Maybe he should try authenticity

Liberals of a previous era muttered, “let Chrétien be Chrétien.” Funny how history repeats.

For more than a year, Justin Trudeau has played a frontrunner’s game, bobbing and weaving rather than meeting critics toe to toe. He will very soon need to get back to something approaching the more freewheeling style of his leadership run, with all the attendant pitfalls, or risk seeing Thomas Mulcair shoulder him aside as the preferred leader of Canadians seeking change.

Is it unfair to accuse the Liberal leader of spending too much time behind his own blue-line? Some will say so. What about his March 9 speech on liberty, which stoked a national debate over the treatment of Muslims in Canada? What about the Liberal plan, announced earlier this month, to slash taxes for middle-income earners by boosting taxes for the wealthiest? Surely, that can’t be considered timid.

And yet, there’s this: Trudeau personally, since his party’s convention in Montreal in February 2014, has operated within a very tightly controlled frame. Even when he works without notes, his utterances appear highly studied and rehearsed. His scrums are brief. The days when he’d simply pop up in front of a gaggle of reporters and speak off the cuff, trusting that Canadians would reward his openness and forgive his occasional miscue, are long gone.

Ah, but this is a double standard, I hear Liberal partisans cry. Where are Stephen Harper’s lengthy scrums? Where are his moments of unrehearsed engagement with the jackals of the press? Answer: There are none. The last may have occurred in Tuktoyaktuk in 2010 when the PM raced down a runway on an all-terrain vehicle and afterward, asked if he had broken any rules, said jokingly, “I think I make the rules.” Oops. Nowadays, even when cruising the Northwest Passage, the PM keeps himself in a bubble. Why should Trudeau be any different, when the cost of a single mistake can be so very high?

The first and most immediate answer, with the New Democrats rising into a three-way tie in public support in the most recent EKOS poll, is that one party leader still does often speak off the cuff. Mulcair’s last serious media gaffe occurred in 2011, a year before he became NDP leader, when he appeared to question whether Osama bin Laden was really dead. That was a while ago. Since becoming NDP leader, Mulcair has scrummed routinely and at length and not got himself in trouble as a result.

Second, Trudeau quite deliberately presented himself initially as a different kind of politician. He took a huge risk when he sought out a boxing match with Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau in March 2012. For all it was done for charity and was nominally a sideshow, the fight was symbolically powerful. Overnight, Trudeau became the guy who took big calculated risks and won. His expulsion of his party’s senators in early 2014 was of a piece; controversial, unexpected, bold. Whether one agreed or not, it was not politics as usual.

In the interim, Trudeau’s early promise as a democratic reformer has taken a beating because of his repeated meddling in nomination battles he promised would be open, most egregiously that of erst- while Tory Eve Adams. And his early casual openness, driven by the need to avoid mistakes, has given way to a more guarded public persona. Some of this, such as the tempering of earlier florid ticks in his speaking style, has helped him. But the loss of spontaneity has not.

Trudeau’s difficulty now is that while he was trying to keep out of trouble, husbanding his lead in the polls, waiting for the big policy reveals to swing momentum in his favour, events were moving. Mulcair continued slapping Tory enforcers around in the Commons, solidifying his reputation as a principled bulldog. Then, Rachel Notley showed New Democrats can be competitive anywhere.

There is one obvious way for Trudeau to leap this ditch, though it carries risk. He could try to tap the same vein Notley recently did in Alberta, by reclaiming his place as the anti-politician politician. He could speak repeatedly and off the cuff with authenticity and wit, scrumming until reporters are tired of the sound of his voice. All summer long, he could wade into town halls and other unscripted settings, giving the lie to the most damaging point in the narrative prepared for him by his opponents, which is that he’s in over his head.

Trudeau would have to do all this, of course, without making a single major gaffe. The pressure would be brutal. But isn’t that moment fast approaching anyhow? If the trend revealed by EKOS and a smattering of other recent polls holds, Trudeau’s days as the favourite are over. He needs to drop the gloves (or lace them up, depending on which sports metaphor you prefer), and tackle the Conservative narrative head-on.

Otherwise, he runs the risk of being permanently defined by it, just as Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion were before him.

The pressure would be brutal, but that moment is nearing fast