Close to 40 years after his father, Pierre Trudeau, took his proverbial walk in the snow, it is time for Justin Trudeau to do the same thing and resign.

As was also true for his father, Justin, is a very proud man and wants to make the most important decision of his life when he is ready. After nine years in the country’s top job, we owe him this much.

Now that he is in a blizzard of controversy and his leadership is extremely fragile, Justin Trudeau must take Parliament’s holiday break to reflect and then announce that he is leaving.

​The late stages of Pierre Trudeau’s career were much as they are now for Justin. Pierre Trudeau’s closest ally and confidant, Marc Lalonde worried back in 1984 that Pierre no longer had the support of his caucus.      
   
Now, Justin Trudeau has just had his erstwhile strongest supporter and Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland leave his side in a bitter departure that rocked the nation.

Marshal Phillipe Petain the future leader of the part of France that was collaborating with Adolf Hitler, stated: “In three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” This prompted Churchill’s strong retort.

Adolf Hitler’s forces had easily marched into France and the world was a very scary place at that time, as it is today.

The grit of Churchill inspired Canadians to rally to Churchill’s call to defeat Adolf Hitler and his juggernaut.

Why should Canadians stand up to the bully figure of Trump today? Because it does matter when Trump pushes us around and shows he does not respect us as a people. The world is again headed in a very dangerous direction, and as the old saying tells us, the world has a way of beating its path to our door.

The dangers signals are there with Trump. No sooner had he won a massive victory in the Presidential election than he began parading out the most frightening, self-serving, mega-rich individuals to conduct his faulty vision for the United States, Canada and the World.

From out of a very dark cave, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally took steps this week toward restoring his reputation as a man with a purpose.
 
Along with his Public Safety Minister, Dominic Leblanc and his chief of staff, Katie Telford, the PM flew down to have an important dinner with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate. It was not an earth-shattering occasion, but if was significant in view of Trump’s threat to impose a twenty-five per cent tariff on all goods entering the U.S.A.
 
Furthermore, when Mr. Trudeau returned to Ottawa, he quickly briefed the leaders of the Opposition parties, including Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre who until then had kept his distance from any involvement in a Team Canada approach to the tariff threat.
 
It was an action-packed week with yet another notice of a Conservative Non-Confidence Motion for the government. Get serious, Mr. Poilievre: A “Carbon Tax election” during the Holiday Season and when there is a national crisis over the tariff!

The last five months have been very heavy, with two big, continuing wars, and many elections, including the last, very serious one in the U.S.A. which rocked almost all Canadians. It is long past time for something lighter and completely different.

This writer sometimes draws amusement and diversion from things in the natural world, many of them that I see out my workroom window. With the fall weather and the leaves almost all down, our feathered friends and animals keep going full tilt preparing for winter.

The crow, with its jet-black plumage, is one of my fine feathered friends which people could easily dismiss as dreary and uninteresting but is one of the most intelligent birds in the sky.

For instance, the other morning when just a few apples were left hanging on a nearby tree, I spotted a big crow spearing some apples with her dagger-like beak. Shuffling her feet down to a crook in the branch, she wedged the apple there, to better enjoy her breakfast.

When he had completed the work of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Murray Sinclair said: “We have described for you a mountain. We have shown for you the way to the top. We call on you to do the climbing.”
 
This was Murray Sinclair’s challenge for the country. After the commission had listened to the difficult stories of the survivors of the Residential Schools and their families, he set out in simple, and non-vindicative terms what this country should continue to work hard to achieve, in a word “respect.”
 
This week the late Sinclair was honored at a commemorative ceremony that would not have been likely in two other wealthy countries with large indigenous populations, Australia and the U.S.A. Those two nations have been at best aggressive or at worst genocidal to their First Peoples. On the other hand, one other country, New Zealand, has done as much or more than Canada in reconciling with its First Peoples. And Murray Sinclair has done more than any other Canadian in helping this country improve its record.

Donald Trump’s huge victory in the U.S. Elections has major implications for Canada. When this writer stayed up to see that Trump had won key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, I felt sick to my stomach, turned the television off, and went to bed.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris took much of the criticism for the defeat, but overall, she did her job very well. The explanation lies in much deeper problems in the Democratic Party, problems which parallel those in recent years with the national Liberal Party in Canada.

In my last blog column before the American election, I set out Trump’s horrific record with his 34 felony convictions, sexual assaults, hush money payments, over $500 million in civil liability judgments etc. Then there is his threat to mobilize the U.S. National Guard and American troops against those he calls “the enemy within.”  His encouragement of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill following his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat is further evidence of his terrible record. Of course, Trumps most frightening current promise is the massive deportation of illegal immigrants from the U.S.

Non-MAGA Republicans, Democrats and most Canadians await the Nov. 5 presidential election with a deep sense of foreboding. Even Kamala Harris enthusiasts are nervous.

There is still much hope, all is not lost, but it does seem likely that the most dictatorial leader in the history of democratic nations could well be in a position, once again, to seize the reins of office for the most powerful nation on Planet Earth.

Donald J. Trump has a lengthy list of negative credentials which speak poorly of his basic human decency. The most serious of these include the following:
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• Last May, a jury found Trump guilty of thirty-four felony charges. Also, last May, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed writer E. Jean Caroll. The court also awarded her $5 million, and then she was later awarded a further $83 million in damages. Trump has myriad appeals of his criminal convictions and is appealing $500 million in civil judgments. Readers of this blog column might well ask if this represents equal justice under the law.
  
  
• Trump has repeatedly threatened to mobilize the U.S. National Guard and American troops against his political enemies. He spreads fear about what he calls “the enemy within.”
  
  
• The former president has yet to accept that he lost the 2020 election. Few can forget the terrible scenes from Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump mobilized his armed supporters to attack the Capitol building in Washington. VP Harris noted this week at her massive rally of supporters at the Ellipse (the very place where Trump had called out his mob) that Trump’s own staff told him repeatedly that the mob wanted to hang his own Vice President, Mike Pence. Trump is reliably reported to have said: “So what.”
  
  
• At the major Trump rally this week at Madison Square Garden in New York, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” To this a spokesperson for the Trump campaign made an almost casual disavowal of the comment. We shall see below that this incident soon became a major negative for both the Trump and Harris campaigns.
  
  
• John Kelly, former Trump chief of staff and a retired Marine general has said that Trump “fits the general definition of fascist.” This reminds us of the horrendous threat that Trump has made in his anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric. He promises to conduct the largest ever deportation of immigrants from the USA., and perhaps the entire world.

Susan Holt’s Liberal victory in Monday’s election puts New Brunswick on the national map in a way not seen since Frank McKenna’s 58-0 sweep of the province in the 1987 election, 37 years ago. Holt will be the first female Premier in the history of the province, and the number of women, at 17, elected to the legislature is the largest ever.
 
Both the Holt and McKenna victories were spectacular in their own way, appealing to newness and freshness for an electorate weary of an unpopular incumbent Premier. Both ran high energy campaigns based on blanket touring of every corner of the province.
 
Ms. Holt’s campaign may have been even more spectacular from a homegrown policy point of view because she concentrated overwhelmingly on primary health care, promising to introduce 30+ collaborative care centres staffed with professionals from doctors, to nurse practitioners, nurses and mental health therapists, thereby reducing pressure on hospital emergency rooms.