Justin time again
ON TUESDAY morning, with the Canadian election results just in, it was clear that Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party were just in by a whisker or two, losing their majority but with sufficient votes to be a Minority Government and walk a political tightrope which could as easily end up around their necks as under their feet.
During the elections, many of the ‘dumb’ things Trudeau said in his first term surfaced, including, “If you kill your enemies, they win”, “The budget will balance itself” and “I don’t read the newspapers, I don’t watch the news. If something important happens, someone will tell me.”
On Tuesday, there were so many things in the media about him that the line of people waiting to tell Justin Trudeau what was in the news must have stretched from Ottawa to Toronto. For example, a report by the New York Times Editorial Board started with,
“Justin Trudeau’s victory in Canada’s national elections on Monday followed what he called one of the ‘nastiest’ campaigns in Canadian history. That may be true, to the degree that much of the campaign was about him and some bad decisions he made, and it featured a lot of name-calling. At one point, supporters of his Conservative challenger even chanted ‘Lock him up, lock him up’.”
The Times referred to a ruling by a Canadian ethics commissioner that Trudeau violated federal conflict of interest rules by pressuring his former attorney general to cut a deal with SNC-Lavalin, a company facing corruption charges, and retaliating when she refused to play ball.
That was the frying pan but, as the Times added,
“The scandal dominated the news for months and led to several high-level resignations. Then, when the campaign got underway in September, old photographs and a video surfaced of Mr Trudeau in brownface and blackface.”
This was clearly not the same Justin Trudeau who had welcomed refugees and made amends to Canada’s indigenous people. But while another minstrel show or scandal might dent Justin’s image, it most likely would not destroy his political career.
As he said, “I won the birth lottery” and expanded the statement, “I’ve always known that it’s sometimes an advantage to be a Trudeau.”
This, more than anything else, explains Justin Trudeau’s rise to power and why the only fall he now faces is the crisp, clear and extremely beautiful Ottawa autumn.
DAWN OF THE ERA
Time Magazine captured the dawn of this era, “Justin was not yet out of diapers when Nixon foresaw that he’d one day be prime minister himself. During a state visit to Canada in 1972, Nixon raised a toast to the four-month-old son of Canada’s prime minister, reports the CBC. ‘Tonight we’ll dispense with the formalities. I’d like to toast the future prime minister of Canada: to Justin Pierre Trudeau,’ Nixon said, raising a glass at a state visit gala in Ottawa.”
I was a student in Ottawa when this took place but I had seen for myself, a year earlier, what it meant to be, not just a Trudeau, but Pierre himself and the charisma that made him what magazine editor and journalist, Peter Brimelow, said, “…a great man, perhaps the greatest Canada has produced in this century.” Poet Irving Layton, put it differently, “In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination”.
Fortunately, in Pierre’s case, it was character assassination and that was like water off the back of one of the ducks in the Ottawa Valley.
I was working in the Whitehall Office of Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams in Trinidad when Pierre
Trudeau – the erudite, handsome, flamboyant and charismatic prime minister of Canada – took time off from his honeymoon in Tobago to pay a courtesy call. Mr Trudeau jumped out of the car without waiting for the security guard to open the door and literally ran up the stairs in his gold-coloured shorts or ‘hot pants’. As he left, Trudeau looked longingly at the polished mahogany handrails of the wooden staircase at Whitehall.
Later, when I went to study journalism in Ottawa where Trudeau and Parliament were our beat, I realised that he might have been itching, hot pants and all, to slide down the banister. As CNEWS reported on Trudeau’s death, “He did back flips in swimming pools, wore sandals in Parliament, dated glamourous celebrities.” When his second son, Michel, died in an avalanche in 1998, Trudeau aged overnight. As CNEWS said, “It was not the man that Canadians were used to seeing, the one who would pirouette behind the Queen, slide down a banister, or give protesters the finger.”
A COUNTRY IS BUILT EVERY DAY
Despite Justin’s slide in this election, he is still the son of the man referred to as “the greatest pop star this country ever produced”.
I watched Mr Trudeau perform in Parliament and on television and, like most other students, loved his quick humour, “Some things I never learned to like. I didn’t like to kiss babies, though I didn’t mind kissing their mothers”.
What I remember best is his statement, “A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.”
We in the region have seen other similar father-toson handovers – the Adams family (Grantley to Tom), the Manley magic (Norman to Michael) and the Birds of Antigua (Vere to Lester). Justin’s time is not yet as tempestuous as Michael’s, as tough as Tom’s or as tarnished as Lester’s.
The New York Times ends its article with, “Let us hope that Mr Trudeau returns to office chastened and wiser.”
Justin might but Pierre never did. As he made clear, “A man who tries to please all men by weakening his position or compromising his beliefs, in the end has neither position nor beliefs. A man must say what he believes clearly, without dogma, and without guile.”