Trudeau’s gaffes getting harder to brush off
Not everything that comes out of Justin Trudeau’s mouth is simpleminded prattle, though you could be forgiven for thinking so. The Liberal leader has long made a habit of sticking his tongue into the nearest electrical outlet, and shows no sign of giving it up. It is harder and harder to see this as a refreshing candour, or even a dangerously loose lip. Rather, we seem to be tapping directly into the workings of a cluttered and undisciplined mind.
Consider the latest such episode, his musings on the virtues of the Chinese dictatorship, delivered in the course of a “ladies only” fundraiser in Toronto that was itself the subject of controversy, not least for the leering overtones in the promotional material. (Has any Canadian politician been so frankly marketed as a sex object since, well, since his father?) Asked “which nation’s administration” he most admired, outside of Canada, Trudeau took a moment to think, then offered up the following:
“You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest … we need to start investing in solar.’ ”
If you watch the video, it’s clear he’s serious: that prefatory “actually,” the way his voice drops on “China” suggests he knows he’s saying something that will sound surprising to the uninitiated, but will be explained in the next phrase. Only then, perhaps aware of the limb he has put himself out on, does he start trying to scramble back:
“I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about” — heh, heh — “of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted that I find quite interesting.” But by then it’s too late. He can’t erase that first passage: China’s “basic dictatorship” and its ability to “turn their economy around” — not to mention their environment — “on a dime.”
The point is not that Trudeau would, if he became prime minister, impose a communist dictatorship across Canada. His approach to China would be unlikely to differ greatly from that preferred by much of the political and business class, which is that you should cluck about its abysmal human rights record, but not so loudly that it notices.
It’s just … weird. He was not challenged to “say something positive about China,” to which he might have replied with the standard hope that “prosperity and trade with the West will in time lead to a relaxation of the regime’s grip” or a backward glance at “the success of the marketoriented reforms that have lifted so many Chinese citizens out of poverty” or even, if he wanted to be edgy, a rueful “we might not like it but you have to admit their dictatorship has a certain brutal efficiency that poses a challenge to the democracies,” which would be mostly wrong but not completely crazy.
But when the question is to name the government you most admire on this Earth, and your first choice is … China? (His second choice: the Territories — Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Yukon — which is almost as strange.) Who says such things?
The type of person who could tell an interviewer that he would take up the cause of Quebec independence if he thought Canada were really “the Canada of Stephen Harper.” The type of person who could complain to another interviewer that “it’s Albertans who control our community and socialdemocratic agenda — it doesn’t work.” The type of person who could make a perfectly defensible statement — that we should try to understand what makes a homegrown terrorist tick — sound vaguely silly, simply by running on at the mouth for too long.
These are not gaffes of the type defined by the American journalist Michael Kinsley, “when a politician tells the truth” — not really gaffes at all, in other words, except in the topsy-turvy world of politics. Neither are they the sort of slips that anyone might make when they’re tired or off guard, insulting or impolitic remarks they either didn’t mean or wouldn’t have said if they did.
Rather, the Trudeauvian gaffe generally involves a quite deliberate statement, presented not flippantly or offhand but in a determined effort to sound provocative or profound. If they instead strike the listener as ill-judged, it is because he seems to have invested so little actual thought in them. It is in the gulf between his intellectual reach and grasp that his reputation as a ninny has been earned.
Does it matter? Much too much is made of gaffes generally. Was it really enough to rule out Howard Dean’s bid for president that he got a little too enthusiastic at a rally? Was Bob Stanfield’s inability to squeeze a football — in one of dozens of shots taken that day — really evidence of his unfitness for prime minister?
On the other hand, there are gaffes of a kind that tell us much. Ted Kennedy’s inability to answer a simple, obvious question — why do you want to be president — was all too revealing of the empty sense of entitlement at the heart of his 1980 campaign. They tell us, not so much of a candidate’s thoughts, but his thought process. They are less about his platform than, much more important, his judgment.
The next election is nearly two years away. There will be many more chances to take the measure of Trudeau, who will have many more chances to demonstrate his capacity to grow and mature. One gaffe does not disqualify him from office, nor even do four or five. But the more evidence they are given of his flightiness, the less willing Canadians will be to hand him the keys to the car.