The (painful) education of Justin Trudeau

Eve Adams’s spectacular failure to win the Liberal nomination in Toronto’s Eglinton-Lawrence riding suggests its members have much better political judgment than Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader who sought to impose her on them.

Adams was an MP without a party or many political friends when Trudeau boggled many a mind by welcoming her to Liberal ranks in February. She’d been hustled out of the Conservative caucus over her behaviour in seeking the party’s nomination in a Toronto suburb. She famously berated a carwash attendant over a cleaning she considered inferior. The moment she traded blue for red she started heaping scorn on her former associates as “fear-mongers and bullies,” and the party she’d served until then as mean-spirited and divisive.

There were probably few Canadians more pleased than Conservatives to see Adams sign on as a Liberal. They’d not only been cured of a long-time headache, but had managed to pass it on to their rivals. Mike Colle, a Liberal who represented Eglinton-Lawrence for 20 years, didn’t need any help to spot the size of the mistake being made.

“I mean, that a Harper Tory from Mississauga all of a sudden is going to run here in the middle of Toronto with no connections and no awareness? You know, it’s a real insult to the local Liberals in this community,” he said. “I just find the whole thing preposterous.”

So did a lot of other Liberals. Despite campaigning hard for the nod, Adams was decisively defeated on Sunday, losing by about 800 votes out of 3,000 cast. Why such a stupendous gaffe wasn’t evident to the Liberal brain trust remains a mystery. Trudeau would have been better to fire whatever adviser suggested it was a good idea, and enlist Colle in his place.

Instead, Colle went to bat for Adams’s rival, Marco Mendicino, a local prosecutor and adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall law school. Adams, he declared, would succeed “over my dead body.”

Mendicino has an impressive background, including prosecution of the “Toronto 18” terror group, which gives him excellent credentials to put up against the law-and-order Tories. He also has an extensive record in local groups. Adams is a career politician who doesn’t live in the riding and only became a Liberal after being rejected by the Tories. She’s engaged to a former Harper strategist also on the outs with the party.

Mendicino had the support of former Liberal leader Bob Rae. Adams was parachuted in by Trudeau, despite his pledge of open nomination contests. It didn’t need a rocket scientist to spot the better candidate, yet Trudeau not only turned up for a photo op with Adams, but praised her “commitment to public service.”

The whole unhappy affair underlines the serious doubts that continue to plague Trudeau’s leadership skills, and the judgment of the advisers around him. A political novice could have seen the dangers involved in embracing Adams, which not only contradicted Trudeau’s pledge of open nominations but offended local party officials and opened the door for Trudeau to be criticized by opposition parties as just another cynical opportunist despite his pledge to practise a new, more honourable form of leadership. Trudeau’s father engineered a similar floor-crossing in 1977 when he welcomed long-time Conservative Jack Horner, handing him a cabinet position he promptly lost when Alberta voters ousted him in the next election.

“You don’t buy into Liberal values in 24 hours,” Colle told the CBC when Adams was first recruited. “You work, you volunteer in the community, you fight for causes. That’s what makes a Liberal.”

Perhaps, never having toiled at the grassroots himself, Trudeau was unaware of the depth of feeling it generates. The leader who has laboured to establish himself as the voice of the middle class failed completely to appreciate how middle-class Liberals in Eglinton-Lawrence would feel about his choice and his intrusion. It’s far from the first time Trudeau has been shown to be out of step with party members who were labouring on its behalf well before he signed on as leader. That he still hasn’t absorbed the lesson, this close to an election, can’t offer much reason for optimism among the rest of the party rankand-file.