Flies of a Summer

Review by John Pepall

The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau. Stephen Maher. Simon & Schuster, 2024.

Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times. Paul Wells. Sutherland Quarterly 6, 2024.

Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life. Andrew Lawton. Sutherland House, 2024. 

WHEN DONALD Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016 an immediate reaction in the media, among Democrats and discomfited Republicans, and many besides, was that he should not be “normalized.” That such an ignorant, intemperate, corrupt buffoon was President was an enormity that was to the country’s shame and must be resisted.

When Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015 there was no such reaction in Canada. That a callow young man who had led a meandering life, who had never shown any interest in government, who was evidently both conceited and silly, should be Prime Minister simply because he had been famous since shortly after his conception, was nice looking, and was the son of a man who had been a bad Prime Minister for fifteen years over 30 years before, should sweep the country in the 2015 election was shameful. No one seems to have noticed.

These books, competent reporting by three experienced journalists, continue the normalization. Their detailed account of recent, and present, history is as much interesting for the narrowness of their perspective as for the detail they recount.

Most journalists, most of the time, affect a non-partisan, objective stand. They report, analyze, and comment on politics rather like sports journalists reporting who scored, who choked, who won and who lost, and trying to explain why.

It’s all just a game, and if you won, you must be pretty good, and if you lost you’re lousy. Philip Marchand once reflected that sports journalism was often more serious than political journalism. Relying on indisputable facts, and statistics, despite home team bias, the analysis was serious, though the subject was just games.

But politics is not a game. It is literally deadly serious. It is government. Paradoxically, while no one gets to play even a couple of games in the NHL without being a far better hockey player than 99% of us, including the sports journalists, people with no talent for government, or even interest in it, can get elected, and even rise to the top, like Justin Trudeau.

Stephen Maher’s The Prince begins with an inside account of the gender-balanced cabinet and the phrase heard round the world: “Because it’s 2015.” Trudeau said, “Ah, that just frustrates me so much, … Do people think they can still get away with the arguments they’re making now against this?”

There are cogent arguments against making people ministers just because they are women and not making people ministers just because they are men. But Trudeau is frustrated by arguments. He thinks there is something wrong with people who don’t see things in the simplistic, progressive clichés he picked up casually following politics on the CBC. So we got a cabinet built for show with a cute soundbite. Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s Principal Secretary, suggested the soundbite. Maher calls the cabinet “a diverse and accomplished group.” Diverse perhaps, but by Maher’s own account not so accomplished. And accomplished Liberal MPs were not there, because they were men.

Maher, though not uncritical, is very sympathetic to Trudeau. In a passage where he entertains a diagnosis of “narcissistic personality disorder” he writes

Despite Trudeau’s attention seeking, there is a more charitable interpretation. He does think he ‘is needed by Canada [and] has done great things to save Canada,’ but he is not alone in that. When he said he feels Canada in his bones with every breath, that is true.

What can it mean to feel a “post-national state” in your bones?

Maher gives a detailed account of the last nine years of national politics, which most of his readers will remember from following it in real time. Perhaps he hopes for foreign sales. There is added value in the insider accounts, largely off the record, that he has dug out. There is no critical analysis of what Trudeau’s government actually did, or didn’t do. There is a lot of analysis of how well they played the game of politics, how they won three elections, but failed to win a second majority.

It is difficult to see what role Trudeau himself played in much of it. In the account of the fiasco of Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s corporation tax changes he doesn’t appear at all. What could he have contributed? Has he ever personally filed a tax return or made an investment? His family’s accountants look after all of that.

When the government was working out the Canada Child Benefit “Trudeau enjoyed working with … [Head of Policy Mike] McNair on the design, playing policy wonk.” It’s the only time he is described as actually working on government, and he was “playing.”

Writing of Trudeau before he became an MP, Maher says “when he talked about policy he often seemed like a poser, with convictions based on his own inclinations rather than a deep understanding of the issues.” When he became an MP his Liberal colleagues “found him uninterested in policy work.”

