This PM Cannot Save A Crisis Of His Own Making

A PM Could Save This. This One Can't.

Since Monday, one of the most common questions asked is whether, and if so how, can the Prime Minister recover his position? If he is genuinely insistent on going, as he steadfastly was claiming at least as of Monday, what is the plan for recovery? It’s a nifty question, and it’s one I’ve grappled with in the periods between St. Paul’s and now, LaSalle and now, and even since the October caucus meeting. But the problem is, even looking back at my ideas, they were all a waste of (proverbial) ink.

Those ideas all were good, I think, and the speech Trudeau should have given stands out as a highlight of the year in this page’s archive. They’re all good reads, in the isolation of hypotheticals. As an exercise in genuinely attempting to help this specific government they were a massive waste of time, energy, and effort, because I was trying to advise a Liberal leader, and not this Liberal leader. And the problem is firmly this leader.

A lot of the advice about reaching out to the caucus, putting in the work, diversifying who he listens to, broadening the circle, it’s all good advice but it’s a waste. Justin Trudeau will never do any of those things because if he was capable of it he’d have done it years ago. He is not a leader capable of doing the things that are theoretically possible that would help, and the way we know that is a leader willing to listen to new voices, broaden the circle, and adapt wouldn’t be down 25 fucking points. It’s like asking a southpaw to pitch righty, Jordan Spieth to play a boring round of golf, or Brad Treliving to not overpay a 4th line center. It’s fundamentally asking them to be different people.

I’m not Justin Trudeau’s biggest fan these days, and I understand that, but what the defenders of Trudeau get wrong is they are ascribing to him the successes of this government and ascribing the failures of it to various others - disloyal Ministers, corrupt outsiders, and a dirty media. It is Justin and Justin alone who built the CCB, guided us through COVID, won us the first Trump trade talks, gave us pharma, dental, and child care, etc etc etc - a way of articulating why he can’t leave - but it’s not his fault for firing Wilson Raybould for not overriding a decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions. It’s not his fault that he tried to sole source a nearly 10 figure contract to a charity that’s paid his mother six figures and paid for a mid five figure trip for his Finance Minister to Africa. It’s not his fault, it’s the media’s for reporting the truth, or Jody’s fault for not doing what she was told (remember when we supported evidence-based decisions, not political ones?), and there’s grand conspiracies around the IDU and nonsense about crap designed to evade responsibility.

The honest truth about Justin Trudeau is that he’s not the world’s smartest leader. He never has been, never will be. He is less naturally informed of the issues facing him as PM from his time before politics than most Prime Ministers or world leaders. His pre-politics work was fulfilling and important but not worldly, he never sat at a Cabinet table, and had extremely limited experience on the world stage as anything other than Pierre’s kid. None of that, of course, is disqualifying - Harper’s pre-politics life is similarly filled with little (and frankly he did nothing as meaningful as being a teacher), and he never sat at a Cabinet table either and was an MP for about the same amount of time as Trudeau before he became PM - but it matters.

What Trudeau did originally was acknowledge that lack of intellectual heft in his personnel moves and in his policy work. He asked Chrystia Freeland to lead his economic policy commission/task force and get a respected businessman to be his first Finance Minister. He got a General to advise on Defence issues, he let brilliant outside economists shape the CCB from conception, and he had Gerry Butts as a counterweight to Katie Telford, meaning that the three of them had to come to consensus before they made moves.

Over the years that’s been whittled away. Morneau is gone, Freeland was clearly iced out in recent years before she quit, Leslie never got defence and we gave a bumbling idiot the job for 6 years for reasons passing understanding, and Foreign Affairs is led by someone who claimed in a meeting that it’s “colonial” to appoint an Ambassador to a key Middle Eastern country. Butts is now gone, which means a key lever for avoiding internal groupthink is out the door.

Decisions are increasingly made by a smaller and smaller group of loyalists, with those inside the PMO who were prone to even mild dissent having left as the circle tightened. Ministers who pushed back against “costly political gimmicks” or in defence of political non-interference with decisions of the DPP were demoted or offered demotions. If your grasp of the English language is so bad you routinely misrepresent government policy in the majority language you’re fine. Dare argue against wasting billions of dollars before a potential economic bomb gets dropped on us that might necessitate fiscal stimulus to save the day and you’re offered a fake job with no department behind you. The leader who has at best been fine with all of this and at worst actively wanted all of this will never be the one to undo it.

This government’s crisis is not merely a crisis of a mediocre economy. The economy is eminently mediocre, but that’s a reason for them to be at 27% and 10 points down. The rest of it is about the leader. I’m not claiming that anybody cares about PMO management styles or anything like that but I do actually, genuinely think that most of the things people are mad about with this government stem from that sin. The government has its head firmly planted in its ass, refusing to listen to even mild criticism. For all the shit Bonnie Crombie gets in these pages, when I wrote a scathing piece about her a couple weeks ago, her orbit read it, internalized it, and complained about me quite a bit. But at least they read it, which is more than can be said about this PMO’s approach to anything even remotely critical.

Could a Prime Minister recover from this position to something like Harper’s 2015 loss, aka 99 seats and 31% of the vote? Sure. Not this Prime Minister, though. Because if this Prime Minister could, he wouldn’t be down 20+. Trudeau understood his weaknesses before and worked to actively counter them, by bringing in intellectual heat he didn’t have and by not pretending he was the only brains of the operation. Now he is alone, and he has lost most of that heft around him. He’s isolated people who owe him their political lives. He’s unable to see the truth plainly in front of him, and hasn’t for months. That he genuinely thought Mark Carney would say yes to taking Freeland’s job last Friday was another sign of how far up his own ass he is, when it’s been clear to me since July that Carney was never going to touch a Ministerial office under a 10 foot pole under JT.

This PM can never be the one to save himself. He cannot be the one to go to China, to butcher the phrase. He is fundamentally unable to be the guy to put together a comeback, because it is his specific failures that broke this. And pretending otherwise is an insult to all of our intelligences.