Patrick Gossage

January 7, 2022

The new year promises to confront Justin Trudeau with more challenging political battles than he has ever faced. Are he and his cabinet up for them? Can he get us to the other side of the pandemic, show real progress on climate change and Indigenous reconciliation, find a way to deal with Quebec’s discriminatory Bill 21, all the while making a brave face, knowing he has few levers to pull to quiet inflation, while trying to be being seen to tackle high prices and a housing crisis?

In foreign affairs he is faced with deteriorated relations with a China which may provoke a military situation with Taiwan, a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine and Lithuania, and a weak  president presiding over a dangerously divided United States.

This will be all the more challenging since Trudeau is no longer a popular star at home  or, for that matter,  abroad.  A recent Angus Reid poll indicated one-in-three Canadians strongly disapprove of Trudeau, while only 6 percent strongly approve of him. The Liberal party runs ahead of him.

I found watching all his year-end interviews in English a good place to take  a fresh measure of the man and to gauge whether he can  convince Canadians that he and his government are taking effective action on the challenging  files they have been handed.

When I was Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary, I set up many year-enders with  CTV’s Bruce Phillips,  the pioneer in this format. Trudeau liked doing them and was often very revealing  in the hour-long broadcasts. Phillips was not confrontational and knew how to draw him out. We always learnt more about the PM from these sessions. Some of this year’s interlocutors might have taken a page out of the Phillips  book.

Rosemary Barton, in the CBC year-ender, pushed him hard on his failings, including the ill-considered  Tofino holiday trip on the day of Truth and Reconciliation. She even suggested he was “sitting around” on Quebec’s secularist Bill 21, which prohibits public employees in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols such as hijabs at work. The recent removal of a popular Grade 3 teacher from her job at Chelsea Elementary School in the Gatineau region near Ottawa is a case in point. His “speaking out” against it and saying he “may intervene” in a court challenge is not as strongly as I am sure his late father would have acted, since he deeply disliked and regretted having accepted the inclusion of a notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which Quebec is using a shield in its unfortunately discriminatory Bill. This is a mountain his son will have to climb sooner rather than later, and “standing up to Quebec” is apparently not an option.

Barton managed to get him to admit he “learnt” from his errors, blaming his Tofino oversight partly on, of all things, neglecting his image and putting “substance first”. Justin’s odd version of himself –  the substance not the image,  does provide insight into how his mind works, and why he finds comfort in his normal  rehearsed and scripted interview posture.

This is why the machine gun style  attack interview by Evan Solomon for CTV didn’t work. Trying to catch Trudeau to make a news clip.  he got nothing back but talking points.

Global’s Mercedes Stephenson did better, and he clearly liked her. Interestingly, she focussed on China, and the military’s sexual assault issues. On his meeting the Two Michaels on the tarmac returning from their imprisonment in China, she elicited a rare, emotional answer and an account of how Michael Kovrig told him, he “did the right thing” by not making a deal and sticking to his principles. Obviously, he was very pleased with this, and it showed a leader with some humility.

She got a similar human reaction on the military’s decade long inability to come to terms with its culture of ignoring sexual predation. Getting to the kind of real action we are now seeing “took a crisis,” Trudeau said. “I wish it hadn’t.” Then he talked of his student days  at McGillUniversity, working on sexual assault incidents. This was a telling moment and left no doubt about his regrets on the military file and his real concerns about how it had been handled. It would have been a more convincing way of showing his commitment months ago had he felt comfortable enough to frame  the issue in such a personal context.

This takes us to two very relaxed and revealing personal interviews, one by the Toronto Star’s veteran columnist Susan Delacourt and another, over a beer, by his old Montreal pal, Terry DiMonte, recently retired as a morning radio host. Delacourt got one quote for the ages in their long winter walk around the grounds of Rideau Hall: “In my 40s, I was trying to get people to call me Justin,” he said. “I tried to get people to detach their memories of my father from their contemplation of me. That’s no longer a challenge I have.” This is fascinating since there’s no  doubt the Trudeau name was instrumental into propelling him to where he is today.

