People’s rights are not a political chess piece
Liberal leader has rebuilt party and is winning Canadians’ hearts
A great deal of the usual reptilian cunning has gone into shaping the Liberal party campaign that has catapulted Justin Trudeau from thirdplace pretender to surprise front-runner in Canada’s 42nd federal election campaign. Even so, the primary energy around Trudeau is a genuine idealism, and that’s what voters seem to be responding to in droves.
This has come as quite a blow to the New Democrats, who are unused to the impertinence of counterclaims to their accustomed privileges as the partisans of Canada’s conscience. But for all the cool Liberal videos, the stylish all-weather gear, the Pride parades, the legalized-pot policy and the tight calibration of promises to suit key middle-class demographics, Trudeau’s idealism is very real.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair shares a great deal of Trudeau’s objections to the populist, culture-war wedgedriving that Stephen Harper has put to the Conservatives’ advantage, especially in the NDP’s Quebec bastions. But it isn’t just elocution coaching and a proper haircut that has enabled Trudeau to so quickly shunt Mulcair back into the third-place showing where the New Democrats have historically languished. Something else has been going on.
Trudeau’s Liberal party is not the grand old project that had its final 13-year run in power with Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin and then thrashed around during the post-2006 Opposition years under Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. The old party was finished by the 2011 Liberal nadir of 34 seats in the House of Commons and its replacement by the NDP as official Opposition.
The NDP’s rise, meanwhile, had a lot less to do with Jack Layton’s mystical powers than with a blood moon anomaly in Quebec, when busloads of untested NDP candidates found themselves with an open run at the rich pastures vacated by the collapsed Bloc Québécois. What Trudeau has accomplished makes the NDP’s 2011 triumph look like a mere lottery win.
Trudeau’s celebrity had a lot to do with it in the early innings. But it is his guileless charisma that has mobilized more than 300,000 Liberals to turn the tables on the NDP, and most of these people are new recruits. They’re Trudeau’s most loyal and hardcore activists and campaigners now.
By way of contrast, during Thomas Mulcair’s bid to win the NDP leadership in 2012, the NDP brass was boasting that the party’s 128,351 federal card-carriers represented “historic” and “massive” numbers, evidence that “Canadians are really engaged and involved in our leadership race ... Jack would be proud.”
Fast-forward to the Sept. 28 Munk Debate when Mulcair dodged moderator Rudyard Griffiths’ first question by also summoning Layton’s memory. Asked to identify the circumstances under which he would authorize the deployment of the Canadian Forces, Mulcair began by saying, in French: “For me, it is important to remember that, here tonight, we’re on the same stage, in the same room where we said our last goodbye to Jack Layton.”
Getting at what Trudeau stands for is no such challenge.
You don’t have to drill down through the finer points of the NDP and Liberal campaign platforms to notice that the few substantial differences in their economic and spending policies can be read in such a way as to situate the Liberals to the left of the NDP. The “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” notes on everybody’s election concertinas are in the same key. Terrorism, citizenship revocation, niqabs, trade policy, Syrian refugees and the parties’ tireless wooing of “ethnic” votes have ended up being at least as entertaining as the competing bread-and-butter tunes all three parties were hoping to play. But between Mulcair and Trudeau, it’s Trudeau’s renditions that are proving the most rousing.
Perhaps most noticeably in the provisions of Bill C-24 that would enable Ottawa to annul the Canadian citizenship of convicted dual-citizenship terrorists, Trudeau has been playing from sheet music that puts him squarely at odds with broad public opinion. But he’s getting points for it, not in spite of it but because of it, because it’s the sort of thing that takes guts.
While Mulcair gives the impression of mostly being aggravated by the Conservatives’ deucedly fiendish campaign chess moves, Trudeau relishes the fight, insisting that what is at stake are inviolable frontiers that decent societies must never allow to be crossed. Hallowed boundaries circle the dignity of the individual and the rights of citizenship, Trudeau will tell you, and fleeting assumptions about the civic good or national security, no matter how popular, must not be permitted to trespass across them.
That’s the sterner stuff of liberal idealism. It is a devil of a thing to champion effectively at the best of times, but it is the difficult philosophical standpoint that Trudeau has been most vigorously and extemporaneously defending. What does Mulcair stand for again? What does Harper stand for?
Even his sharpest critics should admit that Trudeau is no longer just the fashionably unkempt Dauphin of Trudeau the Elder, the Honourable Member for Zoolander (yes, that was me), nor is he that “largely talentless and insufferably foppish celebrity drama queen” who was presuming to run for the Liberal party leadership (yes again, guilty). Trudeau’s flame-outs and transgressions of decorum from the earliest days of his parliamentary apprenticeship can be understood now as having been evidences of mammalian traits, all along, in a federal political culture that a substantial body of the electorate thinks of as a menagerie of carnivorous lizards.
It’s worth remembering that it was only a decade ago that the anti-establishment idealists were Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. They’d arisen from the crypt of the Progressive Conservative party and the untamed world of the Reform party and the genetically modified Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. After a decade of sectarian bloodletting, they’d been disciplined well enough by the warlord Preston Manning to form a minority government. By crikey, they were going to shake things up in Ottawa.
Now that nearly a decade has passed under Dear Leader Harper, most Canadians are wondering what it was all for, exactly. Many Canadians are wondering which of either Mulcair or Trudeau should be allowed a turn. Some people are even wondering out loud why they voted Conservative last time at all, but this time around, the anti-establishment idealist is not Mulcair. It’s Trudeau.
Trudeau led his successful revolution against the Liberal party old guard over the space of little more than a year, bringing about the Liberal hierarchy’s collapse on April 14, 2013, when he swept into the leader’s job on an avalanche of 81,389 votes. That was nearly seven times the ballots mustered by his closest competitor. The final coup came nine months later, on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2014, when Trudeau surprised the Liberal party’s 32 senators by telling them they were out. The senators could sit as independents if they wished, but they were no longer members of the Liberal party’s parliamentary caucus.
In most politicians, a crack in the facade will tend to reveal ugliness, dishonesty or similar portents of the inauspicious. Trudeau goes off-script all the time, and yet when he does, at worst he comes off like an earnest innocent, an amateur.
This only serves to present his partisan opponents as cynical, professional vote-procurers, and Trudeau himself as the genuine idealist that voters who want a change will almost always prefer.
It is (Trudeau’s) guileless charisma that has mobilized more than 300,000 Liberals to turn the tables on the NDP, and most of these people are new recruits.