Punch-drunk politics

Did Justin Trudeau’s victory in a threeround charity boxing match over Senator Patrick Brazeau bolster his eventual claim to the Liberal party leadership and perhaps, some day, the Prime Minister’s Office? Ask a normal person that question, and you might expect to receive a quizzical look. Ask a political columnist in search of a narrative, and your chances of a “yes” are much better.

Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom tried valiantly not to go off the deep end. He did not claim, for example, that anything in the Brazeau-trudeau tilt actually changed the leadership calculus in a measurable way. Nevertheless, he argued that it put Mr. Trudeau “back in the spotlight.”

Then, oddly, Mr. Walkom observed that Mr. Trudeau had already been in the spotlight, exhibiting “classically Trudeauesque” behaviour — by which he seemed to mean, simply (and not inaccurately), being in the spotlight. The only recent news he cited was Mr. Trudeau’s suggestion that Quebec separatism might be a more viable option in “Stephen Harper’s Canada.”

Lawrence Martin, writing in The Globe and Mail, was less cautious. He began by listing Mr. Trudeau’s purported shortcomings: That he is “undisciplined,” “light on policy” and “cavalier,” for example. This, he argued, has been part of “a perception … that he’s the mother’s son,” lacking “much of the mettle from the father.”

Now that has all changed, and changed utterly. “Entering the ring required his father’s confidence, courage and penchant for risk taking,” Mr. Martin effused.

“If the [Liberal] party is to rise again,” he concluded, “it may well be that it needs someone of daunting name and spirit to remind the country of its daunting days.”

The worst part about this tumescent bilge is how easy it is to imagine Liberals swallowing it. It is no knock on Mr. Trudeau, who is reasonably intelligent and articulate and does nothing but downplay his leadership aspirations, to say that most of the arguments in favour of his candidacy are unbecoming of a mature democracy. Canadians tend to deride, in other nations, both dynastic politics and celebrities, par- ticularly sportsmen, elevated past their supposed station. Yet for some of us, the idea of “another Trudeau” is like slipping into a warm, soothing bath. Especially if he takes his shirt off.

Westerners and conservatives tend to scoff at Mr. Trudeau from precisely the opposite angle: He’s not a man of limited accomplishment buoyed by his surname; he’s a man of limited accomplishment weighed down by his surname. There is much to that. But the silliest part of Mr. Martin’s son-of-a-flibbertigibbet turned man-of-steel narrative is the assumption that people outside the Ottawa bubble would even understand it.

On Tuesday night at a midtown Toronto pub, I happened to overhear some 20somethings playing Trivial Pursuit. “Who called Fidel Castro ‘the sexiest man I’ve ever met’?” one asked. Met by stony silence, he flipped the card. “Margaret Trudeau,” he said, blankly. “I don’t even know who that is.”

A foreigner logging on to the Globe’s or Star’s website might think Canada was a country with no substantive problems to solve — a gleaming, well-oiled technocracy in which politicians were a sort of elected royalty, a class of entertainers. In fact, most of them are uninspired, tailwagging dullards.

You can’t argue with Canada’s overall success, with its bottom-line budget numbers and endlessly flattered banking system. But it’s worth remembering that the Liberals’ last winning streak ended in an elaborate criminal kickback scheme. This week, we learned that the Conservatives would rather risk wasting untold billions on fighter jets than ask a few tough questions or admit that an opposition politician might have a point. Many native Canadians live in third-world poverty, with no apparent hope of deliverance.

Again, there is nothing here to say Mr. Trudeau is part of the problem, or that he can’t be part of the solution. But the only thing that should be less relevant to his future career than his last name is the fact that he punched a Senator in the face.

In the Ottawa Citizen this week, Andrew Potter argued that if Mr. Trudeau “does go on to become more than he presently is, they will say that it all really started in a boxing ring, on a Saturday night in a hotel ballroom, in Ottawa’s east end.” I suspect he’s right. And it’s altogether ridiculous.

The future of Justin Trudeau’s career shouldn’t depend on a boxing match