Justin Trudeau on the Ropes

By Paul Wells

Sutherland House/May 2024

Reviewed by J.D.M. Stewart

May 17, 2024

As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s time in office drifts toward the nine-year mark, the printed word is starting to lay down tracks on what happened between 2015 and 2024 and what some of it means. Instagram and Twitter (or “X”, as nearly no-one now calls it) are ephemeral takes. But books still have a degree of gravitas, even if this latest work from Paul Wells, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, tallies a svelte 100 pages. This informative and lively text serves as a useful and entertaining primer on PMJT’s time in office, so far.

A lot has happened during the past nine years. It seems so long ago when the new prime minister in 2016 accidentally elbowed NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau, setting off a major kerfuffle in the House of Commons and forcing Trudeau to apologize profusely. It served as a fitting harbinger for the prime minister’s lack of patience for process and debate, both in Parliament and, perhaps more glaringly, in cabinet. “Trudeau learned to stop inflicting body checks on fellow parliamentarians,” Wells writes, “but he never got over his disdain for the pokey, unglamourous routines of the House of Commons.”

Every prime minister comes to the job with a set of strengths and weaknesses and Wells does an excellent job of profiling both for the current occupant of 24 Suss– oops, I mean Rideau Cottage. Trudeau’s inability to square circles and finesse colleagues is one lasting impression from this essay. We read about cabinet ministers such as Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau, all of whom fell out of favour with the PM for offering dissenting opinions. “It soon became clear that Trudeau preferred harmony to internal debate.”

If public opinion polls over the past year are any measure, there may be something about Justin Trudeau’s overconfidence that rubs Canadians the wrong way. Perhaps the look on his face when he sits down in the House of Commons after he perceives himself to have said something clever. Or the glint in his eye as he starts formulating responses to reporters’ questions before they’ve finished asking them. Trudeau knows best. Confidence is very useful. But according to Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, an excess of it leads to vice, in this case, arrogance. “Eventually it would not be enough for Trudeau that his ministers think like him,” Wells writes. “Soon, he would expect the rest of us to do the same.”

That may just reflect the psychology of a man who grew up as the first-born son of one of the country’s most iconic men. On the Ropes pokes around the edges of the prime minister’s psychological makeup, a topic that would make for a very interesting read if explored further. There is no doubt that his upbringing, one different from any prime minister before him, has shaped a character accustomed to the spotlight. Wells is on to something when he writes that, “Trudeau has trafficked all his life in the currency of attention. Go ahead and look at him. People have been staring at him all his life.”

More readers than just journalism colleagues should pay attention to Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. Its brevity and subject will make it catnip on Parliament Hill as well as for those who love politics and personality.

Childhoods do shape us. There are limitations to such an analysis given the distance between subject and writer, but any biographer worth his salt will engage in a little armchair psychology. The teasers to Stephen Maher’s soon-to-be-released book on Trudeau, The Prince, say that he is “an enigmatic figure– a politician who has been in the public eye since childhood but has always concealed his actual feelings from those around him.”

On the other side of the lack of humility and impatience is a prime minister who has qualities that many Canadians do not get to see. Wells spoke with those who work with Trudeau and have no partisan stake. The PM is intelligent, prepared, and able to make sense of complex ideas. He is willing to consider alternative ideas and has the gift of remembering people’s names. He is one of the more talented retail politicians. But “politics has never come easily for him.” Trudeau is an introvert who often spends time chilling out from politics by playing video games. “I’m told his need to decompress at the end of his workday didn’t always make him popular at home,” Wells writes elliptically.

Justin Trudeau on the Ropes was published by Sutherland House in its Sutherland Quarterly series, which began in 2022. This fact alone is worth some commentary, particularly as Wells himself has drawn attention to it in his media platforms. Each of the essays expounds on a topic of contemporary interest in 25,000 words or about 100 pages. They are easily consumed pieces and this is Wells’s second effort for the SQ. The first was his 2023 essay on the Rouleau Commission and the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act. He is a fan of the format.

“I hope colleagues walk away from reading this book with an appetite to write other essays about other contemporary topics at this length for the SQ series,” he said on his eponymous podcast when Vassy Kapelos filled in for him as host. “I think it is a really exciting format for writers and for public debate. One reason I have written two of them in only a year is because I am trying to get colleagues to pay attention to this as an option.”

More readers than just journalism colleagues should pay attention to Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. Its brevity and subject will make it catnip on Parliament Hill as well as for those who love politics and personality. Speaking of personality, as I reflected on this essay I could not but think of former prime minister Louis St. Laurent. Writing in his 1975 memoir My Years with Louis St. Laurent, Jack Pickersgill wrote: “What I admired most was not his superb intelligence and judgement, which rarely failed, but his genuine modesty, his lack of concern for his place in history, and his complete freedom from meanness or malice of any kind. To me, he was the greatest Canadian of our time.”

Pickersgill’s thoughts jangled in my head after I read one of the concluding remarks in On the Ropes: “It would be possible to imagine Trudeau coming back yet again if he had lately shown any inclination toward introspection or humility, or a driving urge to improve his game. In the absence of those qualities, bad habits become entrenched.” Even with St. Laurent’s virtues, Canadians decided it was time for a change. After nine years of “Uncle Louis” the electorate felt that Liberals had lost touch with Canadians. The 1956 pipeline debate underscored antipathy for parliamentary process and St. Laurent seemed increasingly unable to pivot and engage. Yet, he was seen to be the party’s best asset. They would run with the PM “stuffed” if they had to. They lost to John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives in 1957.

Justin Trudeau is indeed on the ropes. He has won three consecutive elections. No one has won four in a row since Sir Wilfrid Laurier, but those were the days when overexposure was not an issue. People have been looking at the current PM since he was born. In the absence of significant change, it may be that they have now seen enough.

J.D.M. Stewart is a historian and writer in Toronto. His next book, The Prime Ministers, will be published in next year.