Another Trudeau ex-adviser pours scorn on the former boss
Old age and death are the only guaranteed routes to forgiveness for politicians.
As English playwright Alan Bennett once said: “If you can eat a boiled egg at 90, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.”
Perhaps it’s too much to expect a dispassionate appraisal of a sitting prime minister.
But has anyone been as roundly abused as Justin Trudeau by people who were formerly some of his closest associates and colleagues?
Former government whip Andrew Leslie, in his recent interview with National Post, is merely the latest senior Liberal to publicly pour scorn on Trudeau, his cabinet and the cabal of senior advisers around him.
He can be added to the list that includes former ministers Bill Morneau, Jody Wilson-raybould and Jane Philpott in recent books and memoirs. Other former ministers who have left government, such as Catherine Mckenna and Scott Brison, have hinted at their exasperation, while publicly keeping their own counsel.
Can they all be dismissed as disgruntled former employees, or is there merit to the criticisms that the prime minister and his entourage are unprincipled hyper-partisans who care more about spin than substance?
A common complaint is that Trudeau makes brazen commitments that he knows he can’t, or won’t, deliver.
The latest charge from Leslie is that the prime minister and his cabinet are not serious about defence and have no intention of meeting spending targets because they believe the Americans will always defend Canada.
Leslie was involved in drawing up the Liberal defence policy document before the 2015 election. He says this contributed to 2017’s “Strong, Secure, Engaged” policy that had specific timelines for equipment and an annex of 110 or so deliverables that were mostly missed. He said that since 2015, the Liberal government has not spent or has reprofiled, deferred or lapsed around $20 billion that was promised to defence, leaving the Army “in a state of despair.”
Wilson-raybould was at the centre of the infamous Snc-lavalin scandal, in which Trudeau was found to have used means that violated the Conflict of Interest Act to exert influence on his attorney general. Wilson-raybould later resigned from cabinet, was kicked out of the Liberal caucus, won her seat as an Independent and then left politics in 2021.
Trudeau said he was merely standing up for the jobs of his fellow Canadians.
In her book, Indian in the Cabinet, she said she thought Trudeau would make a good prime minister and create a good team but was proved wrong.
“There are lots of pretty words, but there are a lot of promises that have been made that have not been kept. And that leads, of course, to disillusionment and disappointment,” she said in an interview with Reuters in 2021.
In her book, she said she was angry that she had believed Trudeau “was an honest and good person, when in truth, he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it.”
Philpott has also written a book — Health for All — which is diplomatic about her exit from the Liberal party, after leaving in solidarity with Wilson-raybould.
But she also notes the demands by Trudeau’s staff to land partisan punches on the opposition.
“I don’t think that things turned out the way they were initially described. The hyper-partisanship is so built in, it just becomes insurmountable,” she wrote.
Morneau’s criticisms in his book, Where to From Here, are more explicit and damaging. The former finance minister said policy rationales were often tossed aside in favour of scoring political points.
He said the recommendations of the Department of Finance were disregarded on the emergency wage subsidy during COVID, as Trudeau announced a much more generous program than the one Morneau thought had been agreed upon.
“It was one of the worst moments of my political life,” Morneau wrote.
Challenges, he said, were not managed on a daily basis at the highest level and Trudeau’s management and interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking.
“The prime minister had an inability (for) or lack of interest in forging relationships with me, and as far as I could tell, with the rest of his cabinet,” he said.
Wilson-raybould said she was chosen because she was “an Indian in the cabinet” and Morneau agreed that ministers were picked for promotional reasons rather than for what they brought to the table. But that hardly mattered because power resided in the hands of a cabal of advisers around the prime minister who compelled agreement from cabinet ministers, he said.
One example of the improvised nature of public policy-making, according to Morneau, was the “baffling” decision to commit to a public dental plan when the pledge to bring in pharmacare remained unfulfilled.
There are, no doubt, other sides to these stories. Memoirs tend to ring their writers in halos and there is clearly some score-settling taking place.
My point is, the consistency in the accounts of some of the most senior Liberals elected in the sweep of 2015 adds to their credibility.
Not all were political rookies who became quickly disenchanted at the grubby compromises of politics. Veterans no longer on the front lines complain that the Liberal party’s centrist traditions were trashed to allow Trudeau to become Canada’s “first NDP prime minister.”
When Trudeau launched his leadership campaign, he appropriated Goethe’s mantra: “Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
It was the depiction of those dreams that always fascinated Trudeau. Before the 2015 election, he told the Globe and Mail: “I set the frame ... and I’ll figure out how to get it across to people.”
He has done that very successfully ever since. But his has been a government captivated by words, not action.
Trudeau has no apparent interest in the banalities of government, including the management of his cabinet or caucus.
Ministers — senior ministers — report that they rarely talk about their portfolios with their boss.
In the 2018 book, Un selfie avec Justin Trudeau, Jocelyn Coulon, a former adviser to Stéphane Dion, said the relationship between prime minister and his then-foreign affairs minister was “glacial” and the only private meeting the two men had was when Dion was fired.
“The prime minister is a man incurious about the affairs of the world,” Coulon remarked.
It is a situation that is unlikely to have improved as capable ministers were replaced by less able men and women, who, it was made clear, reported not to Parliament but to the issues-management team in the Prime Minister’s Office.
Senior bureaucrats say the partnership with cabinet is frayed and the exhaustion palpable.
After the pandemic, there was a near breakdown in the delivery of core services — from passports to immigration visas, from airport security to the flow of travellers across borders.
This week, years after the crisis passed, CBC is reporting that Canadians who want a passport still need to wait for three hours for service at a Passport Canada office.
The sage of Baltimore, Henry Louis Mencken, once satirized a government that sounds remarkably like Trudeau’s as a “a broker in pillage”: a collection of individuals whose only talent was getting and holding office and whose principal device was “to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of 10, that promise is worth nothing. The 10th time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B.”
The prime minister may have to wait until his old age before he gets any respect.
The voting public seems to have come around to the views of his former colleagues that the country doesn’t need dreams that move the hearts of men, it needs some basic managerial competence.
POLICY RATIONALES WERE OFTEN TOSSED ASIDE IN FAVOUR OF SCORING POLITICAL POINTS.