Justin Trudeau fighting one ghost, struggling with another
Prime ministers past, including his father, Pierre, are having an influence in recent days
Stephen Harper was back in the Commons this week in a big way — not in person, but definitely in spirit.
The former prime minister’s name is being increasingly invoked by the Liberals to take pokes at Conservatives, with the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, leading the charge. During just one question period this week, Trudeau raised Harper’s name no fewer than seven times.
“The Harper Conservatives still demonstrate that they do not get it,” the prime minister said during a back-andforth over carbon pricing.
While it was once said that Pierre Trudeau “haunts us still,” his son seems to have his sights set on a more recent ghost of prime ministers past. Harper, according to Trudeau this week, “still very much apparently controls the backbench of the Conservative party.”
All of this Liberal talk about Harper has been ratcheting up ever since last month’s big convention in Halifax and Trudeau’s speech to the troops, heavily laced with references to the former PM. Clearly, and not so subtly, Trudeau’s team seems to have decided that the best way to fight the next election is as a sequel to the last one — party like it’s 2015.
In Halifax, Barack Obama’s former adviser, David Axelrod, advised Liberals to keep casting themselves as the force of change. Could that be what all the Harper references are about, then? Trudeau reminding Canadians that he’s still a big change from the Harper years?
Whether it works or not remains to be seen, but all these references to Harper are also an indication of what the PM is thinking about these days as the clock ticks down on his first mandate. Trudeau does indeed seem to be thinking about what lasts in politics; what lives on after prime ministers have left office.
Trudeau said as much during a fascinating question-and-answer encounter with the Assembly of First Nations on Wednesday in Gatineau, Que.
In the midst of a reply about delivering on money and services within certain time frames, the prime minister wandered off into reflective mode about the whole idea of political legacy.
“I got to see my father, as a kid, working very, very hard on things,” he said. “I get to reflect now on the things that he did that actually made a difference 30, 40 years later — and the other things that are just footnotes in the history books, that seemed to matter quite a bit at the time but didn’t last … didn’t set Canada on a path forward.”
This reminiscing about his father has obviously prodded Trudeau into thinking about how to sort through his own questions on what’s urgent now and what’s going to be important later — and how you determine the difference.
“Fortunately, my father got to do a few things that did deeply mark the history of our country in meaningful ways,” he said, “but a lot of what we do doesn’t last.”
There’s probably a whole book — or at least a long magazine article — in how Trudeau is sorting through his first three years in office along these lines. (And yes, I’m happy to write that if the PM wants to give interviews.)
All prime ministers obsess from time to time on their legacy. The fact is, however, they don’t always get to write it themselves. They will be sized up by their friends but also their foes. They will be remembered not only for how they’ve changed history but by how history has changed them.
Conservatives keep cheering in the Commons every time Trudeau mentions Harper, demonstrating that prime ministerial legacies are also a matter of opinion.
But when Trudeau is talking about Harper these days, it may not just be the last prime minister’s legacy on his mind — but his own as well.