Trudeau leaves a legacy of both being over-hyped and over-hated

Farewell to the Prime Ministerial tenure of Justin Trudeau.  He leaves the office with the rare distinction of having been forced out by his own party where most Prime Ministers resign in a timing of their own choosing.  Interestingly, he announced his leadership resignation with considerably weaker polling support than former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives did in the year 2015, yet the Liberals have tentatively bumped much farther up in the polls in the face of his replacement as leader by Mark Carney.  While the faction of Canadians who hate Trudeau personally has become increasingly loud, it appears that the faction of Canadians who felt a lesser cynicism towards the man had bought into the Anything-But-Trudeau movement.  Yet it seems in my opinion that Trudeau’s successor lacks massive policy distinctions with the outgoing Prime Minister.

Some commentators have remarked that Trudeau will inevitably in time be more fondly remembered by many Canadians than he is now, as is often the case with former Prime Ministers.  Personally, I feel that my furiously negative assessments of the Harper era have aged well (though I did at the time under-appreciate that Prime Minister’s early support for Ukraine), and I doubt that my opinions of Trudeau will change much in the coming decades.  That is because Trudeau has rarely surprised me as a politician who has been both obviously over-hyped and over-hated.

Trudeau always struck me as a cynical if typical politician, disguised in a celebrity persona

Despite watching it on television at the time, I remember little of the October 2nd, 2012 speech that Justin Trudeau gave in Montreal announcing his bid to contest the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.  I do not believe that anyone was giving the speech rave reviews or ever thought of it as much of a highlight in Trudeau’s political career.  But I was struck by and remember to this day Trudeau’s eagerness to repeat the dishonest talking points of the interim Liberal leadership, the accusation that the NDP was “blaming the West” for eastern economic disappointments with the rival party’s comments about Dutch Disease.  In fact, the NDP was criticizing the economics of oil sands policies, not any particular region of the country – but the banal cynicism here helped inform my own expectations that Trudeau would be much like the stereotypical politician.

But a stereotypical politician will not be seen for what they are when perceptions are guided by pre-existing expectations, and pre-existing expectations were very much created by the circumstances of birth, those circumstances being Justin’s last name.  Those expectations propelled Trudeau’s career and gave him a capacity to draw the interest of massive crowds, crowds that would register as entry-level Liberals to give him 78% of the leadership contest vote. 

It was also expectations of Trudeau being his father’s son that caused those who always hated the legacy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau to be predisposed to seeing the son as political vermin, before the latter had any policy or political viewpoints – such is the damage that partisan confirmation bias does to critical thinking.  It is this same prejudice that has fueled the exceptional vitriol that has caused this Prime Minister to have gravel thrown at him, to be subject to endless profanity in the form of insufferable flags, and to be advised by his security detail at times to wear a bulletproof vest.  This country has disappointed me personally with its inability to have an emotion-free and rational discussion about a politician who is both more cynical than his proponents ever expected and more normal than his haters ever insisted.

Neither a particularly democratic nor anti-democratic Prime Minister

What is there in Trudeau’s actual record that could be so polarizing? 

He lied about intending electoral reform, only to then bleed support to a party leader who could not care less about replacing the first-past-the-post system. 

He harassed a couple of his female Cabinet ministers for their criticism of his desired interference in the criminal prosecution of a Liberal-friendly company, and he never admitted to wrongdoing involved.  But the desired interference did not proceed and has not been attempted since. 

He continued a Liberal-Conservative schism over the carbon tax that has existed since 2008 and which is obviously nothing new. 

He set immigration targets for continuous population growth and then backpedalled after a shift in popular opinion. 

All his worst legislation, from accidentally driving news off Meta to absurd bureaucratic imposition of “Canadian” content on the Internet, has been passed with the support of other parties. 

He disgraced himself with certain scandals, such as visiting the family friend the Agha Khan on the public dime and allowing himself to influence a sole-source contract to a charity that has paid members of his family.  But these scandals have been far from a daily occurrence and largely inconsequential. 

