Rex Murphy: In a recent interview, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put that phrase in the past tense — a “time when men were men” — but, may I suggest, ever so mildly, that the axiom is still sound.
But that phrase wasn’t the only thing that caught my attention in Trudeau’s interview with the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt. It was when he alleged that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was yearning for the days when “white men ruled.”
To be just, here’s the whole quote: “What is he actually proposing? He’s saying everything’s broken.… He’s playing and preying on the kinds of anger and anxieties about some Canada that used to be — where men were men and white men ruled.”
Still, even in context, that last phrase bothers me. I don’t like the attention to skin colour, specifically “white.” I cannot see, of all people, this particular prime minister calling out a “skin colour” epithet in any other context, or — to be sure — any other epidermal shade than white.
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