Authenticity part of Singh's appeal

NDP boss is what Trudeau isn’t, Lisa Van Dusen writes.

When last we left our federal-election-speculation Google alert menu, the original round of soothsaying and odds-making that provided such a dreamy, early-summer beach-blanket bingo diversion from Delta variant anxiety and vaccine misinformation was in full swing.

But because we live in an era of tactical log-rolling ruled by Newton's Third Law of Bulls*it — whereby every political narrative produces an opposite political narrative designed to recalibrate the first political narrative based on the relative operational value of outcomes — that original pre-election speculation has now been qualified by a barrage of deterrence, much of it generated by parties with a vested interest in election timing, some of it not even.

Still, since — for the prime minister in charge of making the call — the price of waiting includes a potential fourth-wave-induced reversal in the government's pandemic management epic, as well as the possibility of a change in the campaign dance card if Erin O'Toole succumbs to the sort of enticingly incentivized Kremlin flu that could rationalize a late substitution, let's assume away.

One factor that must be keeping Justin Trudeau up on the nights when O'Toole isn't helping him sleep is the appeal of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. Singh is everything Trudeau is not, in an interesting way — the way O'Toole is everything Trudeau is not, in an uninteresting way.

A lawyer who transmuted the pain of a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father and a sexually abusive martial arts teacher into a career as a public defender, Singh is the great-grandson of Punjabi Sikh freedom-fighter and Indian independence activist Sewa Singh Thikriwala. The prime minister famously boxes; Singh practises Brazilian jiu-jitsu (in 2017, experts surveyed by VICE on who'd win a Justin-Jagmeet smackdown picked Trudeau, but the methodology is so impenetrably bro-ish that I have no way of judging those results).

Singh surpassed expectations by running as an authentic, happy warrior: i.e. himself.

Trudeau has been teased about his hair;

Singh offers YouTube videos on how to tie a Dumalla. Trudeau has been sighted running with international counterparts; Singh, per the cover photo on his 2019 autobiography, Love & Courage, rides a bike (it was stolen from his condo garage in March and, in an outrageously Canadian moment, returned to him by Ottawa police within hours).

In the last federal campaign and his first, Singh surpassed expectations by running as an authentic, happy warrior — i.e., himself. This time, whenever this time is, he has served a stretch as the progressive ballast in a minority parliament when the health and economic exigencies of a deadly pandemic made him a voice of reason as “social spending” became existentially pragmatic.

Singh's authenticity matters at a time when Canadian voters are still recovering from daily, cross-border exposure to an American president whose communications strategy consisted of a perpetual, democracy-discrediting deluge of dishonesty. That experience has recalibrated our thresholds for insincerity; made us less inclined to indulge either conventional political boilerplate as a fig leaf for it or performative belligerence as a substitute for it. It's one of the reasons Joe Biden's approval ratings are what they are, and it's an argument for including questions about honesty, authenticity and trust in leadership polling along with “gets people like me.”

One could argue that Singh, as leader of a party unlikely to be conferred the responsibility of governing, can afford to be authentic and sincere. These days, at a time when the stakes of competence are so high and the cost of electing phoneys so exorbitant, no politician can afford to be anything but authentic and sincere. With so many lies still being told in the public sphere, truth is more than its own reward.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor and deputy publisher of Policy magazine. She is a former Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.