Where is the overbearing and insufferable autocrat here?  There has not been one.  A worse Prime Minister would have taken advantage of some of the anti-democratic precedents that the Harper government abused, such was rushing through legislation with 100+ motions of time allocation and attaching 31-year exit notices to some of the more sinister treaties.  Despite the parliamentary dysfunction of the past few months, Trudeau brought back some normalcy to the tone of parliamentary debate, making parliament a place again where there was not another massive Trojan Horse bill being debated every other day.  With the glaring exception of the past few months, Trudeau has been accessible to the media and its public questioning in a way that Harper very much shunned.  (Remember how the 2015 leaders’ debates from the media consortium never happened after Harper announced that he would not participate.)

But with all that being the case, Trudeau’s government did next to nothing to make Canadian democracy permanently better in any way.  The Senate scandals of the Harper years do seem like a distant memory with Trudeau implementing a process for appointing qualified non-partisan Senators – yet this process is non-binding and only time will tell if future governments keep it that way.  The Trudeau government also brought in formal and binding regulations for leaders’ debates, bringing more predictability to the democratic quality of election campaigns.  Otherwise, I struggle to recall much in the way of Trudeau-led democratic reforms.

Where Trudeau both positively and negatively surprised me in his record

When Trudeau sought the leadership of the Liberal Party, I doubt that any of his supporters flocked to him expecting an intellectual full of policy depth.  On paper, Trudeau should have always been a policy lightweight compared to Michael Iggnatieff, an accomplished academic who ran away from his own worldly record and who ran a vacuous anti-Harper campaign in 2011 (the latter whom I single out because he was the first Liberal leader as I came of voting age).  Yet Trudeau did run on a record of what the pundit Andrew Coyne called a “daring” election platform, with substantial promises and policies from the newly revamped Canada Child Benefit to cannabis legalization to reducing boil water advisories on Indigenous reserves.  This remains one of the most impressive election platforms in my lifetime (however much I remain proud of having run under the Green banner in 2015).  This obviously demonstrates that political leadership is about more than the depth of the leader and pertains also to their capacity to listen to potential advisors and the party membership surrounding them.

But, as has been acknowledged by enough other commentators, Justin Trudeau ran and campaigned on setting up expectations which he was bound to fall short of.  In 2015 and 2016 I was always braced for the prospect of Trudeau somehow either not keeping his promises on electoral reform or adopting what he stated was his preferred system (the ranked ballot).  Given the history of provincial governments perpetually deriving excuses for half-hearted pursuit of electoral reform, I found it easy to imagine there being a national referendum on electoral reform where the pro-reform side would end up losing – or some other kind of process where attempted electoral reform gets dragged on without end.  What surprised many Canadians including me was the galling and anti-climatic nature in which the Prime Minister suddenly shut down the electoral reform conversation - just as the parliamentary committee study of electoral reform concluded with the most predictable and reasonable recommendations possible.

Many conservative haters of Trudeau attribute “narcissism” to every Trudeau quirk or policy that they do not like.  But if ever there was a time in politics when Trudeau was pathetically full of himself, it was when he somehow transitioned from “2015 will be the last election under First Past the Post” to “electoral reform legislation will be introduced over my dead body”.  (Obviously the latter statement is not a real quote, but it is not a serious distortion of his tonal shift.  In 2017 he ordered then Democratic Reform Minister Karina Gould not to pursue any legislation on the matter.)  It is inflammatory and graceless that Trudeau has ended his time as Prime Minister expressing “regret” that no electoral reform was initiated, without admitting or denying that nothing was a greater obstacle to reform than his own inflated ego and his own insufferable insinuation that Canadians were unworthy of a national debate on electoral reform.