Bill Morneau wrote of Trudeau’s weaknesses “one of the most striking was his lack of focus on policy details. Leaving the development of policy responses to his PMO staff meant that debates were conducted and conclusions reached without his presence.”

Though he was in a way part of our politics from birth, and as a boy was brought along by his father to meet many world leaders, Trudeau’s knowledge of politics is only of the show, what you see on TV. He can mouth unctuous platitudes, read a speech, go about the world stage with his affected stride, wave to admiring crowds, but he cannot sit at his desk and govern.


THE CONSERVATIVES' famous attack ads in 2015 saying Trudeau was “just not ready” were off the mark because he can never be ready, because he has never been interested in government.

Some in the States who were most appalled by Trump’s election reflected a year or so in that it was not as bad as they had feared. The bureaucracy, and some good appointees, kept government going tolerably well despite Trump’s bluster. His very inconstancy, and lack of attention to detail, saved the country from the worst of him. He spent his time watching Fox News and tweeting, while those under him ran the country.

Many supposed that it did not matter that Trudeau was an airhead. Smart operators like Butts, and Katie Telford, his Chief of Staff, and our world class bureaucrats would see that all went smoothly while Justin gave government a happy face. Butts was gone after little more than three years over the SNC/Lavalin blundering, but he hadn’t seemed to be able to save Trudeau from himself while he was there.

Maher gives a detailed and sympathetic account of the renegotiation of NAFTA, which Trump had threatened to tear up. Brian Mulroney played a key role in advising the government and old hands worked hard to save it. Trudeau’s public statements did not help. Trump’s inconstancy did. Mexico, which was his real target, managed to strike a deal, at one point threatening to make a bilateral deal with the States. Gerald Butts said “Never have so many people worked so hard to make nothing happen,” They succeeded, but it was not such a great accomplishment and it was not Trudeau’s.

With Butts went his strategy of appealing to the middle class. In came “the feminism and diversity issues that Telford embraced, which ultimately led to a narrower electoral coalition.” The government went Woke.

Maher writes:

Trudeau had outsourced Cabinet management tasks to Butts and Telford. Trudeau, who gets energy from glad-handing in a crowd, is by nature introverted and gets drained by one-on-one meetings. ‘He’s very introverted,’ says one person who has worked closely with him. ‘He finds personal engagement tiring, difficult, hard.…Trudeau tries to reduce the amount of time he spends with ministers and caucus members, some of whom wonder if he would recognize them on the street.’

Before resigning Bill Morneau had a last meeting with Trudeau alone at Rideau Cottage.

That kind of thing simply didn’t happen in Justin Trudeau’s world. Virtually any topic you wanted to discuss with the prime minister — official or informal, strategy or gossip — had to be shared in the presence of members of his staff. This was an acknowledged fact among everyone who had reason to converse with him.

Maher is a COVID hawk and claims “a lot of Canadians are alive who would not be” but for the Trudeau Team, while alleging that Jason Kenney killed “a bunch of Albertans” by opening up too soon. Yet he admits that vaccine mandates, which Trudeau had spoken against when his team bungled vaccine supply, were introduced purely as a political wedge for the 2021 election he called in the hope of another majority. That led to the Convoy and the Emergency Measures Act farce.

Maher supports the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act and cites only Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand as condemning it. There were plenty of more respectable critics of it. “[Trudeau] defends democracy and the rule of law, warning against extremism and disinformation, but he has not found a register for responding successfully to the likes of Carlson, Brand, and Trump,” he writes sympathetically.

Maher cites Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics to describe the Convoy supporters, whom he describes as “militants.” He is scathing about them, though stopping short of calling them “deplorables.” Hofstadter wrote “Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

A better example of the paranoid style might be Trudeau himself. Maher had a nice long chat with Trudeau early this year. He does not say whether they were alone. Speaking of Pierre Poilievre, Trudeau said “I just see it as such a fundamental choice in what kind of country we are, who we are as Canadians. That, for me, is what I got into politics for: to have big fights like this about who we are as a country and where we’re going.”

