By Jonathon Van Maren

More bad news for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals may just indicate sunny ways for the rest of us come autumn. From John Ivison in the National Post:

A majority in a poll conducted by Ipsos believe the country is on the wrong track, while the government’s approval rating has fallen 20 points in the past two years and is now lower than the Harper government’s six months before the last election. Nearly two thirds of respondents say Trudeau does not deserve to get re-elected.

There are a lot of reasons for this shift, of course. The SNC Lavalin scandal and resulting resignation of two prominent female cabinet ministers followed by their eviction from the Liberal caucus, Trudeau’s lengthening trail of goofy social justice warrior screwups, and the Trudeau’s image as Canada’s woke boyfriend being tarnished by video of the prime minister mocking aboriginal activists (“Thank you for your donation to the Liberal Party!”) have many voters wondering if Trudeau was, in fact, just not ready.

But most interesting to me is the growing consensus that Trudeau’s relentless virtue-signalling and obsession with identity politics may be at the core of why Canadians are simply getting fed up with the wealthy heir with the perfect hair:

Emotions are running high in the country, with broad dissatisfaction at the direction in which Canada is heading and the leadership being provided by Trudeau and his government. Pollster Darrell Bricker said in a speech earlier this month he believes the Liberals felt they had more support for their agenda than proved to be the case. He said the public is “ornery” over the “misalignment” of Liberal priorities — the identity politics issues dear to Trudeau’s heart — with the more hard-boiled concerns of many voters.

In order to secure re-election, Trudeau and his team will in all likelihood launch a campaign of such epic ugliness that it will make Notley’s months-long smear-job of Alberta’s recently elected United Conservative Party look like a group hug. The shattered Liberal Party was dragged back to prominence on the back of Trudeau’s alleged charisma (which has always been a mystery to me)—and so if the Canadian public appears impervious to Justin’s frantic flirting, they’ll spend the upcoming months dusting off the “hidden agenda” narrative and calling the Conservatives Nazis (which is ironic considering the fact that Pierre Trudeau firmly opposed fighting the actual Nazis while Canadian soldiers were dying to defeat Nazi Germany.)

Rachel Notley’s devastating loss in Alberta proved that voters simply do not buy the fearmongering progressives are attempting to sell, and I hope that a Trudeau loss (and it is still his election to lose) will illustrate that Canadians do not embrace his aggressive identity politics, but were simply willing to tolerate them as long as he delivered on the economic front. What most progressives do not seem to realize is that their LGBTQ2S issues surrounding bathrooms et al (and yes, Notley cited that entire acronym during the speech at her defeat party) are quite literally a luxury. Most people simply want to take home enough money to pay the bills and be left alone.

Trudeau, Notley, and the rest of their ilk, however, have no intention of leaving people alone. They are determined to reshape society and to make everyone more progressive and enlightened, regardless of whether or not they grow more impoverished in the process.

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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.