RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Justin Trudeau: Why Can’t He Be Our President?” asks the cover of the latest edition of Rolling Stone. Well, the Constitution. But let’s assume Canada’s prime minister was born an American citizen: On the strength of the slavering, feverish, we’re-in-heat-and-we-don’t-care-who-knows-it Rolling Stone profile, Trudeau couldn’t even get the nomination of the Democratic party.

Trudeau’s idyllic northern paradise is actually the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, and even Boy Band Angela Merkel doesn’t seem particularly eager to destroy the country’s fossil-fuel industry. Sensibly enough, he’s a big proponent of the Keystone Pipeline and Canada’s Kinder Morgan pipeline, which transports hydrocarbons between the oil sands of Alberta (which are “pockmarked,” RS gravely informs us, “like a B-52 bombing range”) and British Columbia. Sensibly enough, he notes that carbon-based fuel will be with us for quite some time: “One of the things that we have to realize is we cannot get off gas, we cannot get off oil, fossil fuels tomorrow — it’s going to take a few decades,” he tells RS. “Maybe we can shorten it, but there’s going to have to be a transition time.”

A few more decades of bowing and scraping to Big Carbon? Try selling that to American Democratic-party primary voters. Doesn’t Trudeau realize that climate change is an imminent existential threat, that fossil fuels are the ticking time bomb that will blow up the world? Trudeau lacks the necessary climate hysteria to be an American Democrat.

Yet Rolling Stone largely gives Trudeau a pass on his sheik-like affection for black gold and hurries on to other topics. Hey, Justin snowboards! He’s handsome! He loves diversity! RS is more interested in the fact that Trudeau’s defense minister is a member of a minority gruop: Harjit Sajjan was born in Punjab, India, wears a turban, and served in the Canadian military in Afghanistan. Women and minorities make up more than half his cabinet.

So here’s Rolling Stone’s politics: We’ll forgive you for turning Earth into a coal-black cinder as long as you keep cheering for identity politics in these final moments of suffering we share together. But if you really do want to live in a country led by Justin Trudeau, given that people not born American can’t actually be president of the United States, why not do what Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick suggests in the kicker of his piece: “At this moment, Justin Trudeau’s Canada looks like a beautiful place to ride out an American storm.” Why won’t Justin’s American acolytes  do what they keep promising to do and take off to the Great White North?

It’s not as if there’s no room. Canada is a land of 36 million people spread out over 3.9 million square miles. Among the 100 largest countries on earth, it ranks 99th in population density. Canada is empty.

And it’s welcoming immigrants. Trudeau brags that he has welcomed 40,000 Syrian refugees. If Canada can handle those, why can’t they handle 40,000 Vox refugees? The entire staffs of Mother Jones, The New Republic, and Rolling Stone are simply aching to live in a social-justice, diversity-first paradise. Why don’t they quit whining about it and pack up? Montreal is just a bus ride away. They could spend the rest of their days happily telling the rest of us how beautiful life is up in Trudeauland.

In fact, Canada love is just progressive fanboyism, the equivalent of comic-book nerds’ discussing what it would be like to live in Wayne Manor. Emigration from America to America’s Hat is basically unchanged since the pre-Trump era — 2,325 Americans took the Canadian plunge in the first quarter of this year, up about 100 from the first quarter last year.

Lena Dunham is still among us despite her highly specific vow, “I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will. I know a lovely place in Vancouver.” Actor Keegan-Michael Key similarly indicated he had a northern escape route planned out when he said Canada is, “like, ten minutes from Detroit,” adding, “That’s where I’m from; my mom lives there. It’d make her happy too.” Key has given no indication lately that he is following up on that.

It might just be that there is more to a country than who happens to be head of state at any given moment. It’s also possible that the U.S. didn’t become the Third Reich on January 20, 2017. Our progressive friends, who alternate between saying, “Ha-ha, Trump can’t do anything!” and dressing up like extras from The Handmaid’s Tale, are proving yet again that their alarmism is meaningless. If any professional lefty actually gives any indication of being serious about leaving America, I’d be happy to start a Kickstarter campaign to pay for their moving expenses.

— Kyle Smith is National Review’s critic-at-large.