It’s difficult to determine what’s more tragic: Justin Trudeau’s great pot reveal, or the moral high ground the prime minister and his fellow Cons have taken in response.
By now, everyone in the nation who cares (and many who don’t) will have heard or read about the Liberal leader’s almost trite confession, how on the rare occasion over his 41 years, he’s smoked marijuana.
“I think five or six times in my life that I’ve taken a puff — it’s not my thing. I think I’m in more trouble for admitting that I don’t drink coffee on social media today,” Trudeau said while speaking to reporters in Quebec City.
Of course, this revelation from the Liberal’s prospective prime minister, who has already expressed a desire to shake up the nation’s arguably excessive drug laws (as have Canada’s Association of Chiefs of Police, though perhaps not to the same extent), became immediate fodder for the Conservatives.
Justice Minister Peter MacKay says Trudeau has shown a “profound lack of judgement,” something MacKay is all too familiar with, given his own high-flying history as the nation’s defence minister, when he had no qualms about travelling executive class by air to a football game, or having a military helicopter to give him a lift from a fishing resort, all on the public dime.
As for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s response, that Trudeau’s “actions speak for themselves,” wow, talk about a case of the pot and the kettle. But as with MacKay, Harper speaks with authority, having established his own substantial list of outspoken actions which have done more to anger and alienate the nation than unite it.
MacKay wasn’t entirely off the mark: Trudeau’s supposedly calculated confessional has predictably titillated public interest, leaving the nation’s more pressing issues in a cloud of second-hand smoke.
