Concerns about closet racism in the Canadian elite is understandable, and The Toronto Star’s Paradkar has a duty as a journalist to speak her mind, even if is based on suspicions. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/09/25/giving-maxime-bernier-a-platform-legitimizes-his-dangerous-ideas.html. Paradkar is “a Toronto Star race and gender columnist, [who] is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. “

Curiously, Paradkar doesn’t even mention Justin Trudeau in her article which focuses solely on her suspicions that Maxime Bernier is a closet racist.

There is plenty of evidence for Trudeau’s racist, racy, and intolerant closet. He appears in photographs, videos and there are first hand accounts of Trudeau mocking people of colour in black and brown face – on multiple occasions.

In the below, Paradkar discusses her suspicions that Bernier is a closet racist by quoting from his proposed policy statements. Oddly though, she intermingles Bernier’s statements with self-quotes in her own voice.

Paradkar writes as if she is the omniscient narrator in a play or a novel, telling her audience what she believes are the interior thoughts of the suspected racist character of Bernier:

“Bernier is open about his views on multiculturalism — it should be banned as a policy. He demands that immigrants “integrate” — with whom? The “west” (read: white). He seeks a Canadian values test for new immigrants (add ominous music and “sharia law” here). Refugees — we can’t save the world, so let’s do very little. Climate change — not an emergency. (All quotations here are mine.)”

I’m not sure why Paradkar’s imagined play did not include the former drama teacher Trudeau dancing up a storm on the Canadian election stage, perhaps first appearing in an Indian costume groping women, and then doing a quick costume change and going black face, all to the horror of the Canadian crowd.

Trudeau has taught us that the Canadian elite espousing multiculturalism can be closet racists, or at least stupefyingly intolerant, and he has the costumes to prove it.

We could be surprised yet again, but it may be that it is the conservative voices who are speaking forthrightly and openly in the public square, that are the ones who are respectful of, and don’t have the impulse to, mock people of colour.