The Man in the Masque

THE PRINCE:
The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau
by Stephen Maher
Simon & Schuster Canada
384 pp.

JUSTIN TRUDEAU ON THE ROPES:
Governing in Troubled Times
by Paul Wells
Sutherland House
95 pp.

Imagine you’re a political analyst for the leader of a foreign country – let’s call it Maralagonia – and you have to give a presentation on Justin Trudeau to your equally big-ego political boss. On the eve of a summit, your boss wants the key to understanding this guy he’s about to meet. What makes him tick? What’s his political situation?

In every state department and intelligence service of any consequence, there are briefing notes on Justin Trudeau intended to answer precisely that, and they’re probably being updated by the month. They’d make for fabulous reading, if only we could get our hands on them. It would be great fun to compare and contrast what the nations of the world tell their leaders to think of Justin Trudeau, and see what they all get comically wrong.

But here in the free world we don’t have access to the secret files of other governments. We have, instead, journalists. And here are two of our best, Stephen Maher and Paul Wells, triangulating on the same question: Given all we know now, what are we to make of Justin Trudeau?

Other journalists have already written Trudeau’s obituary. It’s not ghoulish. They have to. If he were to die tomorrow, the BBC, Al Jazeera, the New York Times and the People’s Daily all need something ready to go. The obituaries in the global press will be respectful, at least the ones in the West. Less so the official news agencies of places like Russia or India. And in the online precincts of the people who detest him, reaction to Trudeau’s death would be exultant and grotesque. And there’s the fact of the politics of our day.

This is the country Trudeau has been trying to govern for the past nine years. Some say he’s responsible for this enraged polarization, with his sanctimonious virtue signalling and his high and mighty moral condemnation of people who see things differently. But no, he didn’t start the fire. This is a lot bigger than him, or any world leader. This is structural.

So, if we can all agree that Justin Trudeau is not personally responsible for the venomously divisive political atmosphere of the world at large, we can get down to the serious business of determining what he is to blame for, with Maher and Wells as our guides.

Between them, Maher and Wells have worked for the top roster of the Canadian news media. They are seasoned front-row political observers, perceptive analysts, and clear, compelling writers. Neither of them, we might note, is currently on the staff of a legacy news outlet, because the legacy media just aren’t what they used to be. Maher now writes for GZERO, an American outfit, and Wells has hung out his shingle on Substack.

As a book, Maher’s is the more conventional, if only because it’s available in hardcover and is almost 400 pages long. I approve of this. His book has to have that heft because it’s based on some 200 interviews, mainly with Liberal insiders, most of them anonymous, and part of the pleasure of reading it is listening in on what he got people to tell him. Want to hear the skinny on how the Trudeau PMO strategized to charm Ivanka and Jared in the run-up to the NAFTA renegotiations? Maher has juicy stuff from behind the scenes.

Wells’ book is more of a booklet, but that’s the idea. It’s published by Sutherland Quarterly, an imprint created by Ken Whyte, the founding editor-in-chief of the National Post, to commission thought-provoking works on timely questions, package them as slender, appetizing essays, and publish them nimbly. I approve of this also. In the welter of media content from the ephemera of Instagram reels to the endless torrent of podcasting, there’s a place for this sort of information digest, and Wells has a way with words that lends itself to the concept.

The aim in both books is to take the measure of Trudeau by recounting his time in public life – which is to say, almost his entire life, from his birth on Christmas Day, 1971, when his father was prime minister, to the present, as the leader of a government besieged by opinion polls. The premise is that we can read his personality through the record of his government, which is not quite the same as saying that the record of his government is the outcome of his personality, though in the end both Maher and Wells arrive at a conclusion somewhere in that vicinity.

So, all the greatest hits are here. The “sunny ways” of the 2015 election, in which the Liberals went from the electoral wilderness to a majority government and a gender-balanced cabinet. The promise to do away with first-past-the-post elections, and the betrayal of that promise – only the first of promises betrayed. Dealing with Trump and the NAFTA renegotiation. The failed bid for a UN Security Council seat. The pandemic, vaccine mandates, the WE Charity scandal, the Freedom Convoy and the Emergencies Act. Meng Wanzhou, the two Michaels, and China. The disastrous trip to India, Modi, and an assassination on Canadian soil. The Trans Mountain pipeline. SNC-Lavalin. The politically embarrassing vacations. The supply and confidence agreement with the NDP. The housing crisis, inflation, grocery prices, and foreign electoral interference.

