Trudeau didn't make Canada woke: Canada wanted woke so he obliged
Paul Wells on the Trudeau Jr era
Veteran journalist Paul Wells talked to me about his new book Justin Trudeau on the Ropes that came out last month in the Sutherland Quarterly series. I’ll spare you our opening discussion on the methods by which the parties elect leaders—the relative merits of the ranked ballot vs one-member-one-vote vs delegate convention vs hybrids—and I’ll jump straight in medias res.
LP: I wanted to ask you about some of the things that you highlight about Trudeau's reign. The centralization of appointments, for example, like the appointments of the chiefs of staff of cabinet ministers. Also - any kind of government by cabinet was basically out of question. When did we say farewell to cabinet government Canada? Already during Stephen Harper?
PW: And Jean Chretien before him. It's significant that Stephen Harper's first chief of staff, Ian Brodie, has written admiringly about the way that Chretien organized his government. Governing from the centre makes perfect sense if you work in the centre. And it's defensible to the rest of us. One of the arguments that Ian Brodie made in his book is you can't expect a good cabinet minister to have complex thoughts about anyone else's portfolio because they're so busy on their own portfolio. If you've got a really strong transport minister, you can't expect them to think much about the health care system. They're busy running the transport system. So you need to put a lot of the decision-making capacity in the centre, when the centre can be Privy Council office, prime minister's office, to some extent the finance department, treasury board.
Generally speaking, my book does not try to exaggerate the extent to which Justin Trudeau was calling the shots. A lot of times the shots were calling him. He was a significant player in a chaotic time, and a lot of the decisions were not decisions he made by fiat. They were decisions that the circumstances demanded.
And so, for instance, on ministerial autonomy, why on earth would anyone have given Bill Morneau autonomy as a cabinet minister? He'd never been a Member of Parliament before in his life. Jane Philpott didn't know the health department, didn't know Parliament. She knew how to run a hospital. But after 2015, that wasn't really on the exam. And so all of these rookies who've done, in many cases, impressive things outside of politics, suddenly they're in government. And I think it was, to some extent, rational for the prime minister's office to say, well, we're going to keep these people on short leash. Well -- that doesn't guarantee success. And the book is to some extent about the kinds of failures that flow from that initial decision. But the initial decision was not a crazy decision.
LP: OK but why were there so many rookies? Why didn't they choose from a pool of experienced people? I mean, I remember reading about the 50/50 gender balance in the cabinet and the “because it's 2015” but only later did I learn that the women were 26 percent of all MPs and they had to craft half the cabinet out of those. For a good photo-op or something. It's irrational.
PW: Yeah. I guess my thing is I don't expect politics to be all that rational. Also, I don't know what case you could point to where a female cabinet minister let this government down while there was an obviously superior guy, you know, cooling his heels in the corner. When you go through the ministers who left in greater or lesser disarray from this government, Hunter Tootoo, Bill Morneau, Scott Brison, and Ralph Goodale couldn't hang on to his seat, and so on, I don't think the gender balance of cabinet had much to do with it. Why did they go with rookies? Because rookies was all they had. Experienced liberals with long history in government had either gone down to defeat in one of the three previous elections or had gotten the hell out of politics because they expected to lose. And so, yeah, rookies, with some exceptions (John McCallum, Stephane Dion, Ralph Goodale) were all Justin Trudeau had by 2015.
LP: You point out that that was the case with staff too, because every new Liberal government came with brand new staff. Would that be normal operating procedure, or is that new?
PW: For most of the 20th century, it was perfectly normal for people to make their entire careers inside the Liberal Party, either in government or in opposition. Couples would meet within the Liberal Party.
They would have kids who would grow up to be Liberals. You would sometimes spend a few years looking at a Prime Minister Diefenbaker or Prime Minister Clark or Mulroney, but you knew that soon enough you were going to be able to come back. What makes this a new time for the Liberal Party is that because of what happened between 2006 and 2015, that sort of natural order of things was substantially interrupted. And the story of Justin Trudeau is partly a story of what happens when Liberals stop being able to assume that they can govern.
LP: Now, can I pin you down on cabinet government? Are you nostalgic for it at all? Do you think it's a good feature to have in a parliamentary democracy? Or is it just now normal to have the PMO running everything?
PW: I think there's a lot more room for people to be people than what the systems in Ottawa have been permitting. We're all just beginning to pick ourselves out of the rubble of the collapse of the traditional ways of communicating and the replacement of most of those methods of communication with social media. I don't know what the arrival of the iPhone did to the western civilization but it was absolutely seismic in the conduct of politics in North America. Because when everyone could push out whatever information or lies or rumours or gossip that they wanted—literally everybody—it became easier than ever for political actors and other large organizations to be drowned out. If I was the only person with the microphone, what I said used to be really important. But from 2007 on, everyone's got a microphone. So suddenly it's much harder to be heard.
I just think we're living in a different time after 2007 from before 2007. And one of the effects of that is that everyone's obsessed with pushing out a message. It's got to be the same message. You've got to repeat it a thousand times. So people have not left a lot of room for creative secondary figures to improvise what they want to say. That's seen as adding to the static rather than subtracting from it. So in that world, cabinet government has a tough row to hoe. But I think everything I've just described is based on flawed calculations of advantage. And what we've seen is you can't eliminate human error.
