“I will not deny that I certainly take a bit of pleasure with the news of Justin Trudeau’s announced departure from power.
However, I am a little disappointed by the sheer number of overly ecstatic Canadians and Americans who fail to recognize the simple fact that the thing called ‘Justin Trudeau’ was never in power to begin with.”
– Matthew Ehret, (from his Substack) [1]
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On January 20, it appears Donald Trump will once again be inaugurated as President of the United States, his Slavic faced, darling wife standing by his side watching him take the almighty oath of power for another four year term.
Two weeks earlier, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promises to resign as Prime Minister and as Leader of the Liberal Party as soon as his replacement can be chosen. This would seem to put the party in an awkward position trying to address the U.S. on stopping tariffs Trump has threatened to unleash on U.S. imports from Canada. [2]
Who leads negotiations when the Prime Minister is clearly on the way out? And who is present to “stand for Canada” on the world stage with a Prime Minister clearly weakened by low polls, lost by-elections, and average Canadians telling him in no uncertain terms to “get the f–k out of town.” [3]
By March 9, Canadians will have a new Liberal leader and a new Prime Minister. But with the Trudeau brand now a negative, and the opposition, one leader after another, indicating they will vote against the Liberals regardless of who it is, the Prime Minister-ship won’t last a month. And unless the Federal polls change substantially after the new leader takes the PM’s chair, they can look forward to a stunning defeat once the writ is dropped.
What remains now is to look at the record of this government which has clearly lost the confidence of Parliament. Was it really a bad government that the nation at the time didn’t appreciate? And the son of the great Pierre Trudeau does not work alone. He has advisers and handlers. But just how much of his policies did he dig up out of his own imagination and drive?
And for that matter, what about the candidates of his succession? The great Canadian economist and banker Mark Carney is in. Chrystia Freeland appears to be readying her campaign as well. Most of the others at this junction do not appear capable of a serious challenge.
In this week’s chapter of the Global Research News Hour, we pull out a microscope and examine many of the aspects of the political scene driving affairs within the Liberal Party and what they may mean for the future of Canada.
In our first half hour, we hear from activist, author and a leading critic of Canadian foreign policy, Yves Engler, on Prime Minister Trudeau’s foreign policy, and also on what to expect from his presumed successor with regard to shifts off the course for the country he has set on the international stage. In our second half hour, we speak with Matthew Ehret, a researcher and analyst based in Montreal, Canada about the elite masters within the Club of Rome and other institutions holding Trudeau’s puppet strings, and on whether his replacement, either Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland or Mark Carney can be any more trusted.
Yves Engler is one of Canada’s foremost Canadian foreign policy critics and dissidents. He is the author of 13 books including Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy (with Owen Schalk) (2024) and Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military (2021). His articles have appeared at globalresearch.ca, rabble.ca, canadiandimension.com, and on his own site yvesengler.com.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation . Consider helping this process by making a donation to the RTF or becoming a Patreon supporter to the Canadian Patriot Review.
(Global Research News Hour Episode 457)
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Transcript of Matthew Ehret, January 15, 2025
Global Research: So, as I understand the narrative, despite disappointing results from recent by-elections in which the Liberals were defeated in all the ridings and low polling results as a permanent fixture for more than a year, Chrystia Freeland popped up. She accelerated the collapse of Trudeau after being informed in a Zoom call, apparently, that she would be replaced by Mark Carney, the banker guy turned eco-warrior we discussed last time we spoke, as finance minister.
Then she wrote this really explosive letter criticizing him for, I guess, political antics and such. After that, he appeared mute over the entire Christmas break. Then finally, on January 6, he emerged to say he was stepping down.
Would you care to comment on Trudeau’s resignation and on Chrystia ultimately being the key person to trigger his dismissal?
Matthew Ehret: Yeah. I mean, I’ve come in the course of my research, as you know, to look upon Canada and the policies that tend to take up various players in Ottawa. I see it in a relatively controlled way and as a bit of a theater, unfortunately.