Liberal supporters will grumble that this isn’t a true record of the Trudeau government. It’s a journalist’s record, selectively focused on the stuff that triggered spikes in media attention. Where is the attention to the government’s genuine commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, the progress on child poverty, the difficult negotiations with the provinces to introduce affordable day care, the first steps toward national pharmacare and dental coverage, the efforts to assist provincial health care systems, and the unequivocal support for Ukraine?

Fair enough, though the lack of attention to what a government would prefer us to remember does not mean that media attention to the other stuff is unfair.

Between them, Maher and Wells describe a government that has the best of intentions – to do what it can to make life better – but that came to power on the charisma of its famous, telegenic leader, and remains hostage to his ego. Both books are careful not to write him off, but at the same time they view Trudeau as a spent persona. A government built on the personality of a single individual can only flounder once the charisma wears off.

So, in the estimation of Maher and Wells, this is a government without a grand vision of what it wants to accomplish and where it wishes to take the country. Instead, it is almost entirely reactive, swinging its attention from one political flareup to the next. Instead of a master narrative, it has scores of different initiatives, all treading water because everything ultimately has to go through the Prime Minister’s Office, and the PMO can only deal with so many things at once. There is a bottleneck in the good governance of Canada, and it is the ego of Justin Trudeau.

The mistakes Trudeau makes repeatedly – the pattern of how he gets things wrong – “starts to look like a syndrome,” Wells says. Maher notes the same thing, and puts it down to “princely vanity.”

They may be right about the Trudeau government being largely reactive, but when it truly counted the government reacted well, particularly in handling Trump, the NAFTA renegotiation, and the health and economic threat of the pandemic – crises that required coordinated responses across multiple government departments. Cabinet ministers were essential, and the public service sprang into action. This was not government by egomaniac.

Even the examples Maher and Wells cite of Trudeau’s personality running things off the rails are open to counter-interpretation. They both take the SNC-Lavalin affair as the most ringing indictment of Trudeau’s style of government – and, admittedly, any episode that ends with the loss of two government ministers, the Prime Minister’s principal secretary, and the Clerk of the Privy Council, can only be charitably described as a disaster. But it is perfectly possible that Trudeau and his inner circle were not craven and ruthless in trying to extort the Minister of Justice, but rather they genuinely believed the repercussions from the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin would be catastrophic for the country, and they were faced with a Minister who was hell bent on precipitating the catastrophe. In that light, their repeated entreaties to the Minister of Justice were not so much heavy-handed pressure as appeals to reason. They were wrong about the repercussions, but the ego that led to the disaster may have been Jody Wilson-Raybauld’s, not Justin Trudeau’s.

As to who Trudeau is, what makes him tick, one wonders if we’ll ever know. Take the blackface incidents – what on earth was that about? Presumably, if you could unlock that, you’d have the measure of the man. Both Maher and Wells devote close attention to the blackface, but the closer one looks, the more perplexing it becomes.

When the first photo of Trudeau in blackface surfaced – wearing an elaborate turban at a fancy dress party at the private school where he taught – Radio-Canada turned for comment to Quebec novelist Dany Laferrière, author of How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired. Wells is particularly irritated by what Laferrière had to say – “I’m not sure I’ve heard something as ridiculous … in my life” – and quotes him at length. Laferrière points out that in the photo Trudeau is dressed as Aladdin from the One Thousand and One Nights. “It’s certainly not blackface,” he argues, because there is no attempt to ridicule or dehumanize. For Wells, Laferrière’s reading is a tortured rationalization, a gambit to forgive unforgiveable behaviour because if it were to disqualify Trudeau the upshot would be a Conservative government.

Except Laferrière was right. As Maher points out, it only looks as though Trudeau is in blackface because the photo was in black and white. In fact, the body paint he was wearing was blue. He was indeed dressed as Aladdin, by way of the 1992 animated Disney movie with Robin Williams. Blackface has a racist history. Blueface, not so much. (You can catch the Blue Man Group any night of the week at the Luxor in Vegas.) But even once you know Trudeau was in blue paint, it gets weirder, because in the Disney movie it’s the Genie who’s blue, not Aladdin.

Of course, that wasn’t the only time Trudeau slathered himself in body paint. Maher reports that in 1993, while a student at McGill, Trudeau went out on Halloween in blackface, dressed as Ted Danson, who earlier that month had worn blackface at a Friar’s Club roast with the encouragement of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. It was a decidedly meta costume – Trudeau was wearing blackface in mockery of a white man who had worn blackface. This neither explains nor excuses the incident, or any of the others when Trudeau wore blackface. But if, after all this time, we still can’t make sense of what motivated Trudeau to do it, then we don’t truly understand him as a person.

He eludes us still.

The Hill Times June 10, 2024