You could say that 2017 or 2018 were the turning point in which the Trudeau government developed “governmentitus”, as Karina Gould calls it.  Trudeau had always branded himself as a feminist and as an empath, and in the early years he made more apologies for personal misconduct than Harper ever did during the latter’s entire tenure as Prime Minister.  In my view, the political problem Trudeau developed was that he became increasingly like Harper in terms of being personally unapologetic, after already demonstrating that he knows how to be empathetic – and Liberal-leaning Canadians were not impressed.  (At least Conservative voters know they are going to get consistently insufferable patriarchs as Prime Minister.)

Jody Wilson-Raybould was gaslighted by many Liberals in the fallout from the SNC Lavalin affair, but her criticisms of the Prime Minister were implicitly validated by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s own resignation letter 5 years later.  This has been a Prime Minister who believed that others should take the fall (i.e. Wilson-Raybould, Freeland) for his own failures of judgment (pressuring a minister to interfere in criminal justice proceedings, asking a pre-fired minister to take the fall over a deficit based on policies she disagreed with).  Liberal-sympathetic Canadians never expected that.

Where Conservative critiques of Trudeau have been ignorant

In this piece I have expressed my own share of frustrations with Justin Trudeau.  He certainly showed a certain capacity for self-delusion.  Yet I have also been deeply frustrated with the popular Conservative allegations that Trudeau has been the “worst” every Prime Minister in Canadian history, who is somehow single-handedly responsible for all the harms and divisions in Canadian society on everything from global inflation to the violence over the Israel-Palestine demonstrators.

It should not need to be said, but it apparently does: the Prime Minister is neither a deity nor a cultural figure – he technically is not even the Head of State.  The Prime Minister is the chief legislator and executive, and as such should be judged by his legislative record, his enforcement of legislation, and how he sets the tone of foreign policy on the world stage.  The country’s sense of patriotism is not, and should not be, so fragile that any one Prime Minister can meaningfully damage it, however much Conservatives want to blame Trudeau.  Trudeau has been a proponent of the “Canada is a genocidal state” narrative that I believe to be a gross distortion of the otherwise-awful residential school record, but this error is largely inconsequential to the daily lives of Canadians compared to actual government legislation.

Rage-farming by the Conservatives against Trudeau to the point of threatening the safety of his person deserves an electoral reckoning, even if I am not confident that they will pay the price they should for it.

The worst harm that Trudeau has done to the Liberal Party

I have already written at length elsewhere on how the 2016 constitutional changes that Trudeau pushed upon the Liberal Party may be among his worst yet most undiscussed political mistakes.  To make a long story short, Trudeau pushed through an omnibus package of constitutional amendments to centralize the powers of the party into a rigid hierarchy.  The elimination of the powers of Electoral District Associations to propose constitutional amendments has alone damaged the internal democracy of the party in a way that likely will not be resolved anytime soon.  That only the upper-most elite party authorities can propose any changes to the Liberal Constitution guarantees that is restrictive policy proposal process will remain self-isolating for the foreseeable future, and that the party will remain non-responsive to desperately needed feedback.

Being totally new to party politics, the incoming Prime Minister Mark Carney will not understand how his party is broken at the grassroots level, and he will be easily amenable to sycophants who have the attitude that nothing in the party constitution needs to meaningfully change.

The mixed legacy of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

A sizable faction of Canadians believe that Justin Trudeau is their worst ever Prime Minister, and those who believe him to be the best Prime Minister are few, if they exist at all.  But although I am no Trudeau fan, it reflects poorly on our country that the haters have been allowed to become a loud voice.  The simple truth is that other Canadian politicians have done worse in normalizing authoritarian precedents, and they paid lesser political prices for it.  But he leaves a mixed legacy both of positive accomplishments, like reduced boil water advisories on reserves and reduced child poverty, and of missed opportunities to bring “sunny ways” to the electoral system and other democratic institutions.  Notwithstanding the current polling resurgence of the Carney Liberals, I am not confident that he has left his party in a strong place, either.

I will not miss the cynicism of the celebrity figure who was more of a normal politician than he was portrayed to be, but I do hope that Canada will eventually recapture the brief political moment of 2015 and 2016 where it seemed that better was indeed possible.