Some might call that cynical, but I think that’s just part of life under a privy council-managed deep state system that’s around for over a century. I’ve always seen Justin as somebody who has played a role. That role, for those who have been his handlers, has been to advance a certain agenda that would move Canada ever more towards the type of outcome that we know the Davos crowd of the World Economic Forum and the broader Bilderberg Group has in mind for the entire world, which is the transformation of once industrial sovereign nation-states into satrapies or a supranational enforcement tool, a world government of sorts, with a certain type of ideology shaping that post-nation-state era.
And so Justin’s role, he was marketed. He was a bit of a prince-ling. His father is a bit of a mythical figure, a mythical figure in the Canadian psyche.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau has been sold to Canadians as an Abraham Lincoln-style character who saved Canada through times of crisis and stood up against big bad American imperialists when it mattered to protect Canada’s interests. There’s this whole mythology that’s been repeated and baked into a big part of the zeitgeist of especially baby boomer Canadians that made Justin a valuable asset. But when you listen to Justin speak, from his earliest days entering politics in 2000, I guess it was 12, that he was brought in as an MP before being, and he was always set up to become prime minister, he could never really compose thoughts outside of a teleprompter and outside of the comfort of his handlers.
And whenever he was put in those few occasions outside of the situation, it was a disaster.
GR: That reminds me, just sorry to interrupt, but every time he’s been faced with something like that, he just goes silent. It happened during the Freedom Convoy when they came to Ottawa.
He said, oh, I have COVID or something, I can’t talk to anybody. And then it’s happened again after the collapse of the move of Chrystia Freeland. Yeah, you were saying.
ME: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. He just runs away, finds an excuse to not be present if there’s going to be somebody who will actually challenge him in a way, which it’s understood that that will be a humiliating thing.
So he’s he’s served a role as, like I said, a marketing tool and nothing really more than that. So the idea was to always simply use him till he had nothing left to squeeze out of him. And I think that point has come and gone.
And his usefulness is now pretty much it’s over. The scandals built up. He’s embarrassed himself in India, destroyed relations with India.
The blackface thing, he tried to ignore it. It still kept coming back. His settlement with the family of the underage girl who he had sexual relations with as a high school teacher kept on coming back to haunt him.
And just his general detachment from the concerns of your average Canadian worker, it’s just too much. And so they’re flushing him now. And so I think Chrystia being a Rhodes Scholar of a, you know, somebody who is part of a slightly upper level management class within the technocracy shaping Canada, was told that now is the time to make a maneuver that would be a signal to to shift gears as far as initiate initiating a new vote for a replacement to Justin, which which is now what’s what’s happening.
GR: Well, let’s talk to people about the rise of Trudeau. You wrote that the plans to appoint him or however you describe it started in 2006. Who exactly were the key players orchestrating the decision to sculpt him into a new prime minister and why?
ME: Well, for that, one needs to go back down to the organization, a think tank that was created called Canada 2020.
It still exists. They bring in people like Barack Obama and other liberal behaviorists into Canada to lecture. And this was created in 2006 or actually I think it was a first created in 2003, but it only started really hosting conferences and becoming a more politically present force in Canadian politics in 2006.
And some of the co-founders of it included people like John Manley, Bob Rae, Anne McClellan, Bill Graham and Tom Axworthy were also co-founding members of this thing. In fact, also, I would say Diane Carney, Mark Carney’s wife, even before Mark Carney became governor of the Bank of Canada, she was one of the leading president of research at the Canada 2020 think tank. So, these are all indications that the Carney’s both have been vetted by very high up forces to play a role in determining certain outcomes within the Canadian system.
And it was at their first conference, their big conference in Mont Blanc in 2006, that Justin Trudeau was first circulated, measured up if he could be made to have what it takes to be a puppet cutout. And he was a bit of a disaster. He walked in, they say with sandals, kind of like walking in the shadow of his father, trying to always be the extroverted, big, cool oddball was sort of his attempt to always do what his dad was able to do with much more class, what Justin always tried to sort of do in a more lame, awkward way.
GR: He was an acting teacher or something like that, whereas his father, I mean, to give him credit, he was a constitutional lawyer, right?
