Justin Trudeau does his best Ookpik impression, then offers some real insights

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In his indispensable book of children’s poetry Alligator Pie, Dennis Lee has a verse about the Ookpik, a big-eyed, all-fluff snowy owl figure popularized in the 1960s as an Inuit handicraft toy.

Ookpik is sublimely Lee, in that the poem is so bouncy and mischievous that its profound brilliance tiptoes right up behind you. It starts like this:

“An Ookpik is nothing but hair.

If you shave him, he isn’t there.”

I think about this couplet a lot. Like much of Alligator Pie, it’s very useful for trying to make sense of the world. There are a lot of people, especially in Ottawa, where if you shave the obfuscating fuzz off what they say or do, you’re left with nothing but a handful of hair and more questions than you had before you started trying to comb out the knot.

Which brings us to Justin Trudeau’s 25-minute live interview on CBC’s Power & Politics this week. It’s highly unusual for anyone to get a long sit-down with a Prime Minister, so listening to him explain events, decisions and his thinking at length is rare and important.

It didn’t start out very illuminating. The first half of the interview revolved around foreign interference, and in Mr. Trudeau’s responses to host David Cochrane’s precise and thoughtful questions, there was that frustrating Ookpik quality.

Continuing confusion about the degree to which parliamentarians might be compromised – Green Party Leader Elizabeth May snuffed the flames only for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to show up 24 hours later with a jerry can after reading the exact same report – is exactly why the inquiry Mr. Trudeau called is necessary and helpful, the Prime Minister said. He waved off a question about the limitations of what that exercise would be able to disclose or clarify in public.

On the dynamic with the Indian government and his conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G7 a few days earlier – as Canada investigates the killing of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia that Mr. Trudeau says involved Indian state actors – he served up a word salad that wouldn’t feed a hamster.

“One of the really good things about summits is you get an opportunity to engage directly with a huge range of different leaders with whom there are various issues,” he said.

When someone responds to an interview question in a useful way, it’s like playing catch: You toss the ball, it lands solidly in their glove, they palm it and throw it back to you. Ideally, you learn something new – even grading on a curve for a politician.

The defensive mode Mr. Trudeau and his government so often slide into these days is more like table tennis: thwacking the ball back as fast as possible while making only glancing contact.

In the latter half of this interview, though, he started playing a little catch, and the result was genuinely illuminating at points.

On whether his government’s changes to capital-gains taxation could dent Canada’s prospects as a high-tech hub, Mr. Trudeau argued that companies purely seeking out maximum profit would choose “a zero-tax location on an island somewhere,” but Canada offers highly trained workers and quality of life.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are going to be affected by this who are extremely wealthy, who see this as something that is going to make a material difference to them – because they are making such a significant amount of money – who are trying to convince everyone else that there’s a lot more people who are going to be affected by this,” he said.

Mr. Trudeau also said that he and the other G7 leaders had commiserated about how the high cost of living is a universal condition right now. The most interesting question Mr. Cochrane asked came toward the end of their conversation, directly on the heels of Mr. Trudeau talking about how well Canada is doing in relative world terms.

“But despite that optimistic picture, the country is still angry, you can see it in the mood. And increasingly, Prime Minister, a lot of them are mad at you,” the host said. “I know you say you want to beat Pierre Poilievre, you keep coming back to that. But what if you are the reason the Liberals can’t beat the Conservatives in the next election?”

It was arresting. Mr. Trudeau often portrays Mr. Poilievre and his party as an existential threat, and here he was being asked to contemplate whether his personal unpopularity might get those opponents elected.

Mr. Trudeau said he didn’t think Canadians were in “decision mode” right now. Rather, he painted his party’s dire poll results – they’ve been about 20 points behind for months – as a place for people to park their feelings while inflation, the cost of living, housing and interest rates are making them feel strangled.

“And I truly believe that as we choose to step up on solving those challenges, [it will] contrast with a political vision that so far consists from the Conservatives of just making people more angry and saying everything is broken,” he said. “I know Canadians are pragmatic people who focus on solutions, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing.”

So, in the Prime Minister’s thinking – at least in this for-public-consumption version – economic rage-anxiety is a worldwide phenomenon, polls are a release valve for those feelings and Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives are keeping everyone’s anger stoked, while Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals are trying to offer tangible relief. If that takes hold in the time remaining before the next election, he believes, the tide could turn.

The final couplet of Dennis Lee’s poem goes like this:

“He dances from morning to night.

Then he blinks. That turns out the light.”

It doesn’t sound like this Ookpik is anywhere near ready to blink.