Exactly 40 years later, will the son take a walk in the surf?
FEBRUARY 29 WOULD PROVIDE THE PRIME MINISTER WITH A DRAMATIC EXIT OPPORTUNITY
A warm winter likely means no snowstorm for the second Prime Minister Trudeau on Wednesday night. El Niño denies le fils.
This week offers the dramatic flair beloved by Justin Trudeau — the Mark Antony eulogy at his father’s funeral, the blackface costumes, the Bollywood tour of India. Forty years ago this 29th of February, Pierre Elliott Trudeau announced his decision to resign as Liberal leader. He said the idea crystallized while walking in an Ottawa snowstorm the night before. But it was more likely that he wanted to resign on a memorable date offered by a timely leap year.
Thus the heir, facing the same late-term unpopularity as his father, may find it compelling to resign on the same date as his father did. Curse that climate change, though. A wintry landscape will be lacking, not an insignificant consideration for the man who replaced the cross and fleur-delis on the Canadian Royal Crown with maple leaves and snowflakes.
Pierre Trudeau had lost the May 1979 election to the Conservatives’ Joe Clark. By the fall of that year, he had planned to retire, but Clark fumbled away his government and Trudeau returned with a majority in February 1980. He could hardly believe his luck — a triumphal comeback without ever having to leave.
The next four years were dizzying — the sovereignty referendum in Quebec, patriation of the Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, recession, massive deficit spending, the national energy program. By 1984, the country was exhausted and found Trudeau exhausting. A leap year meant another day to aggravate the country. Trudeau knew as much and took advantage of Feb. 29 to resign.
For the election on May 22, 1979, the Progressive Conservatives used the slogan “Let’s get Canada working again.”
A LEAP YEAR MEANT ANOTHER DAY TO AGGRAVATE THE COUNTRY
They were borrowing in part from the Conservatives in the United Kingdom. “Labour Isn’t Working” was their powerful slogan, and Margaret Thatcher drove the Labour Party from office less than three weeks before the Canadian election, on May 3, 1979.
Clark would last less than seven months before being defeated in the House. Thatcher would last 11 years. The Iron Lady had a majority and all the qualities that Clark so spectacularly lacked. She got on with three straight majority governments, and her successor won a fourth.
Trudeau père won four of five elections, with three majorities (1968, 1974, 1980) and one minority (1972). Trudeau fils has won three out of three, one majority (2015) and two minorities (2019, 2021), roughly similar to the Conservatives’ Stephen Harper, who also had one majority (2011) and two minorities (2006, 2008) but also lost twice (2004, 2015).
Were Justin Trudeau to fight and win again he would have accomplished something — four consecutive election victories — not done since Sir John A. Macdonald won four straight majority governments.
But that appears to be an unlikely prospect. And the Conservatives appear to be ready with a slogan comparable to Thatcher’s in 1979: “Everything feels broken.”
Canada remains a blessed country in which to live; one of our current stresses is that a very great number of people want to move here as quickly as they can. And while many parts of the world are suffering various horrors, our problems pale in comparison. But it is not the comparison that matters. Saying that Canada is not Venezuela is no reason to boast. Saying that Canada may one day become Argentina — a once rich country pauperized by malgovernance — is reason to worry.
Everything does seem broken, but the prime minister seems to think that Canadians are broken, too grumpy, too bigoted, too ungrateful, too stuck in the past where we would sell our precious natural resources to our allies.
The headlines from the past few weeks pile up one upon another, a veritable snowdrift suitable for a leap year stroll. There was the elderly man who broke his arm, and then was so broken by his hospitalization that he eventually died. Too many Canadians have similar stories to tell about family and friends.
We now think it normal to check ER wait times like we do a flight status before heading to the airport. Many intercontinental flights are shorter than ER wait times. The national daycare program now has couples trying to get on a wait list before they go for their first ultrasound. And that’s before a wave of child-care facilities shut down altogether under the new federal scheme.
There is the Arrivecan fiasco, a mind-boggling combination of supposed incompetence and negligence. The same “budgeting” that spent $60 million on a bug-ridden app has allocated $5 billion to renovate the Centre Block of Parliament. No amount of money seems able to renovate 24 Sussex. The Olympic Stadium in Montreal is due for some $870 million in the latest salvage attempt, justified on the preposterous grounds that it would cost $2 billion to demolish it.
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is spending $130 million on a “transformative renovation” in order to fix the inadequacies of the last transformative renovation. The much ballyhooed “Crystal” was eye-candy for the architecture magazines but was not really suited to, well, museum exhibitions.
Canadian governments shovel out billions so that foreign workers can be employed by foreign companies to build electric vehicle batteries. Meanwhile, the electricity grid is insufficient to power today’s needs, let alone millions of electric vehicles.
And so it goes. Once the national pharmacare program is launched, should Canadians expect to queue up overnight at pharmacies to obtain the now free but scarce — scarce because now free — diabetes drugs? The last government adventure in free pharma — the “safe supply” of opioids — does not build confidence.
It’s not all Justin Trudeau’s fault, to be sure. Some of it certainly is, like the dubious imposition of the Emergencies Act and the suppression of civil liberties. On that he followed his father’s script.
Will he do so again? His father knew when it was time to walk in the Ottawa snow. El Niño being what it is, the Tofino surf might be a better bet for le fils. The place doesn’t matter. The date does. Will he take the leap?
HIS FATHER KNEW WHEN IT WAS TIME TO WALK IN THE OTTAWA SNOW.