You’d think someone who has operated in the world of UN politics would be inured to hypocrisy. Based in Geneva, the 65-member Conference on Disarmament (CD) is the UN’s only standing disarmament forum and nuclear disarmament is its top priority. The first meeting of the state parties of the new nuclear ban treaty, which entered into force in January last year, was held in Vienna last month. Guess which country held the rotating presidency of the CD in June? North Korea. Even by those standards, owing to the unique combination of virtue-signalling words and virtue-eschewing deeds, my lead candidate for the world’s hypocrite-in-chief leader is Canada’s Justin Trudeau. I give you four examples why.

From the start, Trudeau cultivated the persona of a global champion of gender equality, a feminist foreign policy, diversity and inclusiveness. In his first cabinet, 15 of the 31 ministers were women. Asked why, Trudeau smugly replied: ‘Because it’s 2015’. The CBC site of the swearing-in ceremony still carries a prominent photo of Jody Wilson-Raybould, the First Nations Justice Minister whose powerful personality, personal ethics and institutional integrity punctured his pomposity. Trudeau lost his rock-star popularity with the high-profile SNC-Lavalin scandal in 2019. Wilson-Raybould resisted efforts by the PM’s office to improperly influence her consideration of whether to accept a plea bargain-equivalent settlement with the giant Quebec construction firm, or indict them on criminal charges of bribery. The firm has close ties with the Liberal party, especially in Quebec which is Trudeau’s home province and a party stronghold. Wilson-Raybould was fired from cabinet, a female colleague Jane Philpott resigned in protest and both women were expelled from the party. Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion found Trudeau guilty of a conflict of interest violation. Trudeau’s office stalled the subsequent obstruction of justice investigation by the RCMP.

When BLM protests proliferated and taking the knee became all the rage, the performative Trudeau ostentatiously took the knee on the lawns of Parliament House. In September 2019, Time magazine published a 2001 photo of a 29-year-old Trudeau wearing blackface and one hand splayed across the bare upper chest of a woman. Soon several other photos surfaced of black and brown-faced Trudeau. He would have sacked any other minister for the offence but refused even to think of resigning himself. Henry Olsen noted in the Washington Post: Trudeau’s ‘preening moral superiority… has shown a mind-blowing degree of hypocrisy’. Canadian columnist Christie Blatchford concurred: ‘it’s his hypocrisy that is so galling’.

In 2020, Trudeau gratuitously waded into the domestic Indian controversy on farm reform laws, declaring: ‘Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest’. He urged ‘de-escalation and dialogue’ on Modi in dealing with the convoy of farmers parked around Delhi. Confronting his own Freedom Convoy this year, Trudeau activated never before used anti-terrorism emergency laws to crush them ruthlessly. Confiscating and freezing not just their assets and accounts but also those of all donors took Trudeau’s ‘sunny Canada’ close to China’s social credit system. The truckies kept the food and essential goods flowing across borders during the first Covid wave before vaccines were available and were praised, even by Trudeau, for their heroic service to the community. Like soiled condoms, having served their purpose, they were then flushed down the toilet. Never missing an opportunity for photo-ops with vacuous celebrities like Greta Thunberg and lately the ubiquitous Zelensky, Trudeau could not find five minutes to talk to the very same truckies parked right on his doorstep.

And now abortion rights, not in Canada but in the US. The man just cannot help himself. The former drama teacher waded right into the US controversy by attacking the decision as ‘horrific’: ‘No government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body’. Anthony Albanese joined in, saying the decision is ‘a setback for women and their right to control their own bodies and their lives’. Is he really so thick that he cannot see the Supreme Court has returned the decisions on abortion to the default position that exists in almost all other Western countries, including Australia? OK, scratch the last question about Albanese. He answered it during the campaign.

SCOTUS did not outlaw abortion nor make a finding on the merits of abortion, only on whether the US Constitution confers a nationwide right to abortion. Does Trudeau fancy he has superior legal training and skills to answer that question than SCOTUS? The 6-3 majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that in discovering a constitutional right to abortion where none existed, Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) were an ‘abuse of judicial authority’. It was time to ‘return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives’. In recognition of America’s federal reality, this is with state legislatures. A patchwork of abortion laws is likely to emerge across the states, just as in Europe.

On 26 June, British talk radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer tweeted a sharp response to Trudeau: ‘You literally just spent the last two years telling women and men what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, you disgusting hypocritical excuse for a man’. Plus embracing the LGBTQWTF agenda that has tried to erase women’s identity and exorcise women-specific language from society and the medical industry, posing a threat to the wellbeing of mothers. Women’s objective needs for safety, dignity, privacy and fairness in maternity wards, change-rooms, toilets, prisons and sporting arenas have been sacrificed to the feelings of biological males called trans women.

The progressive luvvies can stretch the gender identity alphabet soup into dozens of letters to denote the wide diversity but see abortion in purely binary colours. Funny that. ‘My body my choice’ – so exercise your choice, thrice over, if you will. You can choose to keep your legs closed. Or, if too weak-willed to do so, you can choose from readily available range of contraception options. Or, if you discover you are pregnant, you can choose to terminate within the first trimester. Instead, abortion is too often used as an after-the-fact tool of contraception.

Trudeau’s Dobbs remarks feed the firming narrative he lacks gravitas, is a lightweight dilletante from a privileged background who mouths progressive platitudes but cuts himself considerably more slack than he does anyone else for ethical lapses past and current. It’s time Trudeau heeded the sage advice, attributed variously to Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and Maurice Switzer: better to remain silent and risk being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt. Mr Albanese, please note.