Trudeau must change attitude, not cabinet

There’s an aura about cabinet shuffles. Certainly they mesmerize newsrooms. The game of who will go where, who’s up, who’s down, what does it mean if X moves from this portfolio to that portfolio, or Y gets hauled from some high- profile perch to dwell in the lower echelons of cabinet, is a harmless one. It’s an endlessly chewable biscuit, ideal low- calorie filler for columns and news panels. And as all will oblige, it is important for columnists to be fed and news panels to have matter to be dreary and obvious about.

In the case of the Trudeau shuffle, don’t take any of it too seriously. It’s mainly show. Having lost his majority, having shed his always specious charisma, the PM has a profound responsibility to show he has been chastened by the election, by the fractured, fractious mélange of a Parliament it has produced, and now in a wounded second term is going to seriously revise his approach to being prime minister.

Start by showing, Prime Minister, that it is a country you lead, not some boutique for trendy causes or a display case for the very freshest “progressive” attitudes.

A cabinet shuffle that does not signify some much deeper, non- cosmetic, shift in the tone and approach of your government will leave things much as they are. What’s needed is a real attitude shift in the whole approach to government, a reorientation of your ideas about government, particularly abandoning performative, emblematic politics for the real business of getting things done.

Attitude change No. 1: Start by coming to an active and informed understanding that problems and tensions in the country you actually lead are your first concern. Understand that the sea levels on a beach in Australia in 2080, over which you have absolutely no ability to predict or change, are not within your ambit or your competence. Your real front- line duty in a Confederation troubled, now, by division, rancour, and failed belief in political leadership, is to attend to matters at home, before all else.

Your assignment is Canada. Strike a new attitude. Canada, its provinces and regions, its industries and well- being, nourishing the national temperament — is your principal and only concern. And considering the country is in one of its most fractured moments, that it is subject to tensions and rivalries and interprovincial disputes, and with a Parliament that is more like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle than a reflection of a country united in most matters that count, you have a major task before you.

Begin to internalize that what distresses or worries the people in Saskatoon or Prince George is far more your duty to learn and appreciate, firsthand, than subscribing to Global Warming Inc.’s latest scare, or Extinction Rebellion’s most recent buffoonish protest. If you must obsess on an issue, make it the return of Quebec separatism and the fresh anger and disenchantment on the Prairies.

You should give great thought to moving your government off its “woke” setting. Your entire first term seemed to be one continuous search for opportunities to display your very progressive credentials to every trendy group and cause that presented itself. Drop the glamour trips abroad altogether. Start holding stay- overs with aides and ministers in sections of the country not normally on a PM’S itinerary. Less the showcase and usually tepid town halls. Go to places somewhat off the track, get a taste of the variety of Canadian life as it is lived every day; the subtle differences between a northern Ontario town and say Weyburn, Sask.

It wouldn’t be woke, but it would be real. The peril in Confederation now is that people, particularly in the Western provinces, really believe that they get secondclass treatment, that Ottawa is running a two- tier government. It’s not a pose. It’s not a partisan response. It is a reluctantly drawn conclusion.

Of the oilpatch, what is there left to say? The greatest attitude shift has to come from you, Prime Minister. You have to, in the common phrase, do a 180 on the oilsands. You have to reverse your focus, stop seeing this great industry as something that ( from your perspective) unfortunately “can’t be shut down tomorrow,” as something to be “transitioned” from, i.e., shut down as soon as possible. You have to support it, and vocally.

For once, get up in a crowded room and declare the importance of this industry to the whole country, pride in the people who work it, astonishment at the level of its technological capacity and invention. It is, of its kind, the best in the world.

That would be an attitude shift of immense consequence and would go extremely far in repairing the divisions your obstinate commitment to international climate change, holding that cause superior to the interests of the country you actually govern, has brought about.

More than any other issue, the clash between your global warming pretensions and desire to play Galahad on the world stage has been at the expense of the West and has stimulated more grievance and resentment within the Confederation than we have seen in decades.

You know the woke crowd. They know you, too, very well. It’s the others, who don’t belong to any sanctioned “marginality,” that you don’t know, and your governing up to this point has proven this. You are out of touch with great swathes of Canadian experience. And out of that distance from the common experience our present divisions have grown.

So the shuffle, as said, will have the headlines. But unless something fundamental within the predominant attitudes and perspectives of your government change, it can be seen as cosmetic, as tactical, not as a bona fide attempt to mend the fractures in Confederation.

Finally, try this as a new motto: Diversity is a great thing; but unity, unity, unity is Canada’s strength.

Drop the glamour trips abroad altogether.