ME: Yeah. And his father actually had Jesuit training, could use logic, reason, debate, he had great debate skills. So his father was a much more competent, democratic figure, very rigorously minded, a vicious, vicious character.
I’m no fan, but I can respect the quality of mental power that Pierre was able to wield. And he was the type of guy who could go into uncomfortable situations and meet with hostile presidents or hostile journalists on camera and hold his own pretty well. So Justin is just a shadow of a shadow, crippled, emotional character whose whole life has been largely stage managed with flatterers and handlers, including Gerald Butts or Dominic LeBlanc, childhood friends who were part of always the Canadian deep state, both of them.
Or Thomas Pitfield, Michael Pitfield’s son is also a childhood friend and lifelong manager handler of Justin. So you got these guys who are brought in to be his friends. It’s kind of Truman Showy.
When I look at this stuff, that’s what it reminds me of, you know, this poor kid. But so there’s nothing, there’s no real substance. He didn’t have like a normal upbringing or childhood set of experiences.
And so that shallowness was very clear at the earliest stage. And I took him a few, took the Canada 2020 team some years to, I think, prep him, workshop him to the point that he could be brought out as he was in 2012 to be eventual very soon. First, the head of the Liberal Party after Ignatieff took his turn, maybe then it was Bob Rae was the interim leader.
And, you know, Bob Rae is another figure who was a Rhodes Scholar, very close to Chrystia Freeland Rhodes Scholar and gave up his own seat so that Chrystia would become a member of parliament and be one of the primary handlers of Justin in 2013. So you got this whole thing. And I would also say, too, one thing that’s important with the Canada 2020 is that they were also, if you look at the background of Thomas Axworthy and Bill Graham, Bill Graham was the president of the Canada International Council for a few years, which is the Canadian branch of the roundtable movement set up by Cecil Rhodes and Milner.
So in America, it’s the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations. And in Britain, the mother think tank is Chatham House, or what’s known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs. And their Canadian branch was renamed Canada International Council.
So you had Bill Graham, who was in charge of that. Thomas Axworthy was the personal secretary to Pierre Elliott Trudeau for many years.
GR: He was the brother of Lloyd Axworthy, right?
ME: Correct.
Yeah. And both men together were also leaders of the task force for the North American Union in 2006, too, which was also, I think, it has since been rebranded, as I think you’ve noticed in the recent months, in the form of the idea of creating a North American technate with US-Canada integration that might also include perhaps Greenland, Mexico, and some countries all the way down to Brazil, really, or the upper part of Brazil. So that’s currently being floated.
It was already being designed and they had mock-up currency built on a model of the euro, of what that would look like for the Amero. And people could see those things online as they were marketing this thing, testing it to see if people would buy it at the time in 2006. It was, I guess, they received enough negative feedback from their impact studies that they chose to shelve it for a bit.
But I think it’s a scenario that’s being brought back. And this is where I see sort of, yeah, Justin is just, they need somebody now in the position of the prime ministership, of someone who actually has competence and can can sort of hold the chip together as the system globally goes into a new phase of crisis. You can’t just have any shallow puppet.
You got to have a slightly more, you know, competent technocrat type, like a Mark Carney, if you’re going to be able to manage that ship estate.
GR: I’d just like to maybe get you to maybe briefly talk about the attempts to convert this confederation into a technate. Rival factions within the Liberal Party vying for control. There’s segments of it that’s resisting these sorts of movements. And so, I mean, does that mean that they are, that one is good for the people and one is bad for the people? Or are they just kind of rival factions, both trying to cement power control for the elites? I mean, what do you think of that?
ME: Good question.
The way I tend to see it is that one, there definitely are fissures of ideology, but there’s a certain set of agreements as well on general needs to get over nation states, move the full powers of decision-making to a completely unelected intelligentsia that has full control of the powers of production, consumption, banking, and other things that will be completely detached from any type of accountability by institutions that could be represented by the people, whether labour unions or parliamentary or constitutional forms of institutions within society. They want to be liberated from all of that and have sort of power of gods. So, I think you generally have an idea that that sort of configuration is what’s desirous, but how to get it is where I think you see some fissures and disputes amongst the Western sociopathic elites.
