Prime Minister Jusitn Trudeau appearing on Nate Erskine-Smith's Uncommons podcast.
Prime Minister Jusitn Trudeau appearing on Nate Erskine-Smith's Uncommons podcast. Credit: Nate Erskine-Smith / Uncommons Credit: Nate Erskine-Smith / Uncommons

Canadian journalists who cover politics are much preoccupied with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sinking poll numbers. 

This writer is no fan of polls and poll-driven journalism, but when he talks to friends, neighbours, and strangers they tend to tell a story similar to that of the polls.

It is not a happy story.

The Golden Boy of 2015 has become just about everyone’s favourite whipping boy. A good many Canadians blame everything that ails Canada – except perhaps the weather – on our current prime minister.

The biggest knock against Trudeau and his Liberal government is inflation. 

No matter the accomplishments of any government – and this government has a fairly long list (a good many thanks to its accord with the NDP) – when ordinary folks feel the pain of significantly higher prices for almost everything, those accomplishments fade in significance.

It might be true that international factors are more to blame for inflation here than anything the Canadian government has done or not done. 

The pandemic, with its worldwide slowdown in production and massive supply line disruptions, had a genuine impact on price inflation worldwide. Canada has not been immune, as a good many economic experts will tell you.

But most Canadians aren’t economists. When the going gets tough for rank-and-file citizens, they don’t tend to blame ephemeral international conditions. They blame the government in power.  

Added to that ineluctable truth is Trudeau’s particular political style. 

From the outset of his career as a national leader, Justin Trudeau’s brand has been more about feelings and image than anything resembling a policy agenda.

Back in 2012 and 2013, Trudeau was the quintessential feel-good leader. He was all about photographable smiles and flowing hair. 

He even adapted early 20th century Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier’s slogan, “sunny ways”, to the era of social media and selfies. 

Trudeau also benefited from a famous, almost mythical, last name. In many Canadians’ memories, Justin’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had not only been one of the longest serving Canadian prime ministers, he was also one of the most revered and respected. 

That esteem rubbed off on Pierre Trudeau’s eldest son.

Here was a young man who had sat in the House of Commons for a handful of years, but had virtually no other significant leadership or managerial experience. And yet, his youthful air and family mystique blew away other far more accomplished potential Liberal leaders, notably former astronaut Marc Garneau. 

Today, those “sunny ways” more often than not seem artificial and mannered. They tend to irritate more than they inspire or comfort. 

To paraphrase an old saying from an ancient Greek tragedy: “Those whom the gods of celebrity would destroy they first raise up to great heights.”

These days, this writer is tempted to defend Justin Trudeau, because so much of the current ill feelings toward him seem as unjustified as were the over-the-top good feelings of a decade ago.

For today, however, in this space, we’ll pile on. Here are two of Trudeau’s choices that, each in its own way, foretold his current troubles.

Shamelessly exploited memory of his father

The first happened during the 2015 election campaign, Justin Trudeau’s first as Liberal leader.

At the outset of that campaign, the Liberals, who had been leading in most polls for months, had slipped. The New Democrats had gotten some wind in their sails following NDPer Rachel Notley’s surprise win in the Alberta election, and the polls tended to show a dead heat among the three main parties.

That situation gave a measure of urgency to the leaders’ debates.

Late in September of 2015, the Munk Centre in Toronto sponsored a debate on foreign policy. Some Liberals feared their young, untested leader might be out of his depth next to his two more seasoned adversaries: PM Stephen Harper, and then official opposition leader, the NDP’s leader Tom Mulcair.

At a bit more than half an hour into that debate the subject of the Harper government’s much disputed anti-terrorism legislation, Bill C-51, came up. 

When the Conservatives first tabled C-51 it was quite popular, which made the Trudeau-led Liberals nervous. While some in Trudeau’s party wanted to vote against legislation that threatened basic civil rights in a number of fundamental ways, the Liberals decided to try for a more cautious course. They would vote in favour of C-51, but promise to amend it later.

The NDP had opposed C-51 from the outset. 

During the Munk debate, New Democratic leader Mulcair pointed out how his party’s evidence-based and persistent opposition had shifted public opinion on Harper’s anti-terrorism initiative. 

Mulcair added that New Democrats had a history of taking such principled positions, notwithstanding popular opinion. 

He noted the NDP’s opposition to Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the draconian War Measures Act in 1970.

Trudeau quickly jumped in, but not to defend his party’s ambivalent and ambiguous position on C-51.

The Liberal leader ignored the issue at hand, and used Mulcair’s mention of his late father as an opportunity to say, gratuitously but to rapturous applause, how “proud” he was to be Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s son. 

