Right before he was fired from Fox News last spring, the prime-time host Tucker Carlson was set to release a documentary called O, Canada! The trailer seemed to unironically suggest that the country needs to be liberated (read: invaded by the United States) to save it from the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This move would, Tucker implied, accord with the US “official policy” of opposing oppressive dictatorships. The marketing for the documentary included Soviet-style graphics of Trudeau. “What if tyranny arrived right next door?” Tucker asked in the trailer. “And what would our government do in response?”
It wouldn’t have taken Tucker, or his team, much digging to uncover the fact that Trudeau is the leader of a politically centrist minority government within a parliamentary system. For all his many faults and political missteps, Trudeau isn’t a communist dictator worthy of a ground offensive by the US military. (And, by the way, Canada fares better than the US on human and economic freedom scales in rankings by think tanks like the Freedom House and the conservative-leaning Cato and Fraser institutes. The US doesn’t even crack the top twenty! Hmmm, should Canada do the liberating?)
