In a surprise move this week, Canada’s Conservatives voted against a new trade deal with the war-torn country.
Justin Trudeau is blaming the MAGA movement and Republican ideology for eroding support for Ukraine.
The Canadian prime minister used a press conference with visiting European leaders to connect a gambit by his Conservative rivals in Ottawa to hard-right rhetoric in the United States and Europe, which he said is “starting to parrot Russian disinformation and misinformation and propaganda.”
Canada is home to 1.4 million Ukrainian Canadians and boasts the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora after Russia. Until now, politicians of all stripes have been united behind Ukraine.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his party turned heads in Parliament earlier this week when they voted as a bloc against legislation that would update the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement. The bill passed anyway with the aid of Bloc Québécois and NDP MPs for study at the committee level.
What were the changes to the trade agreement?
The conservatives in Canada have been going wild over carbon pricing.
The current government recently removed carbon taxes on home heating oil for the Maritimes, where home heating oil is used a lot, to make things more affordable during the cold winter months.
The conservatives are collectively screaming that this should be evenly applied to everyone and that home heating carbon pricing (but really all carbon pricing) should be removed. And that the PM is only doing this to retain votes in the maritimes.
Because this is a hot button issue, the conservatives are trying to claim that this legislation makes Ukraine agree to implement a carbon tax, but as is often the case with conservatives, this isn’t reality at all. In reality if I recall correctly, Ukraine needs to put in measures to reduce carbon emissions. This is something they have already agreed to do to be part of the EU.
Fascist Milhouse, the opposition leader, just wanted to spin the issue into a culture war topic that touches on a lot of things he’s been yelling about like affordability (he has no plan to improve this).
The last part is purely my conjecture: I would not be surprised if he is cozy with Russia. He was cozy with the “Freedom” Convoy in Canada that conveniently spun up right as Russia invaded Ukraine. The troll farms on Reddit were heavily commenting/ arguing/ advancing the cause of the Convoy, and Facebook groups/propaganda about it was thick. I notice that conservatives in Canada use Facebook groups like “Canada Proud” and “Ontario Proud” to advance their causes and these spin up like crazy around election time. These groups have dubious ownership at best and I suspect are foreign influence operations. Interestingly for a while the conservatives were chomping at the bit to investigate foreign interference in Canada’s election but hmmm oddly wanted to ignore Russia and focus on China instead. If you’re squeaky clean wouldn’t you want to focus on all foreign interference, no matter the source?
This, imo is also why they were trying to tie the previous speaker of the House’s dumb decision to honour a Ukrainian war vet (oops he fought on the side of Germany) to = Ukraine supports Nazis/the PM supports Nazis. That’s not reality and it was a dumb oversight by the speaker of the house and his office who has nothing to do with the PM. But I do recall that one of Russia’s favourite attacks on Ukraine is that they are Nazis so this line of attack by the conservatives here in Canada seems questionable at best.
TLDR send help, Canadians are falling for the lies of a fascist shitbird
And the sad part is he’s probably going to win the next election. So many family members are starting to parrot his stupidity, and even my hardcore liberal friends are starting to lean because we’re all tired of Trudeau and whatever stupid thing he’s doing this week that will cost us money.
Goddd that sounds so much like what’s going on with your downstairs neighbor. If you scour Lemmy you’ll find a ton of people claiming supporting Trump instead of Biden because of Biden’s stance on Israel, as it Trump isn’t a xenophobic authoritarian who gets turned on by the idea of killing brown people.