In late 2019, before the pandemic officially started, it was summer in the southern hemisphere and Australia was on fire. I remember the shock of seeing so many images and videos of people fleeing as fire threatened to swallow them. The videos often featured people trying to stay calm as they drove away from a large fire even as they were surrounded by smaller fires. There was so much fire and so much smoke: it looked like the apocalypse had arrived.
Since 2019, the scenes have played out in the United States and Europe and in Canada. The Canadian wild fires in 2023 were so bad that large swathes of the continent bathed in wildfire smoke for months. Instead of action, people turned to denial (much as they have done with regard to COVID-19 and other viral infections). Who can forget the image of yoga practitioners deeply inhaling wildfire smoke on a roof in New York City?
Now it is winter in the northern hemisphere and California is on fire. The Pacific Palisades, which is where rich people live, is on fire. The images coming out are now familiar: orange skies, smoke, fires on both sides of the roads, people using their shirts as filtration material, abandoned cars.
Is it possible to live with any more foreboding? How does one function knowing that everyone will experience being swallowed by a flood or a fire at least once and that survivors will get the chance to do so over and over again until they die?
Trudeau Part 2 will soon be over. Trudeau is resigning as Liberal leader and Prime Minister of Canada. Parliament is prorogued until March 24. An election is likely to occur sooner rather than later.
Everything was limping along until Freeland resigned on December 16, but now the Conservatives have gotten what they have long dreamed of. How will those people who have made hating Trudeau their entire identity cope? Spare a thought for the makers of "Fuck Trudeau" flags. They will soon be out of work.
I am not sorry to see Trudeau go, but I do worry about what comes next. Since 2022, Trudeau has been pretending that the ongoing pandemic is over. Despite the opprobrium that first met the convoyers in Ottawa and elsewhere, we live in the convoyers' world now. We live in the aftermath of the death of public health where everyone is sick all the time and we all pretend not to know why.
Trudeau is also complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He could have joined the Irish and Spanish in speaking up about what Israel has been doing, but he chose not to. Instead, he stuck with Biden and stayed silent while hospitals, schools, and refugee camps were and are being bombed.
For a man who was elected as the hope-and-change candidate in 2015, who liked to march in pride parades and who told everyone who would listen that he was a feminist and interested in reconciliation, complicity in genocide and the death of public health make him a staggering disappointment.
In 2015, Trudeau promised electoral reform and many people voted Liberal because he sounded like he was serious. Once in power, he decided that marijuana legalization was easier to implement and mostly stopped talking about electoral reform. It will be deliciously ironic if the Liberal Party of Canada is crushed in the next election under the current first-past-the-post system. I wonder, if such a result does occur, whether the next leader will start talking up electoral reform again. If so, will anyone be stupid enough to believe them?