Column: Political Power and Justin Trudeau
By Charles Jeanes
Arc of the Cognizant CCIII
The winter of Canadian discontent: alas, politics to end a year
“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun [or son] of York”. — Wm. Shakespeare, Richard III
“Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways. This is what positive politics can do.” — Justin Trudeau, victory speech 2015
“… the first child of a radiant Vancouver hippie newly married to a weirdly-compelling prime minister whose political honeymoon was not yet over,” Justin Trudeau’s initial claim of national attention was entirely unearned. — quote from Paul Wells in SaskToday, July 5, 2024
Character and Leadership, again
I have opined on the issue of individual personality and character in a previous Arc, long ago, taking Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau and Winston Churchill as my exemplars.
The interplay of power with the self-identification and character of leaders, never fails to fascinate.
https://rosslandtelegraph.com/2022/09/07/opinion-character-and-leadership/
The effect of being powerful has been a well-known fact for centuries of human political history; power corrupts character and degrades the morality of many a leader. Justin Trudeau is today’s poster-boy for the truth of this clichéd observation: power imposes a great test on an individual’s character, and he has been failing the test.
His father, the late Pierre Elliot Trudeau, was a giant of our political history, a man who studied in elite universities and deliberated profoundly on what it meant to be a statesman, who aimed to rise to the ranks of our top leadership, and did so, and then delivered a Constitution and Charter for Canadians in 1982.
Why the son has so little of his father’s profundity, while failing to apply what he learned from his mother’s feminism, is a question it would take a deep biography and serious scholarship to answer. A “psycho-historian” might do justice to the subject.
Background for a Shallow Character
Former P. M. Stephen Harper famously tried to paint Trudeau as a man not “ready for prime time” and unequal to the challenges of leading a nation. Trudeau had the last laugh; his great success in the election of 2015 handed him a majority and sent Harper packing. Yet there is truth in the charge that Justin is an unserious leader.
Trudeau has been cursed by good fortune, ease, good looks, and charm. Character is not constructed in a milieu of privilege; his father built a character by serious deliberation. Justin before politics was a teacher, actor, jack-of-a-few trades, whose best friend Gerald Butts encouraged him to think of imitating his father and leading a party.
I joined the Liberal Party online, for no fee, just so Justin could ascend to leadership of the party on the first ballot – he won that ballot with more than 80% of the votes — for I desperately wanted to see Harper gone from power. To me, Trudeau was clearly the man to do that one job. Well, he did it. My bad: I asked for no more.
The Diagnosis: egoism and shallow understanding
Justin Trudeau has been made less by success, and has deteriorated our social order while his power has been determining our policies. Canada is in trouble on a number of fronts, and as the old proverb says, “a rotting fish begins to stink from the head.” The Leader is justifiably blamed for ills of his government, its civil service, and the party she or he leads, whether she or he leads a democracy or an autocracy.
This man, grown from late youth to middle age as our P.M., is an embarrassment to his party; the party is an embarrassment to Canadians. It is deeply incompetent and politically defective. It projects style and façade, is short on substance and content. Natives, the ill, the homeless, immigrants, are losers in these ego-driven politics.
Trudeau’s failure of character is revealed in one glaring repeated error: he loves promises that signal his virtue but accomplish mediocre results on the ground. He loves the pose of progressivism; he fails at effective work, and fails the concrete follow-through to the people who believed his words had meaning.
He doesn’t “get it” – that saying “our party’s values are Canadian values” is meaningless hot air to a lot of us. He says he can win the election because “our values” are what the voters will support. In his imagined scenario – stuck in his head since he won his match with boxer Patrick Brazeau – he is the under-rated fighter who can take down Bully Poilievre. At least his father’s “Just Society” vision was not claimed by Pierre to be a monopoly of his own Party. Justin is obtuse.
The Cracks in the Glitter appear: Justin cannot handle peer criticism
I began to wonder about his character when he could not be more transparent about his mistakes. Why was he unable to show some humility in his mishandling of matters surrounding the departure of Jody Wilson-Raybould from his Cabinet?