Who are we as a country? If we are a post-national country, we’re not anybody. What are we to fight about?

Leaving governing the country to his staff and bureaucrats, Trudeau’s personal activity as Prime Minister was largely controversial holidays, a series of unctuous apologies for supposed wrongs in Canada’s past in which he was implicitly saying that he would never have done such dreadful things, clownish behavior on his family trip to India, and the lowering of flags to half mast over supposed mass graves at residential schools.

Butts, and Telford, had advised Trudeau against his vacation with the Aga Khan at Christmas 2016, but he would not be dissuaded and even imagined it could be kept a secret.

After the “mass graves” story broke in May 2021, the government rushed through a bill to make Sep. 30 Truth and Reconciliation Day, but Trudeau flew off with his family for a holiday in Tofino on that day, and lied about it.

Perry Bellegarde, [former] national chief of the Assembly of First Nations…was disappointed by what happened but…points to a massive settlement Trudeau agreed to at the beginning of 2022 to end a child-welfare-discrimination lawsuit brought by tireless activist Cindy Blackstock. ‘Look at the $40-plus billion that got done. There’s $43 billion for child welfare—$23 billion in compensation, and then $20 billion to fix the system. So yeah. Okay. Was it a strategic error? I guess from a public relations perspective, yeah of course. It was a faux pas. There’s no question.’

Just a $43 billion dollar faux pas.

Maher expresses surprise that the photographs of Trudeau in blackface had not surfaced earlier and speculates that if they had in 2015 Trudeau would not have won the election. He quotes Liberal operative Brian Clow: “The opposition — Conservatives and NDP — they should have found this, … They didn’t.”

One might ask why Maher and his colleagues were so incurious about what Trudeau had been up to before he entered politics. They should have found the photographs.

 

PAUL WELLS' Justin Trudeau on the Ropes is a short book, a Sutherland Quarterly of less than a hundred pages. As its title suggests, it is focussed on the troubles Trudeau has faced in the last few years and the challenge of the next election, if he runs, as all three authors expect him to do.

Wells writes “[Trudeau] didn’t cause the polarization of Canadian politics, but he noticed it, acted on it, and nudged it along. By 2021, that polarization came not only to save his career, but to define it.” This is putting it weakly.

Was Canadian politics so polarized before 2021? Both Scheer and O’Toole befuddledly ran for the centre. Liberals have a fascination with American politics and see themselves as Northern Democrats. They invited David Axelrod and other Democrats to their conferences and hung on their words. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was treated as if it applied to Canada. As Liberal governments fell in provinces they began to see “little Trumps everywhere.” Doug Ford of course, but also François Legault, and even Jason Kenney, “perfect louts in Trudeau’s eyes,” writes Wells.

Trudeau himself is a Manichaean. In a 2012 interview with Jonathan Gatehouse of Maclean’s as he was about to announce his campaign for the Liberal leadership, he said “I’ve really thought about … how it’s going to be harder for me to dismiss all the haters from now on.” Haters? Who hated him before he had the presumption to run for the leadership? In the same interview he said “Can I get people to believe in politics once again? Can I get people to accept more complex answers to complex questions? I know I can. I know that’s what I do very well. Why am I doing this? … not because I want to. Because I must.” As these books confirm, he had never even thought of a “complex answer to complex questions” in his life.

In February 2020 environmentalist fanatics and some indigenous began road and rail blockades to protest TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink. Asked by Andrew Scheer, the outgoing Leader of the Opposition, what he was going to do about enforcing the law, Trudeau replied with what Scheer called a “word salad”

… these protests are serious and … this is a critical moment for our country and for our future. Rights, livelihoods, the rule of law, and our democracy … Indigenous rights, climate action, law and order, and building a clean economy are things we will not achieve by degrading our democracy … It is past time for this situation to be resolved, … Patience may be in short supply, and that makes it more valuable than ever.

