Supplied
- Title: The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau
- Author: Stephen Maher
- Publisher: Simon and Schuster
- Pages: 385
- Title: Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times
- Author: Paul Wells
- Publisher: Sutherland Quarterly
- Pages: 96
Although the next scheduled federal election is almost a year and a half away, two journalists who cover and comment on Canadian politics believe they’ve seen enough to render a verdict on Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. That verdict is stern.
In The Prince, Stephen Maher chronicles a Prime Minister who arrived in office in November, 2015, filled with ambition and high hopes, and whose first years in government were marked by important achievements.
But those gains were ultimately eclipsed by a series of unwelcome events, some of them imposed upon the Liberals, some of them self-inflicted, exhausting the government.
More than eight years in, “it is difficult to have confidence that Justin Trudeau has the right answers, the right team, and the right ideas to tackle Canada’s problems,” he concludes.
While Maher delivers a full-length treatment of the Prime Minister and his government that is both comprehensive and insightful, Paul Wells offers an extended, meditative essay on Trudeau as a man and a politician. Though only 96 pages, Trudeau on the Ropes is one of the finest things he has ever written.
“For all his pedigree and physical grace the work of politics has never come easily for him,” Wells says of the Prime Minister. Though the eldest son of Pierre Trudeau is both intelligent and charming, “his judgement is often terrible. He has not surrounded himself with great talent; in fact, he has discovered a real gift for chasing talent away.”
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When the young, charismatic Trudeau and his gender-balanced cabinet first arrived at Rideau Hall, they were supplanting Stephen Harper’s dour Conservatives and charged with launching reforms on multiple fronts.
The first years were filled with accomplishment: the medical-assistance-in-dying legislation, the law that decriminalized cannabis, trade agreements with European and Pacific nations, a major boost to child care, a new emphasis on mental health, genuine efforts to improve relations with and services for First Nations, and a commitment to bend the curve on carbon emissions.
Hidden in all that activity were features of the Prime Minister and his government that would begin to undermine its operations once the stress and challenges began to build. The first, Maher believes, lay rooted in Trudeau’s aversion to meeting with his colleagues.
“Trudeau, who gets energy from glad-handing in a crowd, is by nature introverted and gets drained by one-on-one meetings,” Maher believes. He dislikes sustained interaction with individuals and small groups, and so he outsourced cabinet and caucus relations to trusted confidants.
Although Trudeau proclaimed on his first day of office that “government by cabinet is back,” in fact, it wasn’t. Instead, a tight cabal in the Prime Minister’s Office controlled decision-making, which led to endless logjams and delays – the government’s second quality.
“Insiders complain that everything gets jammed in Trudeau’s office, so nothing gets done except for the top items that can be handled effectively by the small team of talented, hard-working staffers who are trusted by the boss,” Maher reveals.
This led to the third quality. After an initial flurry of activity in the early years, the Liberals became largely reactive, whether it was to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government’s detention of the two Michaels or the growing housing shortage.
That shift, Maher believes, was rooted in a specific event: revelations by The Globe and Mail in February, 2019, that the Prime Minister and his senior aides had pressed then attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould to arrange a plea deal for the engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, which was facing fraud and corruption charges.
The damage from that scandal was incalculable: A Prime Minister dedicated to defending the rights of women and Indigenous people accepted the resignation of two women cabinet ministers, one of them the first Indigenous attorney-general of Canada. Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s closest confidant, resigned as principal secretary. Public confidence in the government was shaken and has never fully recovered.
“For the rest of the Trudeau era, the government was reactive,” Maher writes, “dealing successfully with crises but never again managing to seize the agenda.”
Wells focuses less on this legislation or that scandal, and more on how the strengths and flaws of Trudeau’s character have shaped his administration. The Prime Minister, he believes, sees himself as a perpetual underdog, the boxer who wasn’t expected to prevail in his match with burly Patrick Brazeau, but who sent the senator to the mat.
“I am told that Trudeau keeps the boxing match in his head as a reference, a model,” Wells writes. “Every time he’s in trouble, he thinks, I’ve been in trouble before and they were wrong to count me out.”
That seems like a plausible explanation for the Prime Minister’s seemingly perverse determination to remain in office and face Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in the next election, despite his government’s deep unpopularity.
At its best, Maher’s book provides a fly-on-the-wall accounting of the events that marked the Trudeau years, such as the tense negotiations surrounding the renewal of the North American free trade agreement, which Donald Trump as president had threatened to scrap.
Maher also explores insightfully Trudeau’s sense of entitlement, made manifest in controversial and politically damaging family vacations to Aga Khan’s private island, Tofino, B.C., and a Jamaican resort.
“He has a blind spot about his vacations and won’t be denied,” Maher concludes. “After foreign trips have done so much damage to his brand, his insistence on carrying on this way seems perverse.”
There were far more serious lapses. Canada’s global reputation deteriorated from “Canada is back” to estrangement from allies and adversaries alike, courtesy of missteps by the Prime Minister and the lack of any coherent foreign or defence policy.
Maher also cites the willingness of the Trudeau government to sacrifice the economy of the resource sector and the Prairie provinces on the altar of fighting climate change.
He quotes Robert Asselin, a former University of Ottawa professor who was initially a strong supporter of, and aide within, the government.
Asselin judges the Trudeau government on foreign policy, the economy and national unity: “I think on these three fronts – and I accept there were challenges that he could not control – but I think the country is worse off.”
The late Brian Mulroney, former Progressive Conservative prime minister, is more generous, citing Trudeau’s resurrection of the Liberal Party from near-extinction to government.
“He handled the pandemic, with the premiers, well, he did the negotiation with NAFTA well. Those are the big-ticket items,” Mulroney told Maher.
For Wells, the rot in the Trudeau regime began at its head, with a political leader who preferred the glitz of the jazzy announcement over the grind of implementing policy, and who quickly sidelined anyone who disagreed with him.
When the government’s early popularity began to falter, Trudeau chose to stoke political polarization: “He didn’t cause the polarization of Canadian politics, but he noticed it, acted on it, and nudged it along.” In the 2021 federal election, it defined his campaign.
And when that election failed to deliver the majority he sought, he engineered one by convincing NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to support his government until 2025 through a confidence-and-supply agreement.
“There is something about Trudeau that can spot an easy mark,” Wells writes, in what may be the cruellest sentence in the book.
Stephen Maher has delivered a thoroughly researched and fair-minded accounting of Justin Trudeau’s accomplishments and failings. If journalism is the first draft of history, The Prince is a convincing second draft.
Paul Wells delivers a beautifully written and devastating critique of Trudeau’s mind and methods, as much a psychological as a political analysis.
Both works are required reading.
John Ibbitson