Will stormy days disrupt sunny ways?
THE PM STILL IS PERILOUSLY PRONE TO TELLING US WHAT CANADA AND CANADIANS ARE ALL ABOUT. — COLUMNIST MICHAEL DEN TANDT
Bitter, unrelenting partisanship was central among the afflictions that caused Stephen Harper Conservatism to collapse under its own weight last year, many would agree. It would be a cruel irony indeed if, having defeated Harperism with a menu of sunny optimism, Justin Trudeau Liberalism became its mirror image.
Let’s give credit where due: At their hundredth day in office, which came and went last Thursday, the Liberals have changed the tone in Ottawa, appreciably. Anyone who denies this outright is either insufficiently informed or in the grip of Trudeau Derangement Syndrome, which now vies with its predecessor, Harper Derangement Syndrome, in the catalogue of Canadian psychiatric disorders.
Trudeau and his ministers engage. They hold regular public briefings, singly and in groups, to update Canadians on their progress on their various files, and to take questions from reporters. The prime minister himself has done the same and is making it routine. It’s easy to forget, because a month is a year in politics, that Harper media “avails” between elections were rare, quasi-mystical events, like total eclipses of the sun.
Trudeau and his ministers are ambitious. Three of the very biggest blots on Canadian political life, arguably, have been the patronage-riddled Senate, the parlous state of our democracy itself (including in the House of Commons) and the systemic inequity lived by Canadian aboriginal people. Say what one might about their choice of fix, the Liberal government has promised to tackle all three problems simultaneously.
Not to mention the beginnings of a new law on assisted death, as the Supreme Court of Canada has required; restoring the longform census, the abolition of which was idiotic and misguided from the start; un-gagging federal scientists, public servants and diplomats, whose silencing during the Harper years was outrageous and un-democratic; gender parity in cabinet, which was long overdue; and re-starting federalprovincial relationships that had rotted on the vine for a decade.
The Trudeau government’s Syrian refugee rescue, which consumed virtually all its energy and attention in its first two months, drew sniping because of the overweening focus on meeting arbitrary deadlines and numerical targets, which the government missed. The bottom line, though, is that Canada was able to take in 25,000 refugees in an urgent manner, just as the Liberals said during the campaign, because it has happened and is happening. The lives transformed as a result are real, not figments of anyone’s political calculus.
The government’s biggest early misstep, of course, has been its incoherent, clumsy and tortuously slow handling of the withdrawal of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s CF-18s from the U.S.-led air war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
As I and many others have written, this election promise could, and should, have been reversed after the Paris terrorist attacks last November. The Liberals’ dogged insistence on pulling the planes out, in defiance of logic and Canadian allies’ stated strategic and tactical needs, has made them appear strangely rigid. That said, they have pulled their fat from the fire, after a fashion, by increasing the breadth, intensity and ambition of the military and humanitarian mission on the ground. They can legitimately say this new mission is in keeping with Pearsonian tradition and Canada’s bipartisan, whole-of-government approach in Afghanistan.
Which brings us to the areas in which the Trudeau Liberals, thus far, are failing. They’re not inconsiderable.
For starters, Trudeau has an unnerving tendency to wade into platitudes, sloganeering and sermonizing when he should be articulating specifics. Belatedly, he and his team appear to have stopped chirping “Canada is back,” at public events, perhaps aware now of the stunning arrogance implicit in the statement.
But the PM still is perilously prone to telling us what Canada and Canadians are all about, in terms that make it obvious his own definition is synonymous with traditional Liberalism. Trudeau’s muchcriticized statement Feb. 8 that “the people terrorized by ISIL every day don’t need our vengeance, they need our help,” was not, as I heard it, intended to suggest that bombing ISIL terrorists is vengeful. It was an expression of a personal philosophy of avoiding hatred as a response to terrorism, and responding coldly and methodically, as opposed to emotionally.
But the fact neither Trudeau nor his advisers sensed how the line would sound to listeners unfamiliar with his thinking is troubling. It suggests that even now, so very early in their run, they’re vulnerable to bubble-think.
This country, perhaps to state the obvious, is much greater and more complex than the necessarily narrow set of assumptions enshrined in any one political party’s policy manual, supported by its true believers in the anile, demented echo chamber of social media.
“Changing the tone” superficially was easy; a matter of dusting the under-used furniture in the National Press Theatre and taking reporters’ questions now and then. Changing the tone fundamentally, after 10 years of silo-building, requires something much harder: That is to imagine the world and the issues through the eyes of your critics, without presuming them a priori to be wrong or ill-intentioned.