Singh shines amidst PM’s dark debacle
Faded candidate able to get to heart of matter
On Friday, amidst a force-nine crapstorm that (for now) makes SNC-Lavalin look like a spring shower, Justin Trudeau stood behind a podium in Toronto and announced his government would “ban all military-style assault rifles, including the AR-15.”
“You don’t need a military-grade assault weapon — one designed to take down the most amount of people in the shortest time — to take down a deer,” Trudeau intoned.
It was an utterly shameless, utterly formulaic attempt to change the narrative. Trudeau’s government spent much of its first term studying the need for new gun control measures and the result, Bill C-71, received royal assent exactly three short months ago. There was no ban on assault rifles or the AR-15. In fact, the government emphasized the importance of letting the RCMP’s gun boffins classify individual firearms. “It should not be politicized,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told CBC last year.
Now, well, there’s an election on and the boss isn’t sure how many more photos might be out there of him in blackface. So to hell with all that. A lot of people in Toronto and other big cities will eat it up, after all.
This sort of approach long predated Trudeau, of course, and he has used it many times before. In so many ways, over the past four years, he has shown himself to be a conventional Liberal politician. But recent days have taken us miles past conventional.
If blacking up wasn’t spectacularly uncommon in the days of Trudeau’s youth, it must surely nevertheless be the case that the vast majority of Gen-Xers haven’t ever done it — if not because they thought it was racist or knew it could get them in trouble, then because who on earth has that much time to kill? Those costumes clearly took a ton of effort, and he made a habit of it!
Yes, he’s (sort of) from Quebec, and it’s different there. “We even laughed about it,” one unhelpful Quebec candidate’s campaign manager told The Globe and Mail. Perhaps more to the point, he grew up sheltered and privileged at a time when casual racism — or laborious racism, in his case — was more commonly expressed.
But then he took a BA at McGill, and a BEd at UBC. Those are environments when you would expect the relevant blackface controversies of the time to be hot topics — Ted Danson roasting Whoopi Goldberg at the Friar’s Club in 1996, for example. Surely it required an incuriousness out of keeping with Trudeau’s self-styled persona to be swanning around as Aladdin in 2001 at the age of 29.
The situation presents a fascinating counterfactual scenario. Trudeau didn’t mention his bizarre penchant during the candidate-vetting process way back in 2008, he told reporters. Had someone discovered it then, it’s easy to imagine he might never have got into politics, let alone become prime minister. Thenparty leader Stéphane Dion wasn’t exactly Trudeau’s biggest fan. And even if Trudeau had performed his epiphanyand-apology a decade ago and won his seat, he would still always be the guy who spent his teens and twenties oblivious to the most basic of racist faux-pas. He never would have been able to build the persona he rode to victory in 2015.
A lot of people who voted for that persona wanted real, fundamental, quick change. They didn’t get it, they got kicked in the shins a few times for their trouble, and many might now just wash their hands of the whole mess — at least for 2019. But then there’s Jagmeet Singh, who stumbled bizarrely out of the gate and is still struggling in the polls, but who delivered a note-perfect response to Trudeau’s
ANY ATTEMPT TO MINIMIZE OR MAXIMIZE HIS (CONDUCT) DOESN’T ACTUALLY DO JUSTICE ... IT HAS TO BE ABOUT THEM.
little problem that’s been rightly praised across the political spectrum.
He refused multiple rote requests to sensationalize the revelations, for example by calling Trudeau a racist, arguing the question focuses on the PM rather than the people who would have been hurt by the images. “Any attempt to minimize or to maximize his behaviour doesn’t actually do justice to people who are suffering. It has to be about them,” he told CBC’s Carol Off. “He has to answer for the impact that it’s had on people.”
Very much unlike Trudeau, very much unlike most Canadian politicians (and very much unlike me), Singh actually knows what it’s like to be a visible minority in Canada. What’s more, he promises to transform Canada along many of the same lines Trudeau did four years ago — albeit more boldly, for example with a wealth tax that might boost government revenues by two per cent in a decade. (Part of me wonders: Why not go bigger?) As disappointed by four years of Justin Trudeau as non-partisan progressives must be, these bizarre revelations about his past, and Singh’s calm, clear-eyed and empathetic response are a reminder that not all politicians are, in fact, the same. Better is always possible, as someone once said.