This new guy reflects our real values. We hope.
After just two days in almost-power, Justin Trudeau was moving fast. He popped up at a contrived-yet-symbolic one-man flash mob in a Montreal subway station. Told Obama he’s pulling our CF18s out of Iraq. Stood in front of the cameras and promised action on cabinet gender parity, the Paris climate talks, electoral reform ....
“Slow down,” I told the television. “You have four years. Keep your shirt on.”
This sentiment was not shared by all household members: “Don’t listen to him, Justin,” she implored the image on the screen. “Feel free to take your shirt off.”
No shortage of shirtless Trudeau pictures flying around social media since the election. Call it sexist if you want, but there’s a gleeful, gloating quality to the “look at the stud who we just elected prime minister” posts. We peek at foreign media, hoping they’ve noticed.
The implicit message: This is the Canada we want to project, hot and cool, optimistic and youthful. Forget the past nine years. That wasn’t us. This new guy represents our real values. We hope.
It can’t be fun for Stephen Harper, listening to Canadians singing Ding Dong The Witch Is
Dead and making speeches about how our long national nightmare is over.
But Harper, an American Republican trapped in a Canadian’s body, never was in sync with most of the country, which was the irony behind all his talk of heritage and tradition. Too often he looked at Canadians as though he had just caught us breaking wind in an elevator.
He always left the impression that he thought we weren’t good enough and were incapable of doing better, so we needed his stern, prescriptive, paternalistic hand to drag us where we needed, but didn’t want, to go. It was a dour, negative, self-righteous approach, controlling and intolerant of dissent — and by the time the election rolled around, most Canadians were sick of it. Hubris.
The New Democrats could have capitalized on this, but blew the opportunity by spending too much of the campaign trying to fight their traditional reputation as soft-hearted outsiders with lousy math skills. They looked like a kid who had borrowed dad’s suit for a job interview at an accountant’s office.
Likewise, Thomas Mulcair himself came across as someone trying to counter his own persona. He spent his first year as NDP leader steaming through Parliament with a perpetual scowl, earning his Angry Beaver image. He spent his second gliding across Canada with a frighteningly fixed smile and modulated speech pattern, presumably the result of some Clockwork Orange behaviour therapy, or perhaps a Prozac/Flintstones Vitamins mix-up.
And he spoke in numbers. You don’t inspire voters by talking about corporate tax rates and the Trans Pacific Partnership, you get elected by selling hope. Mulcair sounded like a policy wonk. Harper played on fears. Trudeau asked what kind of country Canada wanted to be.
“In Canada, better is always possible,” Trudeau declared. A cheap slogan, perhaps, but a welcome one.
Not that we were totally convinced by his delivery. The Liberals might have a solid majority, but Trudeau needs to recognize that Canadians (at least, 39.6 per cent of them) voted for him with fingers crossed, hoping him to be more than an heir-head elected on brand-name recognition and wishful thinking.
More to the point, this election was less about voting in Trudeau than voting out Harper, who had reached his best-before date. Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney got the same treatment at the end of their tenures, though instead of giving the voters a chance to chuck them out, they handed the wheel to successors — John Turner, Kim Campbell — before the bus went over the cliff.
Right now, Justin Trudeau is in the honeymoon period, shedding security to shake hands with random citizens (can you imagine Harper doing that?) and answering reporters’ questions (Harper definitely wouldn’t do that).
Canada does not, for the most part, suffer the extreme ideological divide that afflicts the U.S., where some rabid partisans would rather see America fail than the president succeed. Most Canadians, regardless of political leaning, wish the prime ministerelect the best.
He can keep his shirt on, though.