident in Canadian diplomatic annals, and constitutes a real insult to the victims of the holocaust and to the Ukrainian people.
In recent years, Prime Minister Trudeau’s dilettantism or pusillanimity in matters of international relations has often been an object of embarrassment for Canadians, but this incredible blunder is one of those examples where reality seems to exceed fiction. If we had not witnessed it live, we might have believed that an artificial intelligence had been created.
The irony was this pathetic attempt by the government’s parliamentary leader, Karina Gould, upset to the point of losing her judgment, to have this shameful episode erased from the debate log, as well as the images that were filmed last Friday. As if such a mess could be cleaned up with a wipe of a cloth!
Either, Mr. Trudeau is not responsible for the catastrophic initiative of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, but he is nonetheless the guardian of Canada’s reputation in the world and this is found tainted for a long time. The National Assembly may have dissociated itself from it, but Quebec unfortunately risks being included in this opprobrium.
Outside the country, there will be no effort to share the blame. It is Canada as a whole that is being singled out. Neither Russia, which seeks to present its aggression against Ukraine as an enterprise of denazification, nor India, which accuses Canada of sheltering terrorists, would have dared to dream of such a boon.
Since coming to power, Mr. Trudeau can legitimately claim the title of champion of all categories of public apologies, whether for his own errors, for example for having blackened his face during a youth party, or for those of his predecessors.
The Prime Minister apologized to the Jewish refugees aboard the ship MS Saint Louis, which Canada had refused to welcome in 1939, and to the descendants of the 2e Construction Battalion, a unit made up of black soldiers who suffered discrimination during World War I. Italian nationals interned during the Second World War were also entitled to an apology, as were Inuit, First Nations, LGBTQ+ communities and many others.
Having thus led by example, Mr. Trudeau also invited the Pope to apologize for the abuses committed by the Church in residential schools. It is perhaps this taste for contrition that gave an American commentator this summer the idea of demanding an apology from Canada for the discomfort caused to our neighbors to the South by the smoke from forest fires blown by the winds. .
With his usual slowness, it took the Prime Minister three days to react to the events of last Friday and present an apology, but it was not his or his government’s. Rather, he set himself up as the spokesperson for all parliamentarians, collectively victims of the stupidity of poor Anthony Rota.
Of course, Pierre Poilievre was not going to give up so easily. In addition to holding Justin Trudeau responsible for all the harm caused to Canadians by inflation, he can now accuse him of being dangerously irresponsible when it comes to diplomacy and security.
The Conservative leader pushed the envelope a little further by declaring that no foreign head of state will ever dare set foot in Parliament for fear that an assassin is lurking in the stands, since anyone seems to be admitted there. without the slightest verification, but this sad episode is not about to be forgotten, neither in Canada nor abroad.
When the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, asked the Prime Minister if he had communicated personally with President Zelensky, Mr. Trudeau replied that Canada’s apologies had been transmitted through the usual “diplomatic channels”. We can indeed think that the Ukrainian president had no desire to pick up the phone.