Indeed, Justin Trudeau proved utterly shameless in exploiting the memory of his esteemed dad. At another point during the Munk encounter, he noted that the debate was taking place on the 15th anniversary of his father’s death.

At the time, the tactic worked. 

Most observers said Justin Trudeau had bested his two older and more experienced opponents. 

But Justin Trudeau’s success at coasting on his late dad’s reputation should have sent warning signs to the more thoughtful of his ardent supporters. It betrayed a degree of shallow opportunism that would bite him in the backside in coming years.

Then there’s this other notorious case of Justin Trudeau’s dubious judgement. 

It’s ranked ballot or no reform for Justin Trudeau

In the spring of 2015, in the run-up to the election campaign, at a noisy and partisan rally in Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier hotel, Justin Trudeau, then leader of the third party in parliament, unveiled his party’s democratic reform platform. 

One of the items was to replace what had become, over many decades, a highly partisan, patronage-based system for naming senators. Trudeau proposed the more merit-based process we now have. 

To his credit, Trudeau faithfully fulfilled that promise once in office. The Senate is probably a better and more productive legislative body today than it had been for many years before his reform. 

But the centrepiece of Trudeau’s democracy package, and the item that got the biggest applause at the Chateau Laurier rally, was Trudeau’s solemn and unshakeable promise that if the Liberals won the 2015 election it would be the “last based on the first-past-the-post electoral system”.

Two years later, Trudeau famously backed away from that pledge. It was an unabashed, full-scale betrayal. 

Justin Trudeau now ruefully admits the entire electoral reform effort was a big failure for him. But he is not particularly penitent for having broken a solemn pledge.

In a recent interview for Toronto Liberal MP Nathan Erskine-Smith’s podcast, Trudeau claims his biggest error was not in jettisoning the reform process midstream. It was rather in allowing the option most reformers support to be included among possible alternatives to first-past-the-post.

That option would require any new system to have a measure of proportionality.

It could take the form of the German mixed-member, two-vote system (one for a constituency MP and one for a party) or the single transferable ballot (STV), which British Columbia almost adopted decades ago. 

The STV system creates large, multi-member ridings, in which voters rank their choices. Under STV, citizens directly vote for all of the members of parliament. STV thus avoids what some consider to be a flaw in the mixed-member system, namely that parties, rather than voters, choose some of the MPs.

As the reform process proceeded early in the Liberals’ first mandate, Trudeau indicated he personally favoured the much simpler single-member constituency ranked ballot. 

The ranked ballot system would maintain the current parliament, with the same number of ridings and members, but allow voters to indicate first, second, third and fourth choices.

Trudeau says he likes ranked ballot because it would mean minimal change, and because it would force parties to play nicely with each other, since they would need second and third choices to win an election.

Those are legitimate points. But as the reform process was unfolding, Trudeau never, in any way, even hinted he would not, under any circumstances, accept any other option.

Trudeau revealed to Erskine-Smith that the only reason he had agreed to allow consideration of proportional systems was because some of his own Liberal colleagues favoured proportional representation.

The prime minister now argues he made a mistake to have opened the door, even a crack, to any degree of proportionality, which he believes would be “bad for Canada”.

Trudeau now says he wishes he had simply pushed through his favoured system, the ranked ballot, while he had a majority in the House – without consulting the public, or experts, or the other political parties.

When Fair Vote Canada’s executive director Anita Nickerson heard those words, she was so incensed she issued a news release excoriating the prime minister.

The Fair Vote Canada chief pointed out that, in his 2015 pledge, Trudeau never intimated, or suggested in any way, that he would blow up the reform process if the members of an all-party parliamentary committee did not go for his favoured option.

It is a sign of a significant lack of self-awareness that, today, the prime minister believes where he went wrong on electoral reform was in seeking consensus among all parties and not wielding his majority in a ruthless and arbitrary manner.

As Brian Mulroney said to then Liberal prime minister John Turner, during another leaders’ debate, in 1984: “You had [other] option[s], sir!”

If opinion polls are at all accurate, we now face the prospect of a borderline extremist Conservative Party winning a huge majority of seats with only about 40 per cent of the popular vote. 

A different electoral system from first-past-the-post would almost certainly make such an unrepresentative result impossible. 

Trudeau could have seen to it that parliament continued to pursue an alternative to first-past-the-post. The opposition parties were onside on that pursuit. 

He made another choice, and now he – sort of – has regrets. 

But even now, Trudeau does not have the humility to admit he erred in killing a legitimate and consensual reform process, which had a reasonable chance of gaining majority support in Canada.

And so, if Justin Trudeau’s once bright and shiny image is now significantly tarnished, it is, in good measure, his own fault.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...