"Delivering the absolute best future"

Justin Trudeau wants an election about his values

The PM, roaring to go. Youtube screen grab.

I’m going to devote two posts to Justin Trudeau’s appearance this week on Uncommons, Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith’s podcast.

This is a bit over the top. The podcast, which I link below, isn’t much more than the PM shooting the breeze for an hour with a lightly unorthodox member of his own governing caucus. But 2024 is turning into an odd year for this PM. He’s under pressure. He’s personally deeply unpopular. He is asked constantly, to his face or in absentia, when he’ll leave politics. He spent half the summer responding to this pressure by popping up unannounced at various public events, and has since been looking for surprising venues for his appearances.

So lately I wonder the same thing I wondered nearly a year ago when I went to a routine Liberal fundraiser to hear Trudeau’s remarks: What’s on his mind? What’s he got to say for himself? I figure a basic element of courtesy is to hear him out.

Here’s the podcast so you can hear for yourself. Today’s post is about the first half. I’ll begin by summarizing, pretty straightforwardly, what the big guy has to say. After that, I’ll offer some analysis.

Erskine-Smith is the MP for Beaches—East York. He ran for the provincial Ontario Liberal leadership last year and finished a respectable second to Bonnie Crombie. He opens with a decent self-deprecating joke, asking what kind of terrible scheduler put interviews with Stephen Colbert and Erskine-Smith on the PM’s schedule in the same week.

It’s all part of the plan, says Trudeau. “A big part of what I’ve been trying to do is have as many different conversations in different places [as I can] about the challenges we’re all facing.”

The goal seems to be to recapture the novelty of hearing from Justin Trudeau. To do an end run around the layers of jaded fatigue that build up between politicians and voters.

“If we don’t go to where people are, then people aren’t listening,” Trudeau says. “If we don’t start making space for real conversations that actually do filter through everything that people are bombarded with… then we’re not doing right in terms of either representing or serving people.”

He picks up on a remark Erskine-Smith makes about Trudeau’s first campaign as Liberal leader, in 2015. “It’s interesting that you go back to 2015, right? And the why we did this,” Trudeau says. “First of all, there were a lot of people telling us that we were wrong, that I was doing things the wrong way, that I wasn’t tackling the right things the right way.”

It’s clear that Trudeau’s fondest memory of 2015 is of winning after he’d been dismissed. “It was an opportunity to actually give Canadians a choice that I think was absolutely necessary for the country. …To double down on fighting climate change and growing the economy at the same time. We gotta step up on supporting the most vulnerable, we’ve got to move forward on reconciliation, we gotta figure out how we navigate through a much more challenging world that has impacts on us.

“Those are all things the Harper government wasn’t doing,” he says, and the choice between visions is “sort of the same choice they’re going to make in the next election.”

His definition of the choice: “Are we going to double down on making sure that everyone gets to participate or play, or are we going to drive wedges into people and group Canadians into sub-groups that are angry at each other?”

I’m struck by how, as he describes his own instinct as an election approaches, Trudeau repeatedly uses the term “double down.” This is not particularly the vocabulary of somebody who wants to revisit previous choices. “You have to build the economy from the bottom up or from the centre out, instead of from the top down, which Poilievre is still proposing,” he says.

He admits that “This is going to be a much harder election than 2015. It always was going to be.” But he argues strongly — and seems to believe strongly — that he will be judged to have the correct values, and that everything that’s holding him back will fall away as voters start to concentrate.

Erskine-Smith, who really is pretty gutsy for a guy interrogating his own party leader, points out that some Liberals think Trudeau’s not the man to lead the party into the next election. “Would they be saying that if I was 10 points ahead in the polls right now?” Trudeau asks, with a note of triumph.

Here, I’m sorry, I have to say: Probably not, because they would be 10 points ahead! It’s like saying, “If I had a space shuttle growing out of my backside, would anyone be saying, ‘That man does not have a space shuttle protruding from his butt?’” No. No they would not. Good point.

The rest of the exchange is, I think, one of the key moments of the entire interview. Sure, some Liberals question his fitness, Trudeau says — but none questions his heart. “Are there a lot of Liberals who are thinking, you know, ‘Justin’s priorities aren’t in the right place? Or Justin doesn’t have the fight in him? Or Justin is wrong to be continuing to believe in protecting the environment and growing the economy and protecting women’s rights and stuff?’ In terms of the substance of what we’re doing, that’s pretty much the fight.”

The only lack of faith the Liberal leader perceives in his troops has to do with his motivation. “There’s a question on whether or not I still have the drive, the fight or the ability to win this fight,” he says. “I’d sort of say” — here he pauses for quite some time, as if pondering the question himself — “that that’s obviously a question that I have to ask as well. Do I still have the drive to do this?”

Erskine-Smith jumps in: “Well, you have the drive. I’m not dismissive of that.”

