How the PM can smooth things over
This isn’ t the seam that will open wider cracks, enlarging a maw that will swallow up the political phenomenon that is Justin Trudeau. But nor is it a trifle to be waved aside. The prime minister messed up, big-time. His repeat apologies won’t erase the blemish overnight.
Let us try, for the sake of the exercise, to place ourselves in Trudeau’s mind, early Wednesday evening. Let us imagine we are him.
For starters, it’s been a brutal, gruelling day. The urbane House leader, Dominic LeBlanc, your childhood babysitter, has morphed into Six-Gun Sam, using a draconian procedural gambit, Motion 6, to force the opposition parties into line on Bill C-14, the assisted dying law. But that’s not going so well. (Motion 6 was with- drawn Thursday.) The Conservatives and New Democrats have reacted angrily to being strong-armed. And the damned parliamentary media — cynical, querulous as always — are validating this anger, fuelling it, taking the opposition’s side.
Question period, you quietly admit to yourself, was another slow-motion car wreck, with Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef gamely sticking to her increasingly desperatesounding justifications for changing Canada’s electoral system by cabinet fiat. You know quite well, damn it, that a referendum will be the kiss of death to your plan to replace the 150-year-old first-past-the-post system. But you promised to get this done, and you won’t back off without a fight.
As you contemplate these difficulties, you notice that, down the way and across the aisle, Tory whip Gordon Brown is having trouble getting to his seat, where he needs to be for an imminent vote to impose time allocation on debate over C-14. Brown is encircled by a gaggle of NDP MPs, including David Christopherson and Tom Mulcair, who appear to be deliberately blocking his path. Mischief!
What could be simpler? Solve this now. Walk down there and take the man by the hand, guide him from the lion’s den. Though you don’t pause to reflect on this at the time, or on anything really, it’s the kind of move for which you’re famous; unconventional, spontaneous. This is you. It’s who you are.
And it all goes beautifully, your backbenchers are delighted, it’s going to be another rabbit-from-the-hat win — until you regain your seat and realize that, in your rush, you bumped an MP who’d been standing behind you, NDP up-andcomer Ruth Ellen Brosseau. You bumped her quite hard, shocking her, and she’s left the Chamber to collect herself. This is bad, you realize.
So you go after her, thinking to apologize. Whereupon you are confronted by an enraged Mulcair — Angry Tom, fully realized at last and looking as though he’s about to punch your lights out, boxing or no boxing. This is getting worse, you realize. And you back off, steeling yourself now for the inevitable hairtearing, sack-cloth-donning and apologies. It was not, you think to yourself as you dash past the media to an unpleasant chat with your horrified senior advisers, your finest hour. But you don’t yet know the half of it.
For this is the takeaway from this incident; it so- lidifies the narrative that you just weren’t ready, that you’re in over your head, just as those awful Conservative attack ads said. It is the incident Stephen Harper’s strategists put all their money on in 2014 and 2015. Only it happened, for them, about eight months too late.
Justin Trudeau is a physical risk-taker. That runs in his family. It’s there in his dad’s famous pirouette. It’s there in the familial pursuit of sports such as whitewater paddling and boxing. It’s there even in Trudeau’s choice to work, in his early 20s, as a nightclub bouncer in Whistler, B.C.
The conceptual gap here, which explains the real surprise and fury that greeted the PM’s actions, is that this is not a nightclub, and he’s not a bouncer. It’s the House of Commons, and he’s the head of government. In any professional workplace, physical integrity is assumed. Yet an opposition MP was propelled along by the wrist and elbow as though he were an unruly drunk on a patio. And a female MP was bumped hard, by the most powerful man in the country, because of his haste and physical carelessness.
This happened in a place where stylized courtesy is part of the furniture — precisely to prevent incidents just like this, one imagines, from spiralling into lethal violence back when MPs were often looped on the job, and might have killed each other given the chance. So the opposition, over-the-top bellowing notwithstanding, is correct: It is a big deal. It is unacceptable.
Trudeau will be publicly contrite, as he was Wednesday night and again Thursday. He will be chided by his senior staff, and his wife, and he will feel genuine personal remorse, I’m guessing.
Will it be enough? Simmer down, act your station and do the job, with less spectacle and more unassuming work, is what most fairminded Canadians would suggest to him now. It would be good advice to take.