You can't correct for the opportunity cost of not letting creative people be creative. And I think the communications world of 2007 to 2024 is already starting to look a little archaic, and we're getting back to a world where people have a bit more room to be themselves.
LP: This is a good segue to my question about the increased polarization in Canadian partisan politics that you also write about. You suggest three or four factors that are probably behind it: the parties have become more homogeneous; donations amounts are limited, so you need many more passionate individual donors than before; and the events themselves. You don't think the internet had anything to do with it, and the digitization of social life?
PW: It's funny. I quote a political scientist in Toronto named Eric Merkley on this stuff and he's pretty convinced that social media didn't have much to do with it. Because, he says, people don't get their news from social media. I'm unpersuaded.
I think a lot of this stuff is achieved through osmosis rather than through rational processes that are easy to demonstrate. I'm always fascinated by what kids know about politics, because the question is, where did they get it from? They get it from somewhere.
But, I don't know. I don't know on what schedule we're going to move away from the polarization that has characterized our politics in the last decade. I think at some point we will. There's a kind of homeostasis for big problems to correct themselves over time. Or at least to have the decency to shuffle off stage so we can come up with some new problems.
LP: You list among some of Trudeau gov’t successes the friendly free-trade offensive across the US after Trump got elected which kept as much as possible of the free-trade status quo between the two countries. Other accomplishments that you highlight: the expanded child care benefits; reducing the number of boil-water advisories in Indigenous communities. But why do you think Trudeau embraced identity politics so ardently? I think his father would be surprised, if he were around today. That was very much not his politics.
PW: (By the way, one of the things you can find in Justin Trudeau's memoir, Common Ground, is that after Pierre Trudeau left Ottawa in 1984 and went home, so during the late teenage years of Justin Trudeau, he forbade anyone, anyone in his family and any visitor, from speaking English on the main floor of his house in Montreal. Well, that doesn't sound like Mr. Bilingualism to me.)
On the identity politics, again, I don't think the last decade in North American life would have been any less woke if Justin Trudeau hadn't played along. I think that some old wrongs, some old injustices, and some advanced fatigue with the way that classical liberals have of hiding behind ideas like free speech, equal opportunity to get past the fact that there hasn't been a lot of change. Anyway, I just gave you the thesis for a long book and one that I don't have the heart to write.
I think a counter-reformation against the 1980s notions of free speech would have happened if Justin Trudeau had never been born. He just surfed off it. And especially in 2019. In 2019, that stuff saved his ass. He absolutely would have lost the election in 2019 if there hadn't been a cultural left in Canada that couldn't imagine not voting for the guy who espoused those ideas. Because they couldn't imagine giving the country back the people who didn't buy that stuff. I think the woke stuff saved them.
LP: Wait, wait. But who was the Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer? He wasn't some bogeyman. He wasn't promising any radical changes, if memory serves.
PW: I spent about half my career reminding people there's voting coalitions for stuff they don't like.
I tell Liberals all the time that there are people who vote on gun ownership and the freedom to own guns. I tell Liberals all the time that there are people who don't like to pay taxes. And similarly, I need to tell Conservatives all the time that there are people who will not vote for somebody who is pro-life. There are people who will not vote for somebody who pooh-poohs the idea of indigenous reconciliation. There aren't a few people like that. There are millions of those people in this country. And they saved Justin Trudeau in 2019 because he talked like that.
LP: So you think he just gauged what the majority of people who are showing up to vote want to hear. I mean, the voter turnout was probably low as usual. [Edited to add: Turnout was 67%.]
PW: I see it coming around again. I suspect that Pierre Poilievre will be the Prime Minister of Canada soon. And if he thinks he can tuck away relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians with a few resource windfalls for a few congenial Indigenous nations in Alberta, he's got a freight train coming at him. Hundreds of court decisions that'll teach him pretty fast that's not all he needs to do.
Similarly on the freedom of law-abiding gun owners. As potent as that is in the ridings that the Conservatives have held for the last decade, that is a toxic discourse in the ridings they need to hold for the next decade.
People are always sure they know what Canadians want. And my answer is normally you have not talked to enough Canadians. Because there are still millions of Canadians who would vote for the Liberals, who would vote for Justin Trudeau's version of the Liberal Party, six more elections. They see no problem. They're confused by a book like mine.
There are millions of Canadians who would have voted for Andrew Scheer's Conservative Party six more times. And I think our discourse is a little bit too dominated by people who don't simply grant the existence of large voter blocks that disagree with them on these questions.
Why was Trudeau woke? Canada had a pretty woke decade. It would have been super hard to hold power if he hadn't been woke.
And that's why Pierre Poilievre routinely uses terms like LGBTQ, which I promise you, 10 years earlier, he was making fun of that kind of language. It's why Pierre Poilievre Indigenous Affairs Minister is going to, first of all, be called the Indigenous Affairs Minister, not the Indian Affairs Minister. Secondly, he's going to have a crack team of dynamite lawyers in the office, because they're going to need it. Because this stuff is not something that someone made up. This is legal language with now 40 years worth of momentum behind it that you can't wave off with a couple of oil contracts.