Scheer argued that he had left out “a clear denunciation that the actions of these radical activists are illegal [and of a] mob trampling over the legal system which has governed our country for more than 150 years.” Wells writes that Trudeau decided Scheer had done much more than define one end of the debate. He said Scheer had “disqualified himself from constructive discussions with his unacceptable speech.”

Three days later Trudeau announced, “The barricades must now come down, … The injunctions must be obeyed and the law must be upheld.” As Wells writes,

In substance, his stance was now difficult to distinguish from Scheer’s. … but Trudeau had nevertheless managed to send a clear signal that there was acceptable and unacceptable debate in Canada; that he would decide which was which; and that the Conservatives, who had won 220,000 more votes than the Liberals in the 2019 election, could be disqualified from public discourse when he pleased.


In 2015 Trudeau promised to see boil water advisories in indigenous communities eliminated by 2021. They were cut by half. Wells thinks “this is one of the projects Trudeau should be proudest of.” It took “Patience, focus, thick skin, and constant disappointment in return for almost no political credit.” Indeed. On July 11 Jagmeet Singh was attacking him at the Assembly of First Nations because there were still 28 boil advisories and “dozens of communities that can’t trust their water even though they don’t have an advisory.”

And whatever was accomplished, it cannot have been by Trudeau’s personal patience and focus.

Wells notes a long list of Trudeau initiatives that led to little or nothing: vouchers for camping trips for less-privileged kids; planting two billion trees; a Canadian Centre for Peace, Order and Good Government; a National Infrastructure Assessment. “To just keep announcing stuff, as though the announcements themselves were the point. This is the second model for government over the long term, and it is the model Trudeau has preferred.”


ANDREW LAWTON is managing editor of True North, a straightforwardly conservative online magazine. He is seeking a Conservative nomination for the next election. His Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life is a thoroughly researched account of someone whose life is a stark contrast to Trudeau’s. The subtitle is not restrictive but descriptive. His family, relationships, and diversions are fully covered, but his life has been strongly political since he was a teenager.

While still a teenager Poilievre was working for both the Reform Party and the Alberta Progressive Conservatives and on the board of his Reform riding association. He regularly attended party meetings, and occasionally wrote a letter to the editor, or got quoted in the press. He also read Milton Friedman’s 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, not a hefty tome as Lawton describes it, but a two hundred page summary of Friedman’s political economics. Going to the University of Calgary, where he studied International Relations, in 1997, his political engagement intensified and he also became involved in debating and the Model UN, which took him on trips to the States.

In 1999, only 20, he became a summer intern in the office of then Reform MP Jason Kenney. In Ottawa he met Jenni Byrne, who would work in senior positions for both Stephen Harper and Doug Ford and co-manage the Conservatives’ 2011 and 2015 election campaigns. They entered a relationship that would last for twelve years. 

In 2002 Poilievre returned to Ottawa to work for Stockwell Day, the foreign affairs critic under the Canadian Alliance’s new leader Stephen Harper. For those who have forgotten the complicated history of Reform, the Alliance, the PCs, and their merger into the Conservative Party of Canada, Lawton provides a good refresher.

While still a student Poilievre got to know an extraordinary number of later prominent Conservatives: besides Byrne, Andrew Scheer, and Patrick Brown, and several who would later be MPs or manage national election campaigns or work for Harper.

Poilievre’s career represents the more numerous of two relatively recent routes to the top of politics. One is celebrity, most strikingly represented by Trudeau and Trump, who succeeded through mere celebrity, but also by such figures as Ken Dryden and Marc Garneau.

The other is the workers, who rise from obscurity through their grassroots work. Back in the last century I was imagining an updating of H.M.S. Pinafore: a teenager who set to work on a candidate’s sign campaign “pounded in the signs so carefully that now he was the ruler of the Queen’s navy.”

The opening for this new class of politicians came with the expansion of taxpayer funded political staffs, almost unknown only 50 years ago. Now every elected politician down to members of provincial legislatures and even many municipal politicians get to hire kids who worked on their campaigns to work in their offices. These staffers have the inside track when candidacies come up and go on to be elected themselves, drawing in more behind them.

