The sine non que ultra of Canadian politics

Everything is Trump; Trump is everything.

That’s a twist on a pithy aphorism in Buddhism - “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” These days, the Trump one makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Consider the evidence.  Last week, this newspaper broke the news that the taxpayer-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had ordered its reporters and editors to refrain from describing the al-Qaeda terror attack of September 11, 2001 as terrorism.

The CBC has long taken the position - like the New York Times, CNN, The Guardian and many others - to never call terrorism what it is, which is terrorism. I write about it in my new book, The Hidden Hand. The CBC and assorted other media organizations (not this one, or the National Post, or the Wall Street Journal) will call terrorists “activists,” “attackers,” “commandoes,” “fighters,” “insurgents” and so on. But not terrorists. They all got away with it.

Until Donald Trump’s MAGA spotted reports of the CBC’s insane policy in the New York Post and on Fox News, that is.

Trump’s own MAGA “insurgents” were livid. The Director of the FBI declared that “any agency in Canada that doesn’t publicly reject this bastardization of history, and an insult to the souls lost during our largest terrorist attack in U.S. history will no longer have friend in this FBI.”

Republicans in Congress were similarly incensed: “What possible motive could there be for sanitizing the worst terrorist attack on American soil? Care to explain, Canada?” Trump’s ambassador to Canada, meanwhile, said: “Failure to recognize and confront radical and terrorist ideologies significantly endangers our efforts to establish and harmonize a shared national and economic security partnership.”

What happened next was interesting. Critics in Canada (like me) had condemned the CBC’s terrorism-isn’t-terrorism policy for a long time. The CBC could not have cared less. The minute Trump’s MAGA types started to condemn the policy, however - speedily followed by two Canadian cabinet ministers, and CSIS, no less - CBC caved, big time. They eliminated the previously-sacrosanct policy.

Another example: the lake.

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