With Trudeau the matter is even more glaring. Because other than his looks and his bloodline, it isn’t clear why he’s the prime minister of a G7 country. Except for a brief stint as a teacher, he’s never had a real job. He grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth and talks like it’s still there. His speeches are mostly fumbling affairs, like someone keeps pulling the string on a Cabbage Patch doll. He has no talent for debate and regularly gets thumped by the Conservatives in parliament. He is wildly unpopular.

Trudeau, even more so than Obama, is a progressive confection. There is little substance beneath the sugary surface. And now the consequences of electing this stammering airhead are becoming abundantly clear. If Canada had a leader and not a department store mannequin, the trucker crisis might have been peacefully defused. The government might have recognized the need to bring a disenchanted and powerful political minority back into the fold. It might have talked to them, identified with them, negotiated over the increasingly groundless Covid measures that had aggravated them so…

Trudeau is not Hitler (not that he has a problem leveling that comparison himself). Yet it’s easy to see how continued protests across Canada could see him prolong and bolster his new powers, freezing the bank accounts of more and more dissenters by tying them to the convoys, for example. Canadian parliament already voted last night to extend the Emergency Act declaration even though the trucker protests have effectively ended; does anyone really believe Trudeau will ever relinquish his new competencies? Do governments ever?