Far-left Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is under fire for his poor handling of his country’s anti-mandate protests, praised China’s dictatorship in a resurfaced video from 2013.
At a women’s night town hall in November 2013, then-Liberal Party Leader Trudeau was asked, “Which nation, besides Canada, which nation’s administration do you most admire and why?”
“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China,” Trudeau responded. “Because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and saying ‘We need to go greenest fastest, we need to start, you know, investing in solar.'”
“There is a flexibility that I know [former Conservative Prime Minister] Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted, that I find quite interesting,” he continued.
The resurfaced video of Trudeau’s admiration of Xi Jinping’s government, who took the reigns of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, comes as his government is currently cracking down on peaceful protests against Chinese coronavirus-related civil rights violations, using tools many are comparing to “martial law.”
As Breitbart News reported, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada’s history, allowing the federal government to freeze assets, suspend the insurance of the Freedom Convoy protesters, and target crowdfunding platforms and cryptocurrency transactions under “terrorist financing” rules.
“This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said at a press conference Monday. “We are today serving notice if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades your corporate accounts will be frozen.”
“The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended,” she continued. “Send your semi-trailers home, the Canadian economy needs them to be doing legitimate work, not to be illegally making us all poor.”
At the time of Trudeau’s remarks praising China’s dictatorship, he drew the ire of Asian-Canadians, some of whom had been imprisoned or tortured by the regime for advocating democracy.
Trudeau’s family connections to Beijing are deep, calling his praise of the dictatorial regime into question.
Beginning in the 1960s, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was enamored with the mystique of China’s dictatorship during the murderous Great Leap Forward, which killed as many as 45 million people – described by the Washington Post as the “biggest mass murder in the history of the world.”
The elder Trudeau was motivated to pen a communist propaganda book titled Two Innocents in Red China with his travel companion Jacques Hébert. Calling Mao Zedong a “superb strategist,” Trudeau and Hébert declared in the book that “it is these red-scarfed kids who in twenty years will be the New Men of a country which at that time will have a billion inhabitants.”
The younger Trudeau has similarly appeared enchanted by the promise of communist dictatorships. He has praised both China’s dictatorship and Cuba’s dictatorship, while using his office to enrich the Chinese Communist Party.
As detailed in Peter Schweizer’s Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, “In 2012, he [Justin Trudeau] outlined his support for a controversial energy deal involving the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, which was seeking to acquire the Canadian energy company Nexen. There were concerns about the significant implications to national security and possible damage to ‘Canadian interests and values.’”
To justify the move, Trudeau said, “obviously, my family has historical ties with China.”
In 2016, following the death of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, Trudeau described the Cuban tyrant as a “legendary revolutionary” and a “remarkable leader.”
Trudeau said that he learned of Castro’s death with “deep sorrow,” paying tribute to him as a “larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.