I know, I know. It’s a tough ask. But when First Families repeatedly break federal ethics laws, and shrug it off as if it’s no big deal, you know the state of affairs in politics is that the whole mess is a sham. And the people we have to blame are ourselves.
I could be talking about Ivanka shilling a can of beans, or I could be talking about family friends, running the WE Foundation, receiving lucrative government contracts without proper oversight?
I’m clearly talking about both. We enable this behaviour along party lines, through apathy, by refusing to fight when someone changes a law to suit a new level of political grift.
FWIW, this outfit costs about £5,000 (https://t.co/l7p2IAqXWD), or $6,000, or 3,174 cans of Goya black beans. https://t.co/014l5qNdWb
— David Gura (@davidgura) July 15, 2020
Unless dramatically new evidence comes along that stuns the voters, #WECharity will extract from him, but it won't exit him. A plurality of Cdns have a consistently clear message for #Trudeau critics: We like him. We're keeping him. Suck it up Buttercup. https://t.co/ykjs9Ws3NK
— Charles Adler (@charlesadler) July 15, 2020
Opposition party politicians are the same as those who win power. The day it was revealed that Andrew Scheer took money from Conservative Party donors, to put all seven of his children through private school, was Scheer’s worst day ever, because it personally cost him his dream of being Prime Minister one day.
We can pretend that every politician is good, in office to affect real change for their constituents more than to build their own profile, but in almost every single case we would be wrong. They actually convince themselves that these inethical choices are their job, for the good of Canadians, and it’s only when their crisis PR teams can’t come up with a good excuse why it is that they must step down. In Scheer’s case, it was an impossible sell that seven children needed a private education their father couldn’t pay for on his own. For Trudeau and Ivanka, claiming support for Canadian students or Hispanic-owned business, in a pandemic, is a much easier sell. People will actually believe that they care, that these inethical choices had nothing to do with them.
Both Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau could easily be re-elected at this point, all but confirming how we blind ourselves to the scandals of politicians we’ve already decided to support. We’ve proven how we allow grift so long as our most-aligned party is in power, with no desire to change it. The Catch-22 is that the more grift we see, the more disengaged or apathetic to politics we become, which is just a breeding ground for further corruption and abuses of power.
So what can we do about it? Call it out. Stop forgiving Justin Trudeau for his or his party’s bad choices. Stop pretending Ivanka is not a feckless vassal to her beligerent toad of a father. Stop imagining a world where any politicians are less corruptible than others. Accept that it’s widespread, check your own blind spots, and hold your elected officials to a higher standard.
Never eat beans in a white silk blouse, either. Ivanka already knows that and there’s no way in hell she actually ate those beans, but it bears stating anyway.
