Paris attacks dull post-election shine for Trudeau

MONTREAL— In January 1994, two months after his government was sworn in, Jean Chrétien folded himself in a small charter plane to go on his maiden foreign voyage as prime minister.

As leader of the Opposition, Chrétien had described the jet Brian Mulroney had outfitted for his official foreign travels as a needless luxury.

For his first trip, the incoming Liberal prime minister opted for the flying equivalent of a sardine can, a practice he would abandon at the first decent political opportunity.

Chrétien hit three European capitals in less than a week, with a pit stop in London, an overnight stay in Paris and a NATO summit in Brussels.

He might as well have been a tourist on a whirlwind budget tour.

At a joint news conference with prime minister John Major in London, a British cabinet sex scandal stole the show.

The highlight of Chrétien’s Paris stop was a Quebec play he attended with François Mitterrand. He may or may not have mentioned a possible Quebec referendum to the French president.

In any event, by the time of the 1995 vote, Mitterrand was no longer in office.

In Brussels, the issue of the fratricidal war in the former Yugoslavia dominated the NATO summit but while Canada had peacekeeping boots on the ground, there is no public record of a significant Chrétien contribution to the discussion.

Over his visit, the new Canadian prime minister granted the European media no interviews; nor was there a chat on the trip home with those of us who covered his tour, for journalists flew on commercial planes.

In a review of the Liberal prime minister’s first appearance on the international circuit, the correspondent for the Belgian daily Le Soir wrote that Chrétien had essentially travelled incognito.

By those standards, Justin Trudeau should have passed his first test on the international scene with flying colours.

He raised matters of substance at every stop.

In Manila, he served notice on Canada’s Asia-Pacific partners that they should not take for granted a swift ratification by Parliament of the just-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership.

At the G20 meeting in Turkey, his infrastructure-spending plan was praised by Barack Obama.

In preparation for the upcoming climate change summit, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion started to articulate a more activist Canadian tone in the international environment talks.

But while Trudeau probably made a positive impression on other government leaders, the domestic reviews have been decisively mixed. As media coverage goes, this has been his worst week since before the election campaign.

It is not just that Canadians saw more of French President François Hollande or that the Paris attacks pushed non-security issues off to the sidelines or even that the latest terrorist developments made some Liberal policies a harder sell.

From a Canadian perspective, it was on tone that an unscripted Trudeau most came up short. He may have denounced the Paris attacks in strong terms in private but, in his public communications, he did not rise to the occasion.

There was a glaring disconnect between Trudeau’s quasi-dogmatic insistence that it was business as usual on the refugee and the war on the Islamic State fronts and the public’s sense that the attacks were a watershed event that deserved a fuller airing.

He seemed to shrug off the wellintentioned concern of many of his provincial and municipal allies as to his refugee timetable.

When federal reassurance was needed, it was offered on a piecemeal basis and usually short on specifics.

Against the backdrop of the carnage in Paris, some otherwise endearing features of Trudeau’s political persona, starting with his willingness to pose for selfies on demand, turned into liabilities. There are times when glamour is the opposite of gravitas.

Media reviews of Trudeau’s post-Paris week were particularly scathing in Quebec, the province whose links with France are the strongest. Cartoonists had a field day at his expense.

The feeling that the rookie prime minister was not at the top of his game as he handled the first unscripted challenge of his tenure was not limited to his home province.

The premature beginning of the end of Trudeau’s post-election honeymoon is part of the collateral damage of the Paris attacks. That part of the damage is largely selfinflicted. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.