Trudeau should mind his p’s and q’s
Nanny no-no: The expense is typical for a PM, but it doesn’t look good
Is it an Imelda Marcos-scale story of entitlement and narcissism? Ah, no. Will it even register next to the oh-so-Canadian tut-tutting in the 1980s over Mila Mulroney’s spending, which once included $2,000 for flowers at a lunch, or the furor over Pierre Trudeau’s $275,000 indoor lap pool at 24 Sussex?
Not hardly. But the story of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s taxpayer-employed nannies, reported Tuesday by the CBC’s Chris Hall, is one to watch all the same. The reason is the optics, which are lousy — even for, or perhaps especially for, a leader enjoying a protracted honeymoon.
Let us first dispense with the notion that the employment of child care workers by a prime minister and his spouse, particularly when the children are little, is in any way improper. Every prime minister with a young family in living memory has had such help.
The job is 24/7, the demands incessant, the travel constant. In most public circumstances, both the PM and his wife are expected to attend, as Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau have done on their recent international swing. There would be harrumphing if this were not the case.
Likewise, it fails the test of logic to say nannies are less important to a prime minister’s proper functioning than are cooks, gardeners or drivers.
The taxpayer-employed chef at 24 Sussex Drive (once the Trudeaus move back into the official residence, after renovations) presumably will be deemed a reasonable expense because the PM and his spouse can’t very well be leaping up during state dinners to clear the soup bowls, or grab the kettle before it boils over. The PM is not expected to mow his own lawn or rake his own leaves.
Indeed, according to reporting by the Ottawa Citizen’s Don Butler in 2014, caring for then- prime minister Stephen Harper’s yard cost the National Capital Commission a tidy $57,000 since 2009. Ditto the residence’s famous indoor pool — $58,500 on maintenance, cleaning and repairs from 2009 to 2014.
Even Harper’s piano was a burden to taxpayers: Its tuning and care cost nearly $600 over that five-year span. Harper reportedly has a keen ear. With a set of pliers and a tuning fork he likely could have kept the piano sounding true. Maybe he had other things in hand at the time.
Surely the same reasonable standard should apply to changing a diaper. When my children were babies, I used to change them on the fly, on the carpet in the living room, during dinner parties. That would not be deemed entirely proper, one suspects, for a head of government or his spouse, while toasting another head of government, or the Queen and Prince Philip say, over crème brûlée.
That said, Trudeau and his advisers would be smart to pay attention to the public reaction to this story, and not just from the redder-than-red Liberal trolls who flood on to social media, hackles raised and teeth bared, at the first criticism of their champion.
Justin Trudeau’s party won 39.5 per cent of the popular vote Oct. 19. That means six of every 10 eligible voters chose another party with another leader. The 184 Liberal seats, a commanding majority, are partly the result of a winner-take-all, first-past- the-post electoral system, which Trudeau has promised to abolish, this term. His 184 seats are overwhelmingly urban.
There’s a great big chunk of country out there, in other words, that is not gleefully embracing the Liberal restoration, or its smug-sounding slogan that “Canada is back,” as though it ever went away. For those voters, and indeed even for many disaffected conservatives and Red Tories who did vote for the Grits, it will not be obvious that Liberalism is synonymous with Canada, or that the world has been transformed by Trudeau’s good intentions.
Non-true believers and swing voters inclined to give the new government a chance, out of simple fair-mindedness, will be looking for signals he means what he said about Conservatives being “not our enemies, but our neighbours.”
The PM’s offhand remark to the BBC last week, that his critics were “slightly bewildered,” as he “left them in the dust,” may be true. That doesn’t make it wise to say so. From a leader holding a dominant hand, it comes off as arrogant, which is the Liberal party’s ancient kryptonite. Trudeau will need at least grudging co-operation from nonpartisans and fence-sitters when the time comes, for example, to reform the electoral system.
He needs his critics now to help with refugee resettlement. Kicking sand in their faces won’t win them over.
It’s inevitable, given the highprofile round of travel in which the new PM, his staff and ministers were almost immediately swept up, that they should be a little gobsmacked and starstruck by the experience.
Back in Canada, it’s early December, it’s dark, it’s cold, and working stiffs still get up in the morning and drag themselves to jobs they don’t love, and that don’t allow the luxury of hired help. Something to remember.