You know, part of the fun of covering this country is it has stubborn complexities that can't be mocked away.
LP: OK but Indigenous peoples are divided among themselves, they're not a voting block. As we've seen during the Wet’suvet’en protests.
Yeah, but... OK we're getting so far away from the thesis of my book that I forgot what the title of the book was but, like, every 10 years we have somebody who comes to the office thinking that the prime minister they just thumped was a fool. And it typically takes them about six or eight weeks to learn that there were reasons why that prime minister did stuff the way they did. And you can't just pretend those days are over.
Like, Idle No More happened on Stephen Harper's watch. Where did the complexity of Indigenous populations go during the half a year when the majority of the Indigenous populations were making Stephen Harper's life hell.
LP: But but. But maybe you'll agree, maybe you'll disagree, but there was a significant shift in culture and in understanding of what Canadian citizenship is and what Canada is in the last 10 years. I don't think that either Harper or Chretien would have said “Canadian and Indigenous populations”. That phrasing is now normal, as if Indigenous populations are somehow impossible to integrate into Canadian citizenship. Then there's the nation-to-nation rhetoric, and various other things, Trudeau using the word genocide to explain what's going on today in Canada. So, I mean, you can't deny that is a qualitative difference to what we had during Harper.
PW: Call me after Poilievre has been Prime Minister for six months and tell me how much of that has changed under Poilievre. We will see.
LP: So you think that this split is here to stay in Canada? We're never going to be patched up as a country?
PW: One of the first things that Pierre Poilievre did as a member of the governing Conservative caucus in 2006 was to vote on whether same-sex marriage should be permitted to continue in this country. I actually don't know, I expect he voted to keep the same-sex marriage. But I know this: Parliament will never again vote on that question. And the question of same-sex marriage, in 2002-3-4, was a major driver of the Paul Martin-led rebellion against John Chretien. Paul Martin got a lot of support for replacing Chretien as Liberal leader in the early 2000s because many Liberal MPs were terrified of the notion of gay marriage, and they saw Paul Martin as less intransigent on that issue. And the prospect of the Liberals forcing gay marriage through was a major driver of the merger of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives in 2003. And then that issue just went away. It just went away. Similarly, many of the recent developments on Indigenous rights are not going to be rolled back. Will not. And Pierre Poilievre is going to have to deal with that. I promise you.
This is not some silly whim of some silly academics. If Pierre Poilievre goes to court to challenge that stuff 100 times, he will lose 103 times.
LP: But we were a different country before this.
PW: Yes. And now we're a different country.
We're a country where the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has a gay dad, says LGBTQ, will not permit abortion and same-sex marriage to be challenged in the Parliament that he probably will control. And similarly, he's going to realize that he doesn't have a lot of room to futz around on a lot of those identity questions, especially the ones that are pressed by Indigenous nations with 40 years of victory after victory after victory in Canadian courts behind them.
LP: And government funding. There's a lot of. It's basically like a rental situation where the government gives a lot of money to these organizations.
PW: I'm getting a little bored with this. My book's not about this, and I stated my analysis about sixteen times now.
LP: Final question. How do you think is the LPC going to rebuild? What's going to happen? Any new talent spotted?
PW: I don't think they're going to rebuild in the near term. I think they've got a hard time ahead of them. The Liberal parties in Quebec and Ontario are probably closer to the beginning of their time in the wilderness than to the end. I think the federal Liberals to some extent anticipated the difficulties of the Ontario and Quebec Liberals. They started their time in the wilderness almost a decade before the provincial parties, but they found a Trudeau, so they were able to bounce back for a while. But in a polarized environment, it's hard to be the centrist.
And my definition of talent is so far from what… rises. Although it was obvious to me 15 years ago that Pierre Poilievre was going to be a significant player in the Conservative constellation. But if you ask me who I think have been or should have been the effective Liberal cabinet ministers in the last decade, I name people like Jean-Yves Duclos, who there's a good chance won't hold his seat in Quebec in the next election. I just think he's a smart guy who says what he thinks. So people who are talented at the kind of show business that seems to help - Sean Fraser. As a bonus, he's also intelligent, but he's a damned good retail politician. Perhaps a more interesting question is not who we can spot now, because I think the Liberal Party is going to be needing talent in a decade, after it's done suffering.
It's a funny thing, in 1993, if you looked at the era when the Progressive Conservatives were reduced to two seats, and you looked around and you said, who's even got a pulse on the right side of the spectrum? I think in a fair assessment of the field at that point, somebody would have said, This guy Stephen Harper's kind of OK. He was 27. He had, like, two suits. So who today looks like Stephen Harper did in 1993? Ella Grace Trudeau? [laughs] I don't know.
When I think of the Liberals who are more or less interesting, they tend to be around 50 years old. That's not old, any more. But you need to add a decade because they'll have a decade of trouble before talent will be needed again.