The second intriguing  part of this interview was in answer to the question about his running again and when he would know it was time to stay or leave: “The idea that there’s suddenly a finish line that I could cross at one point that says, ‘OK, that’s it, we fixed the relationship with the US, we fixed climate change, we fixed this,’” he said. “There’s no finish line in Canada or in politics. Every mandate is a new opportunity to tackle fresh challenges.” This may be indeed who he is – a man who loves tackling fresh challenges – who relishes them. He would do well to show more of this side of him.

The DiMonte interview demonstrated his attractive personal qualities which, I believe, would improve his standing with voters and  his personal approval ratings.

From his obvious love of Vancouver’s White Spot hamburgers, to his hating being late and keeping people waiting, to  reading novels  for relaxation, to lines like “democracy doesn’t mean unanimity”, to a charming recall of his first phone call to the newly elected Barack Obama, it was an engaging listen and anyone seeing it would have liked him. He was himself, again the bemused, charming young man who years ago came through in a riding everyone said he could not win – Montreal’s working class Papineau, where he first won a contested Liberal nomination and then defeated a Bloc Québécois incumbent in the 2008 election.

He also said he “knows the job” now. A fair admission from a leader who had to learn on the go, as did many of his 2015 cabinet.

To appreciate how big some of the other mountains he and he and the government have to climb let’s consider two. Climate Change and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

Both are marked by political errors Trudeau and his people continue to make – overpromising and underdelivering.  This also relates to how Trudeau often presents himself – making sweeping promises and  stating how hard the government is working on fulfilling them, but often showing less real progress.

Robin Sears, a veteran commentator well known to readers of Policy Magazine, recently made a telling argument here about the tough road ahead to those who want to really attack the climate crisis which is so visibly part of our common concern now:

“(This is) the nightmare political leaders in the developed world now share: do they tell the truth about the costs, the taxes, and the restrictions that a serious fight against climate change today will require — and face defeat from a terrified electorate? Or do they continue to fudge, deny, and delay, and then face defeat from an emerging voter majority who want the truth and action now?”

Consider the real challenge for Trudeau as carbon taxes and gasoline prices  rise, as he imposes pollution caps on the oil sands, and as he contemplates the billions needed for alternative energy subsidies and the “transitional” funding for fossil fuel workers. Not great news for Liberals with Canadians facing many other rising costs going into an election, likely within  a couple of years. Is he up to it?

If climate change has become a common concern, so is the shameful  way we have treated our First Nations. True reconciliation depends on whether this government has the courage to revamp the Indian Act and deal with Indigenous Peoples nation to nation.

It has taken years for the  government to finally reach an agreement announced with Indigenous leaders on January 4th for a $40 billion settlement for children taken from their homes or denied care, with  $20 billion to compensate these children and families. These failures of Canada’s child welfare system were the subject of the government fighting a drawn-out court order by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which ordered compensation. The other $20 billion will go to reforming the system, perhaps along the lines of the granting of total child welfare control given earlier to the Cowessess first nations.

It will be a fascinating two years in a minority House as these major battles are fully engaged. Two years for the official opposition to become a real threat, if they do. Two years for Trudeau to rebuild his popularity and perhaps even his likeability – these are huge selling jobs and his people may have to loosen the short leash they have kept him on. For Justin Trudeau, this is an opportunity for leadership, in words and occasions.

He might listen to what his father told Liberals in Vancouver in 1971: “Canada is known to its inhabitants and to others as a human place, a sanctuary of sanity in an increasingly troubled world. We need to look no further for our identity. These traits of tolerance and courtesy and respect for our environment provide it.”

We need to know that his son’s actions are motivated by a rich vision of our country.

Contributing Writer Patrick Gossage, former press secretary to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, is the author of the bestselling Close to the Charisma: My Years Between the Press and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and founder of Media Profile, a communications consulting firm based in Toronto.