Harper vibe needed for Trump era

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can survive, and possibly even thrive, in the Trumpocalypse. But he’ll have to learn to channel more Stephen Harper. Yes, that’s right — Harper as muse. It has come to this.

Central casting could not have dreamt up two politicians more different in substance, tone and style than are U.S. president-elect Donald Trump and the current principal occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa. If reality were Star Wars, Trump would be General Grievous. Trudeau aspires to a Skywalker vibe.

This can obscure that the PM and his senior advisers, Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, and his trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, zeroed in on the principal fuel of the Trump revolution long before Trump rode it to the Republican nomination, and the White House.

In late 2012 and early 2013, as Trudeau and his team were casting about for an economic frame within which to position his bid to become Liberal leader and then PM, they happened upon a book newly authored by Freeland — Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

Written in a breezy, popular style, the book was an exploration of the latest research then available on the rise of income inequality, principally in the United States. Freeland’s thesis was that the growing gap between the incomes of the wealthiest one per cent, and those of ordinary working Stephen Harper always had a sense for what working Canadians want to hear, Michael Den Tandt writes. stiffs, posed a threat to the international liberal order.

She got that right, quite obviously. Exhibit A is Brexit, courtesy of a disgruntled, aging English working class. was to include Japan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brunei, Singapore and Canada, would have comprised 40 per cent of the