And some of those ideas, some conceptions, I would say, give you more space if you’re a patriotic activist with a commitment to natural law and fighting this thing. There’s more space to work with within some of those groups. Now, let me give you a quick example.
Just to illustrate my meaning in a visceral way, you could see that dynamic expressed in the form of the battles within the British aristocracy of the 1930s over whether or not to continue to support the Hitler New World Order agenda. And for decades before 1936, when King Edward VIII was ousted by a controlled sort of scandal to eliminate him and replace him with a slightly more competent figure as king, he was the Nazi king. And he wasn’t alone.
A big chunk of the British aristocracy, Lloyd George, was hyper pro-Nazi. Members of parliament, very pro-Nazi. Oswald Mosley was just one of many.
Chamberlain was also relatively favorable to a Nazi-led Europe and Russia. And the idea was, you know, they were going to have a dividing up of the control of the world with Wall Street aristocrats having jurisdictional control over a big chunk of North America. Britain would have most of its colonies still maintained.
Hitler would control Russia and most of Europe. So, there was a big chunk of the Wall Street-London axis that wanted to continue with that. And then another faction that realized that Hitler was not the thing that they thought he was.
He wasn’t as obedient to the prompts he was expected to follow and had visions of being the senior partner in the New World Order instead of the junior partner. And so, there was a big fight. We could see it between groupings.
Nobody was good, but there was a fight. And they decided to ultimately abort their Hitler program and fight another day, right? So, if you didn’t have a Franklin Roosevelt, if you didn’t have a Stalin, if you didn’t have a Mao at that time that had carried out a type of struggle, a battle against the systems of empire, then the world would have looked much bleaker. And the fact that you had this configuration of like authentic nationalists for all of their problems, but they were not on the side of this population and technocratic agenda, they were able to force a much different paradigm, which took many decades to undermine during the Cold War.
So, what I see with the case of Canada, we have in the Liberal party a sort of tradition expressed by the old guard of like Jean Chrétien, who was typically in resistance to this type of program of the technate idea you alluded to. John Turner, another guy who was prime minister for two seconds, generally was resistant to NAFTA and that orientation of world government, at least it seems so. Definitely, Jean Chrétien was certainly resistant to it.
And I think that they were, for all their corruption, representing still a bit of a nationalist reflex that was seen by those who had a bit of a memory of C.D. Howe, Mackenzie King, William Lyon Mackenzie King, O.D. Skelton, and the old guard of Laurier liberals of the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, who did represent that like authentic nation building. They wanted to really build up a true sovereign nation that could stand on its own two feet. They wanted that, they were not ideologically Malthusian.
And they wanted to use the power of the nation state, the instruments of the national bank as much as they could to build our infrastructure and to do something for the next generation. So you have that, but then you have this other thing. And that other thing is reflected by these, I mean, Canada 2020 is just, they were set up to reorganize the Liberal party to de- Chrétien it.
It was the de- Chrétienification of the Liberal party during that time when the Liberals were taken down in 2005 through a scandal. And then there was a purge of party leadership and a restoration of more technocratically minded assets under Ignatieff and then Bob Rae that came out dominant. And that sort of same thing was done earlier on in 1960 with the thinkers conferences that Thomas Axworthy also participated in with a network of Liberal technocrats in 1960 to 61.
Well, after C.D. Howe died and Diefenbaker was in power for five years, that five years was a purge period where all the C.D. Howe Liberals were taken down. Walter Lockhart Gordon played a big role who later became the architect of a lot of Canada’s protective nationalist policies that Canadians tend to have liked. But in fact, I would say at the time, the motive was to simply keep Canada more locked in to the system of the Privy Council – the British Empire controls – which didn’t like having or seeing their American junior partners, in this case, it was the Rockefellers, wield their economic clout and power to gain more influence territorially over assets within Canada, which is what they were vying for in the 50s and especially the 60s. So, Walter Lockhart Gordon was part of the British Empire faction that wanted to keep Canada locked into the crown and the global controls there.
