Requiem For A Prime Minister
On Trudeau’s (Lacking) Legacy
“The story in the Globe is false.”
There are a lot of things that come to mind when Justin Trudeau is mentioned. He’s a long serving Prime Minister who has served in many ways with distinction - from handling the Trump 1.0 term well to dealing with COVID better than the Americans through reductions in child poverty and increasing access to affordable child care and dental care. It’s a good legacy, in many spots. But I’ll never forget that quote.
The thing about Justin Trudeau is his time in office is fine, even fine to good, if you strip away the context. If you start the clock in 2016 and just analyze the record it’s fine. But you can’t do that. In a vacuum, you can defend a lot of the parts of the record. But Justin Trudeau ran for office as a counterweight to Harper, a counterweight to the cynical politics of the past. Sunny ways, I think was the phrase. And then he did that.
It’s not the first moment of cynicism, lord knows, but it was indefensible. It was a clear, simple, straightforward statement. It was also a complete and utter lie. Unlike a promise not kept, there’s no ambiguity. He lied, clear as day, down the barrel of a camera, and then proceeded to end the careers of the woman he attempted to pressure into overruling the Director of Public Prosecutions and her Cabinet colleague who could not bear to see this mistreatment. It was cynical, broken politics of the kind Trudeau had claimed he would never do. It was the same old shit from the guy whose whole thing was being different.
Trudeau then won reelection twice on divisive, ruthless campaigns - attacking the Conservatives for socially conservative candidates and litigating Andrew Scheer’s old views until it came out Trudeau had worn blackface, and then making the 2021 election about vaccines and mandates after swearing up and down that Canada wouldn’t impose vaccine mandates. They worked, sure, but that’s not the standard. Stephen Harper also won electoral success, but Trudeau would never say that it was aspirational to follow him. Until he played a playbook that was Harper-esque to win.
On some level, it is what it is. It’s my fault for believing him when he said he’d be different. I get all of it. But it’s why today I’m not as sad as others are. This is a pathetic end for the PM, but he’s a fundamentally flawed and frankly disreputable leader, so I don’t care. His vanity, narcissism, and ego is going to kill the Liberal Party for a generation, and he’ll swan off to some house in the rich part of town and not have to suffer the consequences of it.
Plenty of my readers would disagree with my assessment of Trudeau, but it’s the reality. He is a man whose supporters claim to be so much better than those dumbass Americans who keep being conned by Trump, and yet they’re conned by Trudeau. He’s not very smart, he’s not very impressive, and he’s allowed those things to get worse by isolating himself. Trudeau is an empty vessel, and yet people act like he is somehow necessary. He’s the replacement level PM, the answer to the question of what would happen if you made James Dolan President of the US and not owner of the Knicks. He’s a failson, propped up by a name and an army of people who could mind the store for periods but never truly hide the truth.
The truth is he should have resigned in 2019 or 2020, his ethical lapses so comical and so damaging it’s a miracle we let him get away with it. But again, the fact that Poilievre went on a podcast is supposed to be disqualifying in a way that literally trying to steer nearly 10 figures of government money to a charity that routinely hires your mother isn’t. It’s all just so sad.
I’ve hated Trudeau at times since 2015, but now I don’t anymore. Somehow, my feeling for him has gone from blinding hatred to a weird mix of being mad at myself for ever buying his snake oil and feeling sorry that he’s this isolated from reality. Justin Trudeau has been gifted every opportunity he could ever ask for. The one thing he won’t have is a legacy of respect. He has the legislative accomplishments to go down as a great Prime Minister, but Trudeau will never have the respect to match. He is the failson Prime Minister and his father’s son, even down to the ignominious and arrogant nature of his exit.
Just today I was listening to the audio version of Paul Wells' book on Trudeau. Wells explained that Trudeau is not an attention-seeker as much as an attention-user. Much as I am critical of the man myself and took note of his cynicism in his 2012 leadership contest announcement speech, I am not sure that he truly is much of an exceptional "narcissist". If he sacrificed his marriage for the sake of prolonging his political career, he may be currently desperate to reap continued political returns on sunk costs.
I would also object to the characterization of his 2019 and 2021 campaigns as "divisive", even if neither inspired my support. There is not anything particularly exceptional about bringing up a rival's policy record, or running on a vaccine mandate change. It does not matter if Trudeau made a policy reversal, no one is forced to oppose the policy and if there is a debate then the debate is a shared responsibility among rival parties. The country is not so fragile that it cannot handle a vaccine mandate debate, and Trudeau did not say anything outrageous in support of the policy whether or not he was entirely fair to his rivals throughout the campaign.
Despite the bridges that Trudeau has burned, he's not close to being as bad as Harper was as Prime Minister. Whereas the Trudeau era brought us a Prime Minister who was disgraceful in personal judgment and the conduct of his office, the Harper era brought us a government that every other week was insufferably testing a new precedent for the weakening of our democracy. Whatever his mistakes, Trudeau at least temporarily stemmed the tide of democratic decline, even if he perhaps did not leave much of a legacy for permanent improvement.
Evan, really? Give it a rest.