These staffers need have no particular education or experience beyond their campaign work to get their jobs. They needn’t be interested in government. They like the game of politics, getting out the vote, and winning, and currying favour with the voters for the next election. If they can get elected in their turn, they can be at least local celebrities.

Their political leanings may be just an accident of time and place. They get into the game because they like the game, not necessarily  because they have preexisting political beliefs that they want to serve (though some do). Most join whatever team there is to hand, Liberal, Conservative, Reform, or NDP.


POILIEVRE THROUGH hard work and intelligence is the most successful of this new class of politician. In 2004 he took on the challenge of getting the nomination and running in Nepean-Carleton, a riding where the Alliance had made a strong showing in 2001, but where others were seeking the nomination, and the sitting Liberal, David Pratt, was Minister of National Defence. Organizing, tirelessly going door to door, and benefiting from a general turn against the Liberals now led by Paul Martin, he won, the youngest MP elected that year. He still holds roughly the same seat.

As his triumph in the 2022 Conservative leadership race, and his ascendancy in the polls demonstrates, Poilievre is a superb political tactician. How he would govern is less clear.

His ascendancy in the polls may be partly good timing. He became Leader as Canada was finally realizing that Trudeau will never be ready. He has been perhaps more helped than hurt by stupid attacks trying to present him as Trumpian, or a racist because he says he favours Anglo-Saxon words. His proposal of a Plain Language Act is an unworkable gesture. Better to send a reprint of Sir Ernest Gowers’ Plain Words to every civil servant.

His signature policies are ditching the CBC, axing the carbon tax, and building more houses, mainly by levering the provinces to cut barriers to house-building by withholding Ottawa money from provinces that do not get aboard. Doug Ford was already doing that, to mixed reviews. Trudeau has somewhat copied him.

He has been cagey about immigration, a major factor in the housing market, and all social issues. He said nothing about trans issues until he came in behind Premiers in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan to back parental consent. On wokeness generally he was silent until at the Calgary Stampede in July he said he’d end “weird woke ideology.” Will a No More Wokeness Act do it? 

Perhaps chastened by a dressing down by Harper when he questioned on talk radio payments of $10,000 to everyone who had gone to a residential school as Harper was about to announce a settlement and apology, he has said little about the indigenous. Early this year he proposed an obscure plan to have the indigenous collect 50% of federal taxes on businesses operating on indigenous land while refunding it to the businesses. He said he’d been working on the plan for a year. 

Answering a question from Rebel News on the subject of “unmarked graves” Poilievre said only, “Canadians deserve to know the truth.” But this subject is not brought up by Lawton. 

On Oct. 27, 2022 Conservative MPs under his leadership acquiesced in unanimous consent (during the chaotic post-Question Period atmosphere when it is not clear what is going on) to the hateful libel:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government must recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide, as acknowledged by Pope Francis and in accordance with article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of the United Nations.


This was itself appeasement of wokeness.

Though he went to pro-life events with his mother and was raised Catholic he doesn’t seem to have any religion. Apart from Friedman we know nothing of what he may have read, though Lawton reports that he has spent hours at a Churchillian constituent’s Churchill library.

His 1999 Stronach-sponsored “if I were Prime Minister” essay reads much like what he says today and suggests a classic small government, low tax and spending, somewhat libertarian politics. But he has been able to avoid going into detail. He was faithful enough to Reform to propose a bizarre eleven member Senate with Senators elected for six year terms. How he will cope with Trudeau’s “non-partisan” liberal, progressive Senate, whose members fancy they are there on merit, and to be “effective,” is a mystery. Has he the gumption to appoint competent Conservatives and face down the inevitable shrieking? Or will he try, as Harper was doing, to stage pseudo-elections, while Trudeau’s senators snip away at his agenda?

He proposed term limits for MPs, without explaining what a term was for an MP. If it meant a Parliament he should have stood down at the 2008 election. As it is, he is now in his twenty-first year as an MP. He also proposed recall of MPs, and was still at it as late as 2005 when he introduced a Private Members Bill for recall.

