GUNTER: Trudeau's camping pledge is peak privilege

Justin Trudeau waves to supporters after speaking at an election campaign stop in Brampton Sept. 22, 2019.Carlos Osori / REUTERS

Now Justin Trudeau’s privilege truly is showing.

I’m talking about Trudeau’s announcement Thursday that the planet can be saved and the plight of the urban poor reversed if only we would spend gobs of taxpayers’ dollars getting underprivileged urchins out camping. The alleged climate “crisis” and chronic poverty whisked away with some tents and sleeping bags and, of course, government-subsidized trips to the woods.

This is at one and the same time one of the most patronizing and one of the most naive policies ever proposed during a Canadian election.

While at university I had a dorm mate who smoked a LOT of weed one night and was sure he had discovered the meaning of life. In his cannabis-induced haze he scribbled his answer down lest he forget it when his buzz dissipated. His insight, “This room smells funny,” was no more absurd than our prime minister’s “Camping Experience for Every Child in Canada.”

Trudeau is so far removed from the lives of ordinary Canadians, he just can’t comprehend regular people’s realities.

After he was caught doing blackface three(!) times, Trudeau tried to blame his serial racism on the “layers of privilege” he had had to bear in his upbringing. In that instance, the “privilege” excuse was nonsense.

But Trudeau’s proposal to spend $150 million a year on “bursaries” for 75,000 low-income families to spend four days annually in a provincial or national park is the airy dream of a privileged elitist and cries out to be lampooned.

Trudeau wants to “ensure that every young Canadian, by grade eight, is taught the skills to camp.” Forget about literacy and numeracy, our provincial education systems need more fire-lighteracy. (Or is that s’more fire-lighteracy?)

Canadian schoolkids (especially the ones from low-income families) don’t need nutritious school lunches, they need Jiffy Pop over a cook stove. Improving basic math and science skills be damned, what this country demands is more tent-pitching lessons. And maybe some hatchet management, singalong lessons and shadow puppetry.

Like some 21st Century Baden-Powell (the English lord and general who founded the Scouting movement), Trudeau may as well have said during his announcement Thursday in Sudbury, “Just get our children out breathing the clean pine air and participating in rugged survival pursuits and our society will soar like a majestic goose rising up from a mountain lake.”

Perhaps the only thing Trudeau has ever proposed that was more aloof was his insistence in 2017 that Indigenous young people didn’t need community centres but more places “to store their canoes and paddles so they can connect back out on the land.”

Nearly nine million Canadian households (about two-thirds) claim to have at least one member who camps “occasionally.” We are already one of the camping-ist countries on earth. And the number of us camping has risen by about 5% since 2015.

But it’s this rise that shows how unneeded Trudeau’s plan is. The increase is almost entirely the result of more low-income and new Canadians taking up the recreation.

The true arrogance is that Trudeau feels he was shaped by his camping as a youth, therefore all young people will be made better by following his example.

But how will we know the $2,000 goes to families who truly need it and that it is spent on camping? The bureaucracy to administer the program will far exceed the cost of the bursaries.

And how are these urban campers-to-be to get to parks? Trudeau proposes VIA Rail, despite the fact the Crown rail company doesn’t go anywhere near most of the PM’s proposed campsites.

Tim Hortons already sends nearly 20,000 underprivileged kids to camp each summer for about $12 million, all of it donated by Canadians buying coffee and doughnuts on Camp Day.

Maybe Trudeau should let Tim’s do his platform for him.

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