Essay questions
My new book on Justin Trudeau goes on sale on Tuesday. It's concise.
My fourth book, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times, will appear in bookstores on Tuesday, although our friends at Chapters/ Indigo jumped the gun and have had it on their shelves for days already.
It’s the sixth release in the Sutherland Quarterly periodical series. If you subscribe here, you get a copy of JTotR, the next three books in the series, and digital access to the first six, including my 2023 book An Emergency in Ottawa: The Story of the Convoy Commission, all for an attractive price. [UPDATE: I stand corrected. You don’t get the whole archive with a subscription, you just get the last entry from me. If anyone asks, I plan to say they should offer the whole archive, but as it stands, they don’t. My mistake — pw] I see they’re also offering to throw in a copy of any other Sutherland House book. If that’s not a deal, it’ll do until a deal gets here.
If you want just my Trudeau book, you can, among other options, buy it from an independent bookstore. My favourites include The Book Keeper in Sarnia, Perfect Books and Books on Beechwood in Ottawa, Brome Lake Books in the Townships, Pages on Kensington in Calgary and the mighty Ben McNally Books in Toronto. While in any of them, look around and see what else you might enjoy reading. They will be delighted to help you. Maybe get on the wait list for Niigaan Sinclair’s new book.
I happen to know for a fact that my book is also in Chapters and Indigo. Now that they’re actually supposed to be selling it, help them out. And if you don’t live near a bookstore and you want to propel me up the Amazon bestseller lists, that’s allowed too.
On September 23 I received this email from Ken Whyte, the president of Sutherland House Books:
“I know we’ve talked about doing your next quarterly on something about the comms/ media environment. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t do Trudeau. He’s been around almost a decade and I still have no idea why he’s in office or what he’s trying to do. He’s seriously middle-aged yet often seems like a kid playing a role. I’m sure you’ve thought about him more than I have. I haven’t seen anyone write thoughtfully about him, lay down a thesis…”
I read this as, approximately, a dare. Seven hours later, after finding another home for the comms/ media book, I wrote back: “OK, let’s do this.”
Each Sutherland Quarterly is capped at 100 pages, about 25,000 words. That’s longer than just about anything I ever wrote for magazines, and about one-quarter the length of my big Stephen Harper book a decade ago. It’s a good middle length for an essay. You can read it in an evening, or stretch it out. I have started to enjoy writing at this length. Later in this post, I will mightily encourage ambitious colleagues to give it a try.
This book isn’t based on new reporting. My authority is the news archive, my brains and my eyes. It’s my attempt to take Ken Whyte’s dare and lay down a thesis about Justin Trudeau.
Or maybe a few theses?
The book is in four chapters: rise, crisis, polarization, lessons. The connecting thread, which I take care to use sparingly, is that damned boxing match in Ottawa in 2012, when Trudeau trained and prepared so he could defeat an apparently superior opponent. He still mentions it, I’m told. He’s not a fool: He knows that when you’re on the ropes, a plausible next destination is the mat. He knows that no number of victories guarantees the next one. But he likes to tally the victories he’s won after the smart money counted him out.
I argue that you can’t understand Trudeau’s rise without studying the fall of the Liberal Party of Canada during the decade before he became its leader. The party was shattered — repeatedly. It lost most of what had made it a winning institution, and it did it in instalments, so Dion was worse than Martin and Ignatieff worse than Dion. Which means that when it came back with a strong majority in 2015, it was an inexperienced government led by an inexperienced leader who brought an overstuffed agenda and a shaky sense of policy mission. One of the book’s gentle surprises comes from simply re-reading what Trudeau ran on in 2015. At one point he castigated Stephen Harper for running eight consecutive deficits.
Then he became prime minister and the world came crashing in. Rookie ministers on short leashes; court-imposed legislative deadlines messing with stuff Trudeau actually wanted to do; the ordinary hell of Parliament; then Trump, Brexit, China, SNC-Lavalin, blackface. There were real successes in that first mandate, but near the end of it an angel appeared, bringing absolution. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s strategist, showed up at the Liberal convention in Halifax and told Liberals that hope is a first-election strategy and contrast is for second elections. There is no greater gift in politics than permission.
That’s half the book. The rest is fun too. The book is critical of Trudeau but not dismissive. My job is to try to explain him. That requires empathy. Excerpts in two newspapers this weekend drew predictable outrage on Twitter, but I’m pleased to spot the names of Liberals among the encouraging emails.
I’ll be everywhere this week promoting the book, including CBC Radio’s The Current on Tuesday morning and Peter Mansbridge’s podcast. I daresay my own podcast on Wednesday will be surprising. On this newsletter’s website and on the Substack mobile app, you can find a Chat function; this link should work. Let’s do a subscriber Chat book club on Thursday at noon EDT. I’ll kick it off, and you can type questions, snark, whatever. I believe the chat can continue indefinitely, so if you can’t be there when it begins, just check in later.
One more word about the vehicle. The Sutherland Quarterly series becomes more attractive for all concerned — writers and readers — as it goes along. The more issues that appear, the more you can read when your subscription unlocks the digital archive. [UPDATE: Not true. Not yet, anyway.] And the more people who subscribe, the greater the guaranteed sales for each new writer. [This part is true, and excellent.] In Australia, the series that provided the inspiration for Sutherland Quarterly has become the place to go for serious political argument and analysis. I have half a mind to name the specific Canadian colleagues, most a fair bit younger than me, whom I’d love to see writing an SQ on just about any topic of contemporary public interest. But you know who you are, and for sure you don’t need permission from me. One way to ensure our discourse moves away from slogans and billboards is to pick the damned thing up and move it yourself. I can make introductions if anyone’s interested.
Thanks to everyone who is interested in reading Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. To those who aren’t, I promise this promotional interlude will be brief and I’ll get back to writing for you.
A couple of people have asked whether subscribing to the Substack means you get a free copy of the book. Nope! Subscribing to the Substack means, as always, that you get full access to the Substack. Buying the book means you get a book. Subscribing to Sutherland Quarterly means you get several books. Three different pipelines to good times.
For a repatriated Canadian who has been entrenched in the shit show with our neighbors, and who has been embarrassed by the Trudeau amateur-hour, but seeing the need to catch up on Canadian politics, this could not have come at a better time.