Landslide win for Trudeau
FEDERAL LIBERALS EMBRACE A NEW LEADER
‘I TAKE NOTHING FOR GRANTED,’ Justin Trudeau says after winning the federal Liberal party leadership race 45 years to the month after his father won the same position. Securing about 80 per cent of the vote from supporters in Sunday’s first ballot, Trudeau faces the task of trying to restore the party to its former glory.
OTTAWA – He is master of all he surveys. For a day or so.
In little more than a year, the 41-year-old eldest son of Pierre Trudeau has moved from the fringes of the Liberal party to its head, from neophyte to Great Hope in one extended leap. His pride of place is undisputed. He won overwhelmingly, on the first ballot, with 80 per cent of the vote.
Justin Trudeau now has an unprecedented opportunity to remake a major federal party in his image. The wind at his back is considerable. So are the potential pitfalls in his path.
Until recently, Trudeau was often dismissed as a pushover, with little more than good looks and a famous pedigree to his credit. Over the past six months, as polls showed his popularity surging, the punditocracy has moved incrementally from open disdain, to bet-hedging, to heralding a Liberal revival. The latter will not last — unless Trudeau proves to be as effective a leader as he is a campaigner.
It was intriguing Sunday to see former prime minister Jean Chrétien, the party’s last undisputed winner, emerging from relative seclusion to deliver a vintage crowdpleasing speech. Chrétien has been absent at major Liberal events in recent years. Former prime minister Paul Martin was also present. So it seems the ancient, corrosive blood feud between the two giants of the ’90s may finally be history, resolved by a new generation.
Unlike Chrétien in 1990 and Martin in 2003, or for that matter Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff in 2006 and 2009, respectively, Trudeau owes few debts within the party. His donor base is broad and loyal to him personally. There is no close rival who must be appeased. Retired astronaut Marc Garneau might have been that person, but he dropped out. Martha Hall Findlay and Joyce Murray each have loyal but small followings.
For Trudeau, all of that is to the good. Now for the deadfall traps.
Because of his youth and relative inexperience — he won two hard-fought local elections in his Montreal riding of Papineau, but beyond that, the political resumé is a blank canvas — Trudeau will be deluged with advice from the party’s veterans, many of whom still consider him a whippersnapper in short pants.
Unlike, say, the Conservative and New Democratic parties, the Liberals have historically been porous and undisciplined in their communications, particularly when dissing the leader from the shadows. Trudeau will need to engage his veterans, showing them the respect they will consider their due, without allowing himself to be ruled by them. Should that delicate process go awry, the anonymous backbiting will begin.
Second: Though Trudeau has not presented a detailed platform, he has made promises about how he will form policy. He has committed to drawing in all Canadians — not just Liberals — in generating a platform for 2015.
Such openness is vital, if the party is to come back from the near-dead: Recent Liberal history is strewn with well-meaning planks — from Dion’s Green Shift to Ken Dryden’s national daycare plan to Martin’s Kelowna Accord — that failed to connect.
Trudeau cannot, if he is true to his word, simply recycle these ideas. But a devoted core of Grit partisans, including key members of the caucus, still believe in them and will expect him to do just that. Solving that problem will require skill.
Perhaps most important, Trudeau’s popularity itself can become his worst enemy. There is a risk of him peaking too early, with an election two years away, and of his success itself becoming an excuse for avoiding the intellectual overhaul the party desperately needs.
If that were to happen, the “movement” he has launched will be primed for a hard fall. For as long as Justin Trudeau personally is the alpha and the omega of the new Liberalism — which he is for the time being, without question — the entire edifice is little more than a cult of personality, vulnerable to any missteps or mistakes he may make. And he will certainly make some. Only solid pillars of popular, needs-based policy can provide him with a lasting base.
In the House, he will need to be steady, sensible and workmanlike — a far cry from his demeanour little more than a year ago, in the famous “piece of s---” incident.
The spotlight will be like nothing he’s ever experienced, even in a lifetime spent in the glare. The Conservatives and the NDP both can be expected to turn every twitch and fumble to their advantage.
So, a triumph? For Trudeau it is, absolutely. But the ebullience may be shortlived. For he’s just now, finally, stepping into the ring. In the years ahead, there will be moments when he wonders, as he did in round one of the famous punch-up with Senator Patrick Brazeau, whether he’s made a terrible mistake.
How he recovers from those moments will tell the tale.