1. Let me read to you
We’re bringing the podcast back in mid-summer (early mid-summer?) to share an excerpt from the audiobook version of Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, my book-length (short-book-length?) essay on the prime minister’s career in politics.
If you like the excerpt, you’ll love the full audiobook. Here it is at Audible. Here it is at Apple Audiobooks. If you’re not into the whole audio thing, here’s my post from the book’s paper-and-ebook launch, with plenty of info on where to find your copy.
I’m so pleased with the response to this project. On the Ropes is currently rated 4.2 out of 5 on Amazon and 4.3 on Goodreads, based on a combined total of 142 ratings. Independent booksellers have had a hard time keeping the book in stock because people keep buying it. I’m pleased that in a weird time, so many people are finding something worthwhile in this short book. And I had a blast reading the whole thing into a microphone, in the studio my friends at the National Arts Centre generously provided.
2. Every MP a premier
I’m pleased that even in the worst thing I’ve written in many months — the post that celebrated Liberal candidate Leslie Church’s victory in Toronto—St. Paul’s, shortly before she lost — I did call one thing right.
“[F]or a few weeks I’ve believed that even if the Liberals had managed to lose TSP, there would have been no public or organized effort within the party to remove Justin Trudeau as leader,” I wrote. Indeed, the Liberals did manage to lose the riding, and indeed nothing the party has done since that night has been organized, from either the bottom up or the top down.
Questions Justin Trudeau has faced — mostly in absentia, as the prime minister darts furtively from photo op to photo op — include:
Will he resign the Liberal leadership?
Will he make a cabinet shuffle so big that even Chrystia Freeland doesn’t keep her job?
Ditto with a staff shuffle and Katie Telford?
Will he meet the national caucus of Liberal MPs, to share with them his latest thoughts on the progress of sunny ways? And — whisper when you say it — maybe even to listen while they share their own thoughts?
My current sense of things is that the answers to these questions are, in order: no; maybe; maybe; and not yet. On the CBC show Power & Politics the other night, Liberal panelist Amanda Alvaro was beside herself at the notion that a wee claque of dissident MPs want to meet the PM. I daresay she has a point. The Liberal caucus has met the PM weekly since dinosaurs walked the earth, and they will again in September. It’s not clear what they would say in July that they couldn’t have said all those other times. Perhaps, in the absence of a meeting, MPs can use some of their spare time to contemplate, belatedly, the merits of speaking up when it’s less popular. I know some former cabinet ministers they can call if they have questions.
Liberal MPs who did want a caucus meeting can console themselves with the thought that, by declining to meet them as a group, the PM is in effect appointing them to the status of provincial premiers, whom he also tries to avoid as much as possible.
Meeting with hostile groups, or even simply with worried groups, raises the risk that the PM might hear something he would rather not hear. When he stays in his office or brings his office staff with him on trips, he is apparently in no such danger. In a Star story from Friday, “a senior official in Trudeau’s office” said the situation is “not easy” but that “the prime minister and his party need to ‘double down’ on their current policy direction.” “You finish the job,” the person said, noting that everyone working with the PM remains “one thousand per cent” committed to him.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that input, by Wednesday the PM was able to report that after some “direct and frank” conversations with (mercifully isolated) MPs, he had decided that he needs to… do more of what he’s doing. Double down, you might say. Finish the job.
“I can tell you that, in my conversations with MPs from one end of the country to the other, the emphasis is on how we’re going to continue to be there for Canadians,” Trudeau said, “how we’re going to present a positive vision to counter this mounting right-wing populism that we see throughout the world, including in Pierre Poilievre.”
Indeed, he said the TSP by-election defeat was “a difficult moment that is inciting me to work even harder” on dental care, a national school food program, new housing, child care and the green economy.
The hard lesson from Toronto—St. Paul’s, then, or at least the lesson he’s chosen to retain, is that voters worried he hasn’t been acting enough like Justin Trudeau lately. They would like him to be more like Justin Trudeau. If only they could have a little more of that Justin Trudeau, they’d understand the value of the Justin Trudeau they’ve had all along. This is the “emphasis” the PM gleans from his conversations with selected MPs, and from his thousand-per-cent-committed staff.
Onward with the questions I listed above. Will Trudeau get rid of Telford or Freeland? Honestly, at this point, who cares. He would replace Telford with somebody who was in 85 of the last 90 meetings Telford was at. The emphasis of their conversations would be the importance of doubling down to finish the job. Together they would commit a thousand per cent to working harder.
Shuffle Freeland? Two summers ago it felt bold to suggest such a thing. Now, less so.
Althia Raj reported a few days ago that Mark Carney was in talks to join the Liberal government. I suspect Carney is often surprised to see how often his conversations with this prime minister wind up in the newspapers. Perhaps he will wonder whether the stories are the reason for the calls.
If Carney does join the government, that will indeed be a large event that indicates Trudeau wants to be seen making consequential decisions. It might be enough to get Canadians to reconsider this government. To keep that breath on Liberal embers going, Carney would have to generate a hell of a lot of momentum somehow, given that the next budget is probably eight months away and that four more risky by-elections stand between here and there.
I think a Carney cabinet appointment is unlikely. (People who say it’s impossible because he’s not an MP should read history: Stéphane Dion, Pierre Pettigrew and Michael Fortier were not members of Parliament when Chrétien and Harper named them to cabinet.) Here’s another thing that’s unlikely: a new finance minister, promoted from within the existing caucus, who knows the first thing about finance. Jean-Yves Duclos was head of the economics department at Laval University and president-elect of the Canadian Association of Economists when he first ran for Parliament in 2015. So you know he’ll never be finance minister. The people who made the Liberals’ last few dozen communications decisions will tell themselves they need a good communicator, and that they are the sort of people who know what good communicators look like.
This brings me to the remaining question I listed above: Will Trudeau resign the leadership? I don’t think he will. On balance I don’t think he should, although as I’ve written it’s for the grim reason that some Liberal is likely to lose the next election and it might as well be him.
I’m conscious of being a grumpy Gus. I’ve rejected just about everything in the air as unworkable or unlikely. Meet the caucus? Pointless. Dump Telford or Freeland? Beside the point, at this late date. Quit? Not even. All right then, smarty-pants, what on earth should he do?
I guess the short answer is, it would be great if he’d learn something. What has he done in a decade that he wishes he hadn’t? What is he doing today that doesn’t need to continue? Do events ever teach him any lesson at all besides “double down” and “finish the job” and “work harder” and “meet the moment” and “continue to be there?”
This is from an Abacus poll in February.
I keep thinking of the Coen Brothers’ 1991 movie Barton Fink. John Turturro plays a playwright who fancies himself a champion of the working man. He moves to California to write movie scripts. The guy in the next hotel room, John Goodman, is a working man. Turturro is so busy telling Goodman about his own big heart that he doesn’t let Goodman get a word in. Later we discover Goodman has done horrible things. When Turturro asks why, Goodman says: “Because you don’t listen!”
Of course it’s just a movie. And of course I intend no real-life analogy to the gruesome events in the movie. But if you’ve been worried that Justin Trudeau wasn’t doing enough of the things Justin Trudeau has been doing all along, rest assured he hears you loud and clear. He’s ready to double down.
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