PM doesn’t need another storyteller
‘If you could only have one superpower, what would it be and what would you use it for?” — One of three questions requiring a 250-word essay, when applying for the position of “storyteller” ($ 90,000 salary range) in the Trudeau administration.
Suggested answer: “The superpower I most covet would be controlling the urge to heave after reading this fatuous requirement for a high position in Canada’s national government. I realize, even as a fantasy superpower, this is probably an overreach.”
Does the Liberal government need another storyteller?
As an outdated proverb once advised, there is no need to carry coals to Newcastle. Under the same understanding, the Trudeau government doesn’t need another storyteller. It is already overstocked. The laptops in the Prime Minister’s Office and allied departments tap out more fiction per day than MSNBC panels discussing President Donald Trump. Which is a mighty challenge.
But examples are called for. Recall this from the 2015 campaign: “I am looking straight at Canadians and being honest the way I always have. We’ve said we are committed to balanced budgets and we are. We will balance that budget in 2019.”
Now there was a great yarn. Balanced budget? By last year? What is it now? Three hundred and forty- three BILLION dollars! And the pumps are still going, the sluices are still open, and the printing presses at the mint are spitting out money faster than it can be counted.
Hire another storyteller? Heck, find the guy who wrote the lines about a balanced budget by 2019, drape him in Order of Canada medals, and drop him the Giller. “I am looking straight at Canadians …” That was a real crackerjack.
Or, closer to present moment. What about the great fables spun about WE and its billion- dollar student grant assignment: The civil service said the job had to go to the Kielburgers, because the civil service couldn’t handle it, and only two brothers with $ 50 million in Toronto real estate and some sort of school in Kenya could assuage the suffering young.
Another great line from the same tale, from PM Trudeau: “I pushed back on it ( the WE deal).” As you can tell, Liberal storytellers have a flair for the humorous take, the extravagantly ludicrous assertion. I can hear Stephen Leacock’s artful nonsense in Mr. Trudeau’s “I pushed back on it.” Whoever wrote that line doesn’t need any backup. He’s a storyteller by nature.
Consider the inventiveness of the storyline of why Parliament, already gutted, had to be prorogued. The fertile fictionists in the PMO spun the narrative that it had nothing to do with the WE scandal, nothing to do with closing down the hearings, or shuttering the committees. It had nothing to do with conflicts of interest, the dropping of finance minister Bill Morneau, or reconciling Youth Minister Bardish Chagger’s versatile accounts of how the WE scandal came to be. To build these many storylines argues a depth of creatives already on salary.
Why would a government so gifted in counter-factual accounts then, so fluid in disguising or rewriting reality, want to hire yet one more storyteller? What task would be left for him or her?
I think my favourite from the creative community within the PMO comes from the throne speech. Here’s the gem: “The Liberal government will create an Action Plan for Women in the Economy to help more women get back into the workforce and to ensure a feminist, intersectional response to this pandemic and recovery.” (Emphasis mine.)
From the broad and fertile fields of Saskatchewan, to the icebound coasts of the far North, to the huddled, fog- suffocated hamlets of the Newfoundland shoreline, when “feminist intersectional response” hit the ears of Canadians, howls of ( appreciative) laughter pierced our broad skies.
Everywhere people, bent over in amusement, were asking: Who writes this stuff ? Is he/ she on contract.? This is a talent the whole country should know about. Not since W. O. Mitchell has there been such a natural humorist with such a sweet- flowing tale. Could he, she or they get their own TV series?
Storytelling. There is so much more. The Jody Wilson- Raybould-jane Philpott interlude was a mini- renaissance for Liberal storytellers.
Collected and indexed, the alibis and evasions concocted during this creative era would make a valuable teaching anthology. Hatchling spin- doctors and apprentice fabricators, twitter apologists and yearning sycophants could study it to learn the subtle pathways between mere evasion and outright duplicity, that shade of difference between the non- response response and the explicit No Comment.
However some of their best stuff comes out of the creative- writing sessions on climate change. The story themes are familiar. Canada is a world leader. Zero emissions by 2050. Alberta oil workers can set to work glossing solar panels. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Pure SciFi. Delicious fantasy from a gifted scribe, all of it.
Who was the inventive fabulator behind Chrystia Freeland’s eldritch claim: “All Canadians understand that the recovery must be green.” One simple sentence so totally adrift from Canada as it is — check that “must” — tells me she has a poet on the payroll.
All of which shows the storytelling faculty of the Trudeau government is second to none. Their in- house fictionists have the great power, noted of old, by their words and stories “to hold children from play and old men from the chimney corner.” So the idea of hiring another one is a scandalous redundancy.
STORYTELLING FACULTY OF THE TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT IS SECOND TO NONE.