Trudeau: “OK, but do I still have the understanding of what this is going to take to win the next election? Absolutely. Better than just about anyone else. Because I have been fighting through crises and fighting against Conservative opponents who are trying to undo this and bring Canadians backward and polarize them. I know exactly how hard this fight is going to be. And I also know that I am absolutely roaring to go. Because this kind of fight — that is so fundamental to how Canadians come out and come through what has been really, really difficult years — is exactly why I got into politics. To make sure that we are delivering the absolute best future for Canadians.”

Trudeau is quite sure nobody asks the other guy the same question. “Nobody’s asking Poilievre why he wants to do it. What is it that he is being driven to fight for? We know what he’s fighting against. What is he fighting for? And he hasn’t even… begun to articulate what he’s fighting for. …Other than himself and his desire to be in power.”

So — and here I feel the need to emphasize that I am trying to be the ambassador of Justin Trudeau’s view of things, rather than to present my own — Canadians don’t understand what motivates Pierre Poilievre, but they know and admire what drives Justin Trudeau.

“They know what matters to me. And that is not something to simply shrug off. Because what we’ve seen over the past number of years is crises that nobody ran on. Nobody asked me in 2019 how I was going to handle a pandemic that was going to hit the next year. Nobody talked about ‘How would you react if Russia were to invade Ukraine?’… That idea of knowing someone’s values, knowing the frame with which they approach challenges, is not just important. It’s ultimately sort of the only thing.”

So what drives Justin Trudeau? “Understanding that we are in a moment in this world where everything is changing. The way we work, the way AI works, the way geopolitics happens, the pressures on everything: The world is in a massive pivot moment right now. And we don’t know what the biggest issue is going to be.”

Here Trudeau is arguing that good instincts are better, in a storm, than easy remedies. “For the past year and a half, Poilievre has been screaming his head off about, you know, inflation! And it’s all my fault on inflation! And inflation is now down to where it’s supposed to be.”

Bottom line: “We don’t know what crises are going to hit the world. We only know there are going to be [crises]. And the question [is]: who has the capacity to respond?”

Here, Erskine-Smith takes Trudeau on a stroll through a favourite question of Liberals, which is whether they should have bought a lot of ads to sow doubt about Poilievre once he became Conservative leader. Trudeau essentially says it never felt like the right time. I mostly want to get back to this theme of what Trudeau wants to build, versus what he thinks Poilievre represents.

“I do tend to get wrapped up in the long term,” he volunteers. This makes him brood about “the danger of squandering that lead we have, over so many of our competitors around the world — whether it’s on the environment and the green economy, whether it’s on child care and a responsible safety net, whether it’s on all sorts of different things.” If Canadians did something to blow that — “like electing a Conservative government that wants to bring us back to some past that never actually existed” — they would be jeopardizing “everything that we have been able to build that’s going to make the future so good for so many.”

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A few thoughts.

1. Fresh eyes

The business about “different conversations” and “going where people are” reflects Trudeau’s frustration with being tuned out. Once, 10 summers ago, all the geniuses wrote him off — “there were a lot of people telling us that we were wrong” — but Canadians heard him and liked him, or enough did. So if he just… pops up — On Colbert, at a ball game, guest cameo on Agatha All Along, whatever — he can short-circuit the defences we’ve built up. And quite by surprise, we’ll fall in love again.

Sure, maybe. With great respect for his creative use of social-media platforms, I confess I’m unsure that Nate Erskine-Smith’s podcast is “where people are.” About 4,000 people have seen the Trudeau interview on Youtube at this writing. That’s almost half as much as Erskine-Smith’s most-viewed video, which shows him asking about Pornhub age verification at a Parliamentary committee meeting. It’s a modest start against a 20-point polling deficit.

2. Don’t wanna know

Trudeau’s comments about Poilievre suggest, or confirm, a strong cultural taboo on the Liberal side against developing even the most rudimentary understanding of their opponent’s message and appeal.

To some extent, I get it. Poilievre is loud. A little of him goes a long way. The temptation to tune him out must be fierce. But Sun Tzu said: know your enemy, and if the leader of the Liberal Party thinks the leader of the Conservative Party has said nothing in three years except that the rich should get tax cuts, then he’s got his elbows in his ears. It’s always tempting to run against the opponent you wish you were facing, rather than against a person who exists in three dimensions. Losers do it all the time.

3. The Great Pumpkin

Linus believes The Great Pumpkin will visit him because his pumpkin patch is the most sincere. “You can look around and there’s not a hint of hypocrisy.” Trudeau is similarly sure. He is for “the environment and growing the economy.” So are you. So you will vote for him.

I worry that there’s an intermediate question missing: Do Canadians believe Trudeau is an effective advocate of the things we all apparently want?

A year ago I was surprised by the reaction to this post, in which I pointed out that Canada was 58th out of 63 jurisdictions on the global Climate Change Performance Index. But much has changed. This year Canada has fallen four spots to 62nd out of 67.

There are reasons for this. Canada is large and cold, and its wealth is built disproportionately on its natural resources. A leader who was eager about “making space for real conversations” might talk about such things.

This one got into politics “to make sure we are delivering the absolute best future for Canadians.” Perhaps his problem is that he has the vote of every Canadian who agrees that’s happening.

More soon.