For Trudeau, this summer’s been a scorcher
Justin Trudeau is having a bad summer, but it’s not his first brush with uncomfortable political heat in July.
In fact, there’s a lot about the summer of 2020 that boomerangs back to the long hot days of 2017, when Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Governor-General Julie Payette — each in their own ways — created political firestorms for Trudeau’s government.
History has a knack for repeating itself in this government, even when it’s in the midst of unprecedented political times.
The presence of Morneau and Payette in this summer’s political headlines speaks not just to recurrings characters, but to recurring themes for Trudeau, and quite possibly some lessons unlearned from three years ago.
It’s striking, in retrospect, how two announcements within one week in July 2017 have retained the power to send ripples through this very strange year in Canadian politics.
On July 13 three years ago, the news emerged that former astronaut Payette was being named by Trudeau as the next governor-general. Five days later, on July 18, Canada’s finance minister unveiled a proposal to close tax loopholes for self-employed people working as private corporations.
Both of these decisions would come back to haunt the Trudeau government — even now, in the summer of 2020.
While historians will probably never agree on exactly when Trudeau’s honeymoon in power ended after his triumphant 2015 election victory, the events of July 2017 certainly sealed the idea that this Liberal government was flawed and fallible.
Within days of the Payette announcement, journalists began to unearth incidents from her past that cast doubts on her suitability for such a high office — a dismissed assault charge and involvement in a fatal collision when she lived in the United States.
Questions, good ones, were raised about how Payette cleared the vetting process and why the Trudeau government had not put her appointment through the selection panel that had been established for her predecessor, David Johnston, when he was appointed by Stephen Harper.
Meanwhile, the Morneau announcement was also starting to look more ill-considered with each passing day of that long, hot summer. Small-business owners of all kinds were girding for all-out revolt against the tax changes, calling them an attack on entrepreneurs and hard-working Canadians.
By the time fall rolled around, Liberal MPs were feeling the political damage; Morneau would eventually soften the proposal to ease its impact on small businesses.
The connecting thread between those two controversies was lack of political forethought and a certain tonedeafness among members of Team Trudeau. So convinced were they of their own correctness in the two announcements that due diligence went out the window — proper vetting in Payette’s case, potential political impact in the tax issue.
There was one more connecting theme — it wasn’t just opposition critics who were the most outraged, but Liberals themselves. The worst political wounds are always the selfinflicted ones.
Much has been written, including by this columnist, about how the WE controversy of today contains echoes of Trudeau’s past run-ins with the ethics commissioner. But the parallels to the political missteps of summer 2017 are also worth a recall.
Once again, in 2020, here is Morneau neck-deep in controversy, looking out of touch with people whose annual income roughly matches the cost of his family’s WE-sponsored trips, which the finance minister neglected to turn down and forgot to pay for. What was it about the summer of 2017 that failed to sink in with Morneau and the advisers around him?
Payette is back in the news for what looks like serious turmoil among her staff: Hair-raising stories told to CBC about tantrums and management-inflicted humiliation at the highest reaches of the GG’s office. Stories have been simmering for the past three years about Payette being a difficult fit for the job — a problem that may have come to light in a proper review of her qualifications. The whole story of how WE Charity came to be such a serious problem for Trudeau this summer is just a little too similar to the bumpy summer of 2017 — a government barrelling ahead with plans and personalities that should have raised red flags before they were announced.
Sure, Liberals may take some comfort from the fact that Morneau, Payette and the prime minister himself survived the summer of 2017. But just as that summer disrupted the long, post-election honeymoon, this summer of 2020 is a crashing blow to all the good reviews Trudeau and his team were accumulating in the pandemic.
Everyone in Canada likes to store up good summer memories for the long cold winter. But bad-summer memories can be handy, too, especially for governments interested in learning from mistakes, not repeating them.