He seems to have put behind him his dalliance with Bitcoin, but has embarked on other ill thought out démarches. In March he attacked lobbyists as “totally useless” and said he would not “do them any favours.” Government being necessarily as big as it will remain however much Poilievre may be able to slim it, many, mainly businesses, need help in navigating it. Government relations is a perfectly legitimate business, now perhaps too heavily regulated, providing that help. Poilievre’s suggestion that businesses entangled in obscure and complex regulations that impede their business should launch political campaigns to get the public to understand their difficulties and vote in people to resolve them is nonsense.

More broadly, firing the Governor of the Bank of Canada and boycotting the World Economic Forum are not economic policies. They are stunts. Lawton reveals that in 2021 Poilievre was on the point of publishing a book to be called “Debtonation” on the danger of the massive debt that Trudeau was building up. What he proposed to do about it we don’t know.

Plainly Poilievre has thought more about and has more understanding of government than Trudeau has even now after almost nine years in power, but that’s not saying much.


POILIEVRE'S MOST important policy position, and the one that may be his most effective electorally, poses great risks in government. However sound his policy, it is not likely to change much in the near term, before the 2029 election. If he were able to bring house prices down by 20%, hundreds of thousands who might then be able to afford a home would be grateful. The millions who had seen the price of their home plummet, would not.

Though not suffering from “narcissistic personality disorder,” Poilievre appears very pleased with himself, having much to be pleased with. He knows he needs to “check his ego” one source told Lawton. Another source told Lawton “He was insufferable when he was a minister. … He just wasn’t friendly. He avoided anybody that he thought was beneath him, which was just about everybody.” But he has managed to bring the party together, including many who did not want him as leader.

If he becomes Prime Minister, he, not his staff, will govern.

Poilievre’s strongest appeal might seem to be that Trudeau’s time was up, as Harper’s was in 2015, the Liberals’ in 2005, and indeed, his father’s in 1979, had Joe Clark not blundered. With his remarkable astuteness Poilievre has positioned himself to be the beneficiary. Perhaps he saw when he decided not to run for the Conservative leadership in 2020 that the stars were not aligned for him to triumph.

But this is not the usual “governments defeat themselves,” “time’s up” political conjuncture.

As many as 70% tell pollsters that “Canada is broken.” Despite adding more than 50,000 civil servants, the government has difficulty delivering services: not just issuing passports, but running airports, processing tax returns, and much besides. Judges aren’t being appointed. The surge in immigration, and “temporary” residents has not just exacerbated the housing crisis, but strained provincial and municipal services, and finances.

The denigration of Canada by Trudeau’s unctuous serial apologizing, the hateful condemnation of all who cross him as unCanadian, the flag at half mast for months over non-existent mass graves, the genocide resolution, have sapped the national spirit. Quebec has been allowed to establish itself as a nation state within the imagined post-national state. A new Parti Québécois government looms, maybe a third referendum. Where shall we find the national spirit to defeat it that was summoned up to defeat the 1995 referendum?

The armed forces are ill-equipped and demoralized, unable to recruit, or to spend the money appropriated for them. They are run by bureaucrats, in uniform or not. The top brass spend much of their time playing in a French farce. Pie in the sky procurement programmes drag on for years with the prospect that what may come of them will be obsolete when they enter service. 

Under a massive and increasing national debt, the economy has stagnated. Taxes have gone up and productivity is stagnant. Resource industries are throttled. There will be more Canadians but poorer.

Not referred to in any of these books is the Orwellian censorship legislation recently brought in. Or the taking of the legacy media into wardship with multiple subsidies.

All this results from the man nominally in charge being an airhead with no conception of, or interest in, his responsibilities. From all we knew of him from the day of his birth, there was no reason to expect any better of him, but millions were taken in, and media who looked on politics as a game, or even entertainment, encouraged them.

Originally published in the Autumn 2024 edition of THE DORCHESTER REVIEW.


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