As a Catholic newspaper committed to telling non-partisan truth in charity, the Register would never seek to interest its readers in generic badmouthing of Justin Trudeau as an “idiot” and an “imbecile. We need only look south of the border to witness what festers in, erupts from, and corrupts the body politic when such schoolyard insults become the public office invective of the day.

Yet the descriptors have a different cast coming from an esteemed former provincial premier and Liberal party colleague of Canada’s current prime minister. Objection to them as slurs is overtaken by wonder at why an erudite figure would reach for them to make a point. 

Specifically, why would former B.C. Premier Ujjal Dosanjh use such pejoratives to describe, in a weekend National Post interview, the Prime Minister’s perceived bungling of the Canada-India relationship and, more broadly, the entire Trudeau approach to nation building?

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“Trudeau, sociologically and politically, is an idiot and you can actually quote me,” Dosanjh told interviewer Donna Kennedy-Glans. “He’s an imbecile in terms of understanding how you build nations, how you build countries.”

The former NDP premier and federal Liberal cabinet minister remains miffed by the way Trudeau, when they were MPs together from 2008 to 2011, ignored his counsel as a leading mainstream Sikh voice, and cultivated an extremist minority instead. 

Dosanjh’s hard-edged analysis surfaces what he sees as our prime minister’s prime intellectual failing: the vacuous belief that “Canada is a post-national State without a mainstream culture.” He considers it is self-refuting empty-headedness.

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“If we don’t have a mainstream, then we’re not really a people. We may not sing the same songs. (We) may not do the same dances. Our mainstream is in our values, how we treat each other, how we behave politically, how we behave on the street, how we vote, what we take into account when we vote.”

His epithets for the Prime Minister may make charitable Catholics wince. Yet there is wisdom in his wider words for a simple reason. They are true. Perhaps no single group in Canada can better affirm them than the faithful of Holy Mother Church. We have witnessed – and experienced – our eviction from the mainstream of public life through the patently false assertion that there is no mainstream to be publicly lived. When we seek to live out faith in common life, we are scorned for even asserting a common life in which to have faith. 

Of course, Justin Trudeau can’t bear all blame. Yet the retired 78-year-old lawyer’s puts his finger on the prime minister’s substitution of electoral shrewdness for moral wisdom regarding “what we take into account when we vote.”

Without conflating a political trait and personal character, Trudeau’s leadership has cunningly made the myth of Canadian fragmentation appear real. He and his government have done so by overtly pandering to extreme constituencies. The favoured groups have, in turn, advanced in power and influence far beyond their actual number through access to a ready listening ear self-invested in sustaining the negation of any “mainstream” Canada. The system is circular, with all the emptiness of a circle at its core.

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For Dosanjh, the salient example is Sikh extremism. Catholics have correlatives. There is the jaw-dropping speed of MAiD’s advance from medical outlier to health care normalcy. We might also cite abortion’s integration as an indisputable social good when once it was seen as a tragic individual necessity. A third illustration is the desecration of natural families and human sexuality past the point of promiscuity to that of nullity. Result? Our birth rate is lower than required for basic population maintenance. 

Yet while we can blame Justin Trudeau, they happened on our democratic watch, too. Where should fingers truly point and name calling be directed? As if in prophetic answer, the Great Nasal Bard of Minnesota, Bob Dylan, forecast our circumstance in a long-ago song called “Idiot Wind”that ends: “Idiot wind/Blowing through the dust upon our shelvesWe’re all idiots, babe/It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.” Harsh? Well, prophesy demands truth in charity.