the Walnut Diary

SUN news is all abuzz about Justin Trudeau’s evening speech to a group of highbrow women in Toronto last week where he uttered a heretical statement about admiring China.

I first ran into the “admire China” meme in 1979 in grad school. The dean of the Queen’s Faculty of Education had spent a month in China and showed us his photographs in one class. As an educator he was deeply impressed by the rows and rows of young men and women out for morning calisthenics. He told us that the average height of a male recruit into the army was then 6′, evidence of the vast improvement in nutrition China had achieved in a single generation.

We were somewhat taken aback by Dean Ready’s attitude, but eventually we came to realize that the Chinese have worked very, very hard, first to feed their people, and then to grow their economy.

This is what a visitor sees on a trip to China.

Justin’s comment suited his sophisticated audience (likely former grad students all) but it played a bit too well to the Sun News camera. David Akin extracted a measure of revenge for JT’s drubbing of their Great Conservative Hope last spring in the celebrity boxing match — the media event which came as close to humiliating Ezra Levant as anything ever has, and launched Trudeau’s run to 24 Sussex.

This week some cartoonist will likely cast Trudeau as the Road Runner with Akin or Levant as Wiley E. Coyote in a scenario where it looks as if the anvil is at last about to fall on JT’s head…