And that’s why they had to purge the C.D. Howe Liberals. So, you have these types of conferences that Canada 2020 represented at moments when they need to just sort of do hard shifts on the machine, which are not going to happen gradually. They need to do it more abruptly.
So, that’s sort of the way the Canadian system is stage-managed by the London controllers of the Privy Council. And there’s always been a battle, like I said, with their American pseudo allies, sometimes rivals. And I think that this convergence of the Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, imperial Straussians that are currently in play right now and have gained a lot of influence around Trump.
Trump, I don’t believe is fully one of them, but I don’t think he fully understands the game either. I think he’s in danger of being an instrument for a different kind of empire. And I think that there is a bit of a battle right now over like there was in those two cases I just outlined in my rant.
There does seem to be a battle line because you have Russia, you have China, you have countries of the BRICS that have rejected the depopulation agenda that are increasing their abundance, their productive powers, their excellence. And they’re becoming more difficult to battle if we continue on our path of mediocrity. That’s been a 60-year program of de-industrialization, mediocritization.
So, how do we fight them against a geopolitician who’s like a cold-hearted geopolitician if you’ve made everybody who you need to use stupid and unproductive? And so, I think that there’s currently sort of a clash of the old guard, hard Nazi movement of the British Empire, which wants to double down on their depopulation, Green New Deal, Green Genocide Agenda, which Mark Carney seems to be a vicious representative of that ideological grouping.
GR: Sounds more like Freeland.
ME: Both.
Well, they’re both Oxford creatures. They’re both in Oxford, I think, around the same time before being brought into broader intelligence operations, Freeland through Reuters, Carney through Goldman Sachs. That’s sort of the feeder school, right?
But they work together very closely.
GR: But now they’re fighting each other. Yeah.
ME: That’s the thing.
I think it’s a circus. Fight for the drama, for the public consumption. But I think Carney and Freeland both represent the eco-genocide technocrat agenda that doesn’t want to change what they’ve been doing as far as commitment for depopulation under this Green New Deal thing for the past decades. And then you’ve got this other faction presenting such names as Elon Musk or Peter Thiel that are trying to really influence Trump heavily right now to build up the physical productive base of the United States, which benefit Canada, frankly, it’s possible as far as just not wanting to do it because it’s good or moral, but simply practically in order to fight Russia and China.
GR: Could I maybe just ask you one more question? According to polls, Conservatives are leading the Liberals now by 20 percentage points, and they’ve been in the lead for about a year or more. I find it hard to believe that any credible candidate would want to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party in its present state.
Why would this grand banker guy want to waste time leading an opposition party, as looks to be the case right now?
ME: Well, I think he’s been given guarantees by forces that are much more powerful than him that this is what you’re going to be doing now. And the elections, I believe, are only officially going to happen probably in October, but it could maybe be triggered earlier. Certainly, there’s already propaganda.
He’s being brought into Jon Stewart. They’re really doing a lot of work to brand him again as the great Lincoln hero, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau 2.0 who saved Canada in a time of crisis. They’re already creating a mythos around him and marketing him to an American and Canadian audience.
He’s going to be the replacement to Justin, I guarantee it. I’ve been saying this for three years. I don’t know.
I agree with you. It’s difficult to imagine what kind of propaganda would be needed to shift such statistics, as you just mentioned. A 20% lead in favor for the Conservatives is a very tough nut to crack.
I don’t know. I don’t know how they’re going to do it. But I know that people are very malleable.
And kind of like Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, they can cheer for Pompey one second and then cheer for Julius Caesar if he offers them more breaded circus and drink. I don’t know. I don’t have too much faith in the malleability of the mob and how they’re played like an instrument.
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.
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Notes:
- https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/trudeau-flushing-and-the-north-american
- https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-suddenly-has-no-leader-and-no-plan-for-a-trump-trade-fight-341a5f0c
- Tristin Hopper (December 30, 2024), “Vacationing Trudeau can’t escape catcalls and mockery: ‘Get out of B.C.'”, National Post; https://nationalpost.com/opinion/justin-trudeau-ski-vacation
