Does Canada love ‘sorry’ Trudeau enough to forgive?
The charismatic heartthrob leader has lost his mojo and lost his way. Will Canada forgive?
“I was proud to work with Justin Trudeau as president,” Obama said this week. “He’s a hardworking, effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change. The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbours to the north support him for another term.”
For Trudeau, his 2016 bromance with Obama, when Trudeau’s young children ran through the White House Rose Garden and Obama threw a lavish state dinner for Canada’s new celebrity leader, must seem like a distant memory. Since then the world has aligned against Trudeau’s self-proclaimed “sunny ways” vision of robust action on climate change, free trade, open borders for refugees and tolerance for all.
To his immediate south, Donald Trump now rails against almost everything Trudeau believes in, while across the Atlantic Trudeau sees populist Brexiteers and rising nationalist leaders in Europe. But if the 47-year-old is feeling lonely on the international stage right now, it is nothing compared with the trials he has endured of his own making at home.
This year the charismatic leader has lost his mojo and lost his way through a series of scandals and self-inflicted missteps that see him on the cusp of losing power.
The celebrity son of Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister for 16 years in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, is facing the ignominy of becoming Canada’s only first-term prime minister with a parliamentary majority to lose a bid for re-election in 84 years. The polls have Trudeau’s Liberal Party neck and neck with the rival Conservative Party led by 40-year-old first-time leader Andrew Scheer.
The most likely outcome is that neither Trudeau’s Liberals (polling at 30.9 per cent) nor the Conservatives (polling at 32.2 per cent) will gain a majority, meaning that one of them will need to form a minority government with the New Democratic Party (polling at 18.3 per cent) or the Greens (8.4 per cent).
So how did it come to this? How did Canada’s best-known leader in a generation — a man who was on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which dubbed him the “free world’s best hope”, and who sat for sultry photoshoots for Vogue with his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau — fall so far and so fast in the public eye?
“People look at Justin Trudeau and they expect certain things — he is very clear about saying ‘this is what I stand for’,” says Alex Marland, professor of political science at Memorial University of Newfoundland. “But in each of the controversies, whether it is the Indian visit, the SNC dispute, the brown/blackface photos, people have seen the complete opposite of the brand he promised them.”
In theory Trudeau should be re-elected relatively easily. Since he was elected in 2015 the Canadian economy has been robust with 7 per cent jobs growth and the second fastest economic growth of the G7 nations.
But this election campaign has been as much a referendum on Trudeau’s character as it has been about other issues including the economy, immigration, climate change or foreign policy.
“The amount of media attention that Justin Trudeau commands as Prime Minister distorts every other element,” says Marland.
In short, people are asking whether the public face that Trudeau portrays of an honest, non-political, inclusive, racially and ethnically tolerant leader is the real Trudeau or merely a political construct. The Conservative Party slogan “JustinTrudeau — Not As Advertised” goes to the heart of Scheer’s allegation that Trudeau is a fake.
“Mr Trudeau, you’re a phony and you’re a fraud and you do not deserve to govern this country,” Scheer barked at Trudeau during their second leaders debate.
“The Conservative (Party) message is that there is a lot of hypocrisy and that he says things but you can’t really trust him,” says Marland.
This perception of inauthenticity did not gather traction among many in Canada in the first two years of Trudeau’s term.
His political honeymoon was a long one fuelled by a sense of celebration among Canadian progressives that after eight years of Conservative rule they had finally found a leader for the times to carry their torch of resurgent liberalism to the world.
It didn’t hurt that Canadians felt they had known Trudeau since birth. He grew up on national television as the son of the much-loved swashbuckling Pierre Trudeau — a man former lover Barbra Streisand once described as a blend of “Marlon Brando and Napoleon”.
It also didn’t hurt that the younger Trudeau’s election victory in 2015 was one for the ages, coming from behind in the polls to tally the largest seat gain in Canadian history, from 36 to an outright majority of 184 seats.
Trudeau is telegenic, lucid and exudes a message of inclusion and tolerance, and only a small minority seemed to question whether he was more style than substance.
“The first time he really suffered in opinion polls was the trip to India,” says Marland of Trudeau’s ill-fated visit to the subcontinent early last year.
On that visit Trudeau attracted world headlines and ridicule after his family dressed up in traditional Indian costumes while the Indian officials around him wore suits. Critics saw it as cultural appropriation rather than appreciation and wondered how Trudeau could be so tone deaf.
“Trudeau was selling himself as someone who would make Canada look better on the world stage, yet when he went to India the feeling in Canada was that he was a national embarrassment; it was the complete opposite of what people expected,” says Marland.
Even so, the Indian visit didn’t cause any sustained fall in Trudeau’s poll numbers. The real hit to his popularity came earlier this year on the more serious issue of the so-called SNC-Lavalin controversy. SNC-Lavalin is an engineering company based in the politically vital province of Quebec and in 2015 Canadian authorities charged it with attempting to bribe officials in Libya and defraud Libyan companies.
Trudeau was accused of trying to heavy his then justice minister not to pursue the case because he feared it would cost jobs in Quebec and votes for the party.
The controversy led to the resignation of two ministers and a key aide to Trudeau, and in August Canada’s ethics commission ruled that Trudeau had used his office “to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit” his justice minister. The squeaky-clean image was hit hard as Trudeau came across as just another politician willing to bend the rules to suit himself.
Opinion polls that same month found his approval rating had slumped to levels far lower than those ever experienced by Trump, with only 30 per cent approving of the job he was doing and 60 per cent disapproving.
Then Trudeau was hit by the blackface controversy when a picture emerged of him with a blackened face at a costume party when he was 29. Within a day, two other blackface images emerged from when he was at high school.
Trudeau tried to minimise the fallout by quickly apologising. “Darkening your face, regardless of the context or the circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface,” he said. “I should have understood that then and I never should have done it.”
But such images from a leader who rose to power on messages of racial and ethnic inclusion have given the opportunity for Scheer’s Conservatives to place Trudeau’s sincerity front and centre during the campaign.
Trudeau has tried to recover by pledging that despite the blackface controversy, his government is committed to fight racism and discrimination. “Actions speak louder than words,” he told Time magazine. “I know that my actions in the past have been hurtful to people, and for that I’m deeply sorry. Our government has acted to fight discrimination and racism consistently over our first term and, if we earn the right to govern Canada again, we’ll move forward to fight racism and discrimination in our next term.”
Trudeau’s supporters say that despite the controversies that have plagued him, he has lived up to many of his promises. Trudeau has resettled more than 44,000 Syrians in Canada and has promoted such a generous asylum-seeker policy that there is now growing anxiety about how Canada will integrate so many newcomers.
He has initiated a child benefit program that has lifted more than 200,000 children out of poverty and on climate change he has mandated a price on carbon as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
On trade Trudeau has somehow managed to strike free-trade deals despite the rise of protectionism. He struck an agreement with Trump on a revised North American Free Trade Agreement and reached a pact with the EU. But few of these achievements are likely to resonate with the electorate if they have fallen out of love with Trudeau himself.
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
Justin Trudeau is in need of friends right now so it must have come as a relief when former US president Barack Obama came to the aid of the Canadian leader as he fights to win re-election on Tuesday.