Justin Trudeau Needs To Put Country First

On The Laurier Club And Patriotism’s Dishonour

Since I ended yesterday’s live coverage of events, Justin Trudeau popped up at the Laurier Club fundraiser, gave a speech about how it was a tough day but his love of Canada and his trust in Canadians gets him through the hard times. It’s a nice platitude, and I certainly don’t begrudge him showing up to the Laurier Club (though I might begrudge the rumoured state of certain people who are ostensibly running the country, given the texts I’m seeing), but that speech wasn’t the right tone or tenor for the occasion. Trudeau failed with that speech, a typical stump speech designed to make his room of rich donors feel better.

It’s also a remarkably tone deaf place to give your first public comments since the resignation of your Deputy PM. If one were to be uncharitable, they would point out that signalling that the country only deserves to hear from their PM if you can afford the $1700 ticket is more than a little bit damaging to a leader already seen as hopelessly out of touch. Again, if one were to be uncharitable.

The point in Trudeau’s speech that animated me, however, was his invocation in both official languages his love of Canada. Trudeau is trying to inoculate himself from his critics by draping himself in the flag. His decisions, far from the narcissistic and damaging actions of a man child with a chip on his shoulder and a complex about the fact that everyone said he wasn’t the intellectual heir to Pierre, are an expression of his love for Canada, you see? He can’t be doing something wrong, because he just loves Canada so gosh darn much and wants to continue to make it even more so the best country in the world. It’s all so damn Canadian polite you can barely squeeze a sorry through it. Except, of course, it’s bullshit, and everybody knows it.

What you have is a story we’ve seen a hundred times before. The international comparisons are important here, because too often we get lost in the sauce of specifics and personalities, as if Trudeau being a narcissist is new in one of these battles. Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were both narcissists, as were both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Do we think Boris Johnson isn’t one? Biden’s stubborn refusal to leave the spotlight certainly showed his case for it. The details don’t matter, the fact is when a challenge like this gets going it almost always succeeds.

The closest comparison to this where they didn’t would be John Howard, who did somehow manage to survive internal strife in the 2004-07 Parliament and stay as leader of the Aussie Libs, and fight the 2007 election. Superficially, the comparison makes sense - both had won a number of elections, their first re-elect was their hardest and they won while losing the popular vote (Howard lost the 2PP in 1998), and both should have been, if there was a Hollywood ending to their careers, replaced by their financial ministers and longtime governing partners. The problem is, Howard is the only comparison point.

Every other time the rubicon has been crossed - Rudd/Gillard/Rudd, Turnbull/Abbott/Turnbull, the Dutton spill that ended with Scott Morrison taking office, the attempts against Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, the push against Biden, even going back the efforts to depose Thatcher or Bob Hawke - they don’t get undone. John Major was able to keep the leadership by vacating the leadership in 1995, but he did so by not letting the opposition get too big or too organized. Had he waited he wouldn’t have fought the 1997 election, and Trudeau waited too long.

Membership based pushes, like Mulcair’s 2016 review or Jason Kenney’s 2022 one, are similar in that once the call for a review gets to a certain point it’s inevitable that the leader’s performance will be insufficient. Had Trudeau done what Nate Erskine-Smith suggested after St. Paul’s - let the Liberal membership decide - it might not have been enough but it would have ended this. Now we’re here, having wasted six months.

But this is more than just an assessment that the PM’s moves likely won’t save him (though, it seems likely they won’t), I want to come back to the idea of patriotism, waving the flag, and Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau and his caucus claim that Pierre Poilievre is an existential threat to Canada. Justin Trudeau claimed under oath that Pierre Poilievre is allowing, through his refusal to get a security clearance, traitors to Canada to run amok in his caucus. He routinely calls the Conservative Party Trumpian or Maple MAGA. He and his party routinely call the Conservatives threats to a woman’s right to choose, the child benefit and day care policies, Pharma and Dental, and any number of other policies. And yet, Justin Trudeau is enabling the destruction of those policies by staying.

The thing that gets me is that the government are far more apocalyptic about the consequences of a Poilievre government than I am. I think Poilievre will be bad in the way most conservative governments are. I don’t think he genuinely poses a threat to women’s choice and I don’t think treating a leader who has, on the record, on camera, declared himself to be pro-choice did that just to overturn Morgentaler. But let’s say you do genuinely believe that a Poilievre government will use the Notwithstanding Clause to undo Morgentaler, cut every legacy program the Liberals implemented, reverse the 2005 gay marriage laws, and toss every man of woman born in jail for 15 years for pot smoking, or whatever End Of Canada hyperbole the government claims to believe about Poilievre. If you genuinely believe Poilievre’s Franco With A French Accent, shouldn’t you be more worried about the fact you’re about to give him 250 seats than me?

This is why I cannot find the PM’s position, or anybody who agrees with him staying in the job, admirable. By his own logic this makes no fucking sense. The only move, if you sincerely believe that Pierre Poilievre is the threat you keep constantly telling us you believe he is, is to resign and allow the party to try and save itself. In this case, given your stated perception of the Poilievre threat, you have a moral obligation to the country to do everything in your power to stop him, and to save as many seats as possible. And the PM is claiming both that Poilievre is a crisis and also that there’s no reason for him to do anything to stop it. It’s unacceptable, unpatriotic, and bordering on treason if you believe the PM’s claims.

But nobody should believe the PM’s claims, because that’s the whole problem - we know Justin Trudeau doesn’t actually care about Canada or Canadians. If he did, he’d have resigned months ago. Every day he remains in office Justin Trudeau is enabling the chances of the worst of the worst happening. He has suffered a 52% swing tonight in Cloverdale Langley City, a rebuke that should be stunning but also just feels normal by now. He is down over 20% on average in the polls and by any average he is in a worse place today than he was in September or June or April. This can’t go on.

There is part of me that wants to be polite about the people still enabling this, because there are people I respect who are on the wrong side of this. And then I realize that I will hate myself if I pussy out of telling the truth. Justin Trudeau is putting personal vanity and ego over party and country. Dozens of MPs are enabling this desperate, destructive behaviour. And if they don’t get their heads out of their asses they will have the blood of every horrible decision Pierre and his landslide caucus make. It’s not acceptable to say you didn’t know what your silence was abetting. It’s clear. Act according or exit public life forever.