Marches reveal Trudeau’s tightrope
Liberals walking fine line on Trump
Hours after tens of thousands of Canadians hit the streets in a show of solidarity with women’s marches worldwide, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted his congratulations “to the men and women across Canada who came out yesterday to support women’s rights.”
“You keep your government inspired,” he added.
His newly installed status of women minister was swift to echo his praise.
“Truly inspired,” Maryam Monsef tweeted in response to her boss. “That so many took part yesterday means we can all stand together and keep working for change.”
Neither Trudeau nor Monsef acknowledged that the trigger for the global protests was, of course, the inauguration of President no-longer-elect Donald Trump, which took place on Friday.
But even given that conspicuous omission, it was hard not to interpret it as a tacit endorsement of the motivation behind the march, if not necessarily a statement of wholehearted agreement with the explicitly anti-Trump sentiments being espoused by many of those in attendance.
It also seemed to be in marked contrast to how the Liberal party had reacted a few days earlier when the University-Rosedale Federal Liberal Association reportedly posted an open invitation to the Toronto march on the national party website.
Not only was the listing hastily expunged soon after drawing the ire of Rebel Media, but a spokesman for the riding association claimed that it was an “unauthorized event” that was “promptly removed when brought to attention.”
Welcome to yet another expanse of terra incognita for Canadian politics in a post-Trump timeline: How far can a self-styled progressive, feminist leader — and his party — go to distance himself from the policies being put forward by the man now in charge south of the border without putting the Canada-U.S. working relationship at risk?
Or, to flip the question, how steadfastly silent can that same leader remain on the environment, immigration, equality rights and other issues near and dear to the hearts of so many of those who voted for his party in the last election before he starts putting their faith in his courage of conviction at risk?
For the moment, let’s leave aside the policy implications of, for instance, a NAFTA overhaul as expansive as the new occupant of the Oval Office is angling to engineer, virtually infinite potential scenarios for which have already been laid out in exhaustive speculative detail by those with far more expertise than can be mustered from this corner.
According to an Angus Reid survey taken days after Trump’s upset victory last November, well over half of those who responded — 66 per cent — said they were “upset” by the result, with 45 per cent claiming to be “very upset.” That trend was even more noticeable among self-identified Liberal voters, a full three-quarters of whom reported being either “somewhat” or very upset.
It’s a good bet that at least some of those Liberals were likely on the march on Saturday, and that even more may have been cheering the marchers along from the sidelines. For them, Trudeau’s tweet would have come as small but still appreciated reassurance, particularly to those who may have been left nonplussed by the reaction to that “unauthorized” outburst of activism in University-Rosedale.
Perhaps even more crucially, a December 2016 poll from Nanos Research found that 75 per cent of respondents agreed that Trudeau “should stand up to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as the champion of progressive values and the international order even if it strains Canada U.S. relations.”
And while the data wasn’t broken down by voter bloc, it’s probably safe to assume that, too, reflects the views of many who supported the Liberals in the last election, and who Trudeau and the Liberals are doubtless keen to keep happily ensconced in the big red tent.
At the same time, those voters — and Canadians at large — likely wouldn’t want their prime minister or his delegated ministers to go out of their way to antagonize the incoming administration — not with so much cross-border trade and commerce potentially at risk. That, after all, is just common sense.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political divide, the Conservatives will also have to hit the right balance in positioning themselves vis-a-vis the new Republican president.
They aren’t in power at the moment, of course, so there’s not quite as much pressure, but they’re still facing an election in 2019 in which Trump’s impact on Canada and the world may well be a major factor.
Complicating matters for Conservatives is the fact that, according to that same Angus Reid survey, their supporters are far more divided on Trump: 39 per cent of Conservative voters were “pleased” by the results, while 36 per cent were “upset,” and 25 per cent claimed to be neutral on the outcome.
Those numbers may shift as we start to see actual decisions and orders coming out of the White House — given the Conservatives’ aggressively pro-trade stance, it’s not clear how the party or its base will view the move to extract the U.S. from the TransPacific Partnership, let alone the implications of a new, America First-ified NAFTA or, for that matter, how his pledge to wean the United States off of “foreign” fuel will affect an already hardhit energy sector, even if he does green-light the Keystone pipeline.
(They also presumably hope to lure some of those Liberal voters back into the fold in 2019, which means they also have to take the overall numbers into account when factoring the risk/benefit of seeming to side with Trump on any file.)
Given all those unknown elements – and the risk in becoming the de facto “pro-Trump” choice on the ballot — it’s not surprising to see a tempered response coming from the Conservatives thus far, both from their parliamentary critics and the party itself. Although certain leadership candidates have nevertheless given in to the temptation to emulate his unique take on populism, if not necessarily align themselves with Trump himself.
At the end of the day, this may be one of those vanishingly rare situations in which the distantly third-running New Democrats — and, to a lesser extent, the even more distant, fourth-place Greens — have an unexpected advantage: Not only do 78 per cent of their voters come down on the “upset” side of the Trump victory, as per Angus Reid, but as far as extending the base, they’ll have far more luck appealing to voters disappointed by Trudeau’s failure to come out strongly enough against his new American counterpart.
That’s likely why they were able to do more than simply offer post-protest kudos to the marchers, and could actually highlight the fact that party supporters — including several New Democrat MPs — had joined the fray by retweeting their photos from the ground.