Canadians as guilty as Rolling Stone scribe
Fawning over Trudeau began here initially
What a tetchy neighbour Americans have in Canadians. When they ignore us, we mope. And when they notice us, they had better get everything right. We do not suffer errors gladly. Stephen Rodrick’s complimentary profile of Justin Trudeau, in the current issue of Rolling Stone, is a classic example — and some of the complaints, coming not least from Canadian journalists, are certainly well earned.
The “Royal Canadian Mountain Police”? The “Liberty Party”? Those are alarmingly basic errors ( though God knows Rolling Stone has published worse). “For Trudeau,” Rodrick ventures, “listening is seducing.” What on earth? “For Trudeau, running is swimming,” he might as well have written. “Cooking is yellow.”
By the standards of foreign Trudeau profiles, though, Rodrick’s effort isn’t notably weak. It at least contains a memorable anecdote: the PM’s motorcade jogs onto a dirt road so he can throw an unwanted ice cream cone out the window without being caught littering on camera. Only … you know … there was a reporter in the car. Did no one have a garbage bag?
Much of the online reaction seems to be less about the article itself and more about the very notion of fawning over this guy at this point in his career. That makes good sense. Nonpartisan Canadians who pay attention know that Trudeau isn’t half the change agent he said he was. Key transforma- tional platform items have been abandoned ( electoral reform) or are in significant peril ( everything to do with First Nations). At this point it’s a stretch to call Trudeau a huge change from Stephen Harper, let alone ( per Rolling Stone’s headline) the “free world’s best hope.”
The thing is, though, that was always a ridiculous notion. Rodrick’s piece isn’t so much different from what Canadian journalists have written, as it is late to the party.
CBC’s Aaron Wherry suggested Trudeau might be “the last major progressive leader on Earth” — disqualifying Angela Merkel, who welcomed 25 times as many Syrian refugees to Germany, because she’s “officially a conservative.”
Trudeau is “something much closer to an Instagram star than a conventional politician,” Jessica Johnson wrote in a Walrus cover story. “One wants to know what he is putting in his smoothies.”
“It’s time to accept that Trudeau is a leader of skill and conviction of an order we’ve never experienced before,” Richard Gwyn wrote in the Star.
“I look at Trudeau dancing with his wife, his ease with his fellow humans, his best wishes for his — and our — children, the feeling that I am back in a world of plausibility, sanity, arts and science, good cheer,” Heather Mallick wrote in the Pyongyang Times — sorry, in the Toronto Star.
“Before entering the ring, he might have imagined his dad in the gunslinger pose or on the reviewing stand in Montreal on election eve 1968, standing alone and defiant as separatist demonstrators hurled projectiles at him,” Lawrence Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail, casting the ludicrous spectacle of Trudeau’s boxing match with Patrick Brazeau as a potentially historic event.
Justin lacks Pierre Elliott’s “pure sexual magnetism,” Gwyn ventured in The Walrus — you may be sensing a theme here — but he nevertheless “resembles a Greek god.”
“I might look impossibly naive in a few years, taking our new prime minister’s stated i ntentions at face value, accepting his sincerity as something more than the usual politician’s veneer,” Chris Turner wrote in, uh, The Walrus. ( Guys. Seriously.) But in October 2015, he was willing to take a flyer on Trudeau as “a quintessential Canadian nice guy” — “tough enough to throw a solid body check ( or punch), sure, but otherwise unassuming and self- effacing, keen to broker compromises and accommodate newcomers and apologize too much.”
Nope. At this point, his record is that of a pretty conventional Liberal prime minister — albeit a big-spending one — with an unconventional amount of charisma.
Purple prose about Trudeau has fallen out of fashion, domestically, but the Canadian media still report on Trudeau’s staged photops, his socks and his playlists — and if that’s what people want to read about, I’m not going to argue private media outlets ( as opposed to the CBC) should forego web traffic. But a lot of smart Canadians fell awfully hard for Justin Trudeau, both privately and publicly, and not even halfway through his first mandate it looks pretty damn silly. We should try our hardest not to repeat that performance in the future, with him or anyone else. In the meantime, judge not Stephen Rodrick, lest ye be judged.