PAY ATTENTION AMERICA !

We Canadians, in a manner of smugness with which we're really not accustomed, thought we'd cornered the charisma market in the post Obama years after your bizarro President, Donald Trump, was elected and our sophisticated, charming, debonair, young, image obsessed Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, rose to the world's media attention.

Alas ! When the history of our 23rd Prime Minister is writ...pretty much all that may need mention is "That India Trip" to challenge our preconceived perception and to pinpoint that week in 2018 when the wheels came off the charisma wagon.

We're about to legalize Marijuana in Canada. I am assuming perhaps that it was the celebratory Indian Ganja shared onboard the Prime Minister and his entourage's flight from Ottawa to India a few days back that kiboshed their official mission. And, somehow and in some unimaginable way (For no particular worthwhile reason) allowed our government's leader to parade and blunder his way, family and retinue in tow, in overly inappropriate Indian outfits across a chunk of southern Asia. All of which, to say the least in just about less than 72 hours, turned a really important international sortie into a bad joke and an international embarrassment. What could they possibly have been thinking ?

Pundits have suggested that there had been recent hints that bats were slippin' out of the belfry. One of which was a recent overzealous suggestion that the term 'mankind' should really be changed to 'peoplekind' to reflect gender neutrality - A comment Mr. Trudeau subsequently characterized as a silly joke - Be that as it may, the current India brouhaha has likely left the world's media to revise or downgrade some earlier glossy front page adorable fawning over our photogenic Prime-Minister. Even former advisors to other Liberal Prime Ministers have weighed-in with the opinion that there seemed to be little purpose, and clearly no proper planning to this get together of Canadian official misfits on Indian soil. In a blunt editorial even the 'Toronto Star', certainly not a newspaper unsympathetic to Canada's National Liberal Party, calls the India misadventure "(perhaps) the least successful foray into that country since the repelled Mongol invasions of the 13th century." - Yikes !

Canada's trade mission to India may be one for the books, the bad books. But there has also been little if any progress on the sputtering NAFTA talks with the United-States and Mexico, the Trans-Pacific deal (TPP) though still in talks, minus the USA, is progressing at a snails pace and though concluded,  there's been little if any more mention of the European Free Trade accord. Later in the spring, Prime Minister Trudeau presides over the G-7 Summit of world leaders at La Malbaie, an idyllic resort on Quebec's lower St. Lawrence River. The conclave will involve Donald Trump's first foray into Canada as President of the United-States. The world has a fairly good take on what Mr. Trump is all about. But in the afterglow of this India imbroglio, we may have suddenly been jolted into a revised notion of Mr. Trudeau's competence playing at the world's leadership table. Let's hope it's not too late to reverse the damage suffered, and that the next time our PM comes to play, he shows up as who 'HE IS' and not as a Mr. Dressup - The clown shoes have already been claimed by someone else already.