I don't always agree with Conrad Black but on this one I definitely think he's on track. Trudeau's moronic flag at half staff gesture was typical at first, all style without substance. But in lieu of anything else he's kept it permanently at half staff for months now with no indication it will ever change. This is confusing foreigners, as Black points out, something I hadn't really considered.
The most frequent opening conversational gambit that I encountered during the past three very social weeks in the refreshingly mask-free, socially undistanced city of London, was the question of why the Canadian flag on top of Canada House in Trafalgar Square appeared to be permanently at half-mast. I had the heavy duty of conceding that it was part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau‘s endlessly protracted act of national self-humiliation and confected grief over the history of the white man’s treatment of Indigenous people in Canada over the last 500 years. The many informed people whom I encountered in London could not be described as a broadly based and deeply enthusiastic group of admirers of Justin Trudeau as a leader and clear champion of the Canadian national interest. In general, in my experience, he is seen in Europe, as in the United States, as the chic and dapper bearer of a name well-known in Canada, who deserves the credit due to being a consecutive election winner in a G7 country, but is nevertheless seen as a feckless and rather superficial posturer.
Like most people when absent from the country where they reside, I always do my best to put Canada‘s case forward as persuasively as I can to doubting foreigners. My explanation for a permanent flag in official mourning over the Canadian High Commission in the greatest public square in Britain was greeted with universal, and not always polite, incredulity. It is a challenging posture to try to defend. For reasons that he will perhaps someday make clear, Trudeau has taken it upon himself to go to unheard of and absurdly histrionic lengths to propagate the historic fraud that Canada should be permanently ashamed of its treatment of the native inhabitants of the land.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-lowered-flags-are-a-symbol-of-a-nation-in-decline