Justin Trudeau's "feminist foreign policy" comes down with cramps

Back in the bad old "Big Steve" era, thinking Canadians would cringe when Bullshittin' Baird used to go on about how Canada punches above its weight, blah blah blah.

Now we tweet above our weight instead. Usually, nobody gives a shit, but last week our good pals in the Saudi dictatorship took umbrage.

Poof!

Fifteen thousand Saudi students paying extravagant "foreign student" tuition, gone from our universities.

Canada's biggest industrial export contract in history at risk.

Prospects of further lucrative contracts from the KSA?

Nil.

The response from Canada so far has been to double down on a really dubious idea; that you can cosy up to repressive regimes to take their money, and then turn around and criticize them for being repressive.

Which is par for the course for the team of Dumb and Dumber running the show in Ottawa. To hear them tell the tale, nothing is ever going to prevent us from tweeting for human rights.

We're very selective of who we champion in those tweets, of course. If you're a victim of Bad Vlad's machinations in Ukraine, hey, we've got your back! We'll at least tweet our support, if nothing else.

If you're a Romani victim of Ukrainian racists, not so much.

If you're a Palestinian in Gaza, forget about it.

But that's Canada, eh?

We can't figure out the mysteries of providing clean water to Indian reservations.

We can't run an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women.

Hell, we can't even figure out how to pay our civil servants on time!


But, we are absolutely top-shelf, top-drawer, top 'o the heap when it comes to lecturing others on how to manage their affairs.

What the Phoenix fiasco tells us about the people running Canada

I've long held in check my suspicion that both Justin Trudeau and his number one rep on the world stage, Chrystia Freeland, are lightweight twits who are in way over their heads.

But the epidemic of ineptitude that has overtaken us goes far beyond Justin and Chrystia.

Check out this story at CBC about the Phoenix payroll scandal.

The sub-head says it all; it'll take five years and billions of dollars to sort out the shit-show that is the public service payroll system.

I'm sure that everyone involved in every step of this fiasco is very well educated and has a very impressive CV. They've all got multiple degrees from the finest universities in the land. After all, you don't get into the upper reaches of public service without those prerequisites.


And this is the best they can do?


We are well and truly screwed...