Article content “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and so perhaps we shouldn’t hold Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to any previously articulated conception of “genocide.” In 2019 he accepted the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls that Canada was guilty not just of a historic genocide against Indigenous peoples (for which there is a case to be made) and women and girls specifically (which is a stretch), but also an ongoing one (which is patently absurd). Things went rather differently on Tuesday when Trudeau was asked whether he believes China is perpetrating genocide against its Muslim Uyghur population.