From all I have read, it seems clear that Justin exerts great charm to recruit women to his Cabinet, proclaiming he is a “proud feminist”, but when a strong character asserts a view in direct opposition to his desires, he does not meet that woman face to face and iron out what needs to be changed. He will not change, and she must be demoted from a high post to a lesser. Small wonder they end up mistrusting him.
One has seen several photographs of Justin gazing eye-to-eye with his mother, with Wilson-Raybould, with Freeland – but when he needs to be transparent about his drive for ministerial conformity with a pet idea, he will not face his opponent in a one-on-one meeting. He sends a bureaucrat from the Prime Minister’s Office – an office that has grown much too powerful and insulates the P.M. from his MPs, according to many, many political scientists studying Canadian governance – and the functionary delivers the message without benefit of appeal.
“Do this, or the Big Man will take your job”, is the message. You cannot shoot the messenger nor the man who sent the message, so you leave. But in leaving, you might throw mud. Freeland just did that, masterfully.
Proof of the Pudding: refusal to sincerely consider he might be wrong
One of the great lines delivered by that great revolutionary, Oliver Cromwell, just before a war (he won a crushing victory) is this bon mot: “I beseech you gentlemen, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible ye might be mistaken.” Justin Trudeau has in all probability never heard such words, but he has heard their equivalent as his Party loses one seat after another in the House of Commons over the past year of by-elections, some in formerly solid, safe Liberal ridings.
In the autumn, he promised to reflect on his electoral future when two dozen of his caucus MPs handed him a letter, and had his answer within 24 hours: “ I will lead the Party in the next election.” Some reflective character revealed in that, mais non?
Now, with even worse prospects due to Chrystia Freeland’s searing critique – from the woman whose loyalism was beyond reproach until this month – Justin is being slower and quieter before a reply, but I am absolutely sure his answer will be: he will not step away and let the Party replace him as leader for the next election.
Conclusions: making peace with a fact difficult for “progressives” to manage
Canada is hardly unique in its crisis of a leadership lacking character. Americans chose a president last month of whom no one would say, “his character is of the utmost quality, outstanding in integrity and competence!” (Well, actually… some of his fans would say it.) He is seen as an inspiring “change agent” (of Chaos?).
The U.K., France, Italy, Hungary, Israel, India, and Brazil, have all revealed deep defects in the quality of their leaders, and yet the wild popularity of those leaders within a solid base of conservative voters is incontestable. These are nations where democratic institutions are supposed to be deeply rooted.
Canada is hardly exempt from this polarization we can observe in other lands. Our left-liberal electoral fraction confronts a conservative opposition fraction ready to embrace the Right, and the undecided will vote to throw out the incumbents.
Here is an argument of some solid standing: the middle class of historically-affluent societies will indulge emotional populism and extremes of conservatism when their prosperity is being hurt, and the family’s pain is felt in loss of economic security. Pandemic, inflation, war, homelessness, and huge national debt, threaten stability.
Now that the NDP-Liberal regime in Ottawa has landed us here, where inflation is damaging the lives of middle-class families and a 68-billion dollar budget deficit has been announced, a Conservative government is all but certain, because voters are not loyal to one party more than they are desperate to have good, effective, stable government. And Justin Trudeau stopped giving us that a couple or three years ago.
I am an intellectual, my politics are idea-based, and the socialist Idea has made sense to me all my adult life. But I accept that Canada historically must hand power to the Conservative Party at intervals, and live with the consequences of conservatism. I urge my fellow Canucks to make peace with that fact.
“Canada feels broken”, as Poilievre put it – hyperbole, yes, and “not a rational argument.” But Canadians’ feelings are not negligible merely because the political class says they are not supported by expert data. Feelings are also facts.
The People are hurting; they want a villain and a champion. Justin has seemingly designed his own costume for the former role. The latter … ?
Appendix: reading about Trudeaus
The best biography of Pierre E. T. is by the Nemnis. See here: https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2012/01/the-pierre-we-hardly-knew/ From these texts I drew my conclusion that the father was self-aware about his future statesmanship from a young age.
On Justin, there is as yet nothing definitive, and there will not be until more time has passed, and he has passed from the political scene. Until then: https://www.policymagazine.ca/justin-trudeau-on-the-ropes-or-a-brief-history-of-disenchantment/ Paul Wells writes stimulating prose.
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