Both (Justin) Trudeau (right) and (Chrystia) Freeland have the same problem in their public role, I’d say: their personalities. Trudeau in his drama-teachery way and Freeland in a hedging, calculating quality. They’re both at ease in normal human contacts but that vanishes when a screen is involved. .
“Great Caesar’s ghost!” Perry White, Superman’s editor, would’ve gasped about the Justin Trudeau-Chrystia Freeland impasse, maybe adding, like Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne: “The country adrift, effectively leaderless in the face of a historic threat from without and growing divisions within …”
What’ll Coyne say when there’s a planetary meltdown due to climate (as there is) or martial law’s declared due to an apprehended insurrection (as it was in 1970, under Justin’s dad)? The Globe’s Marieke Walsh said she was shocked. Why shocked? What did she expect — competence? Emotional maturity? This isn’t about normal people, they are inflated public figures with an often distorted sense of self.
Early reactions to the federal finance minister’s resignation from Trudeau’s cabinet included embarrassment that it is happening in a G7 nation. Er, have they noticed the last decade in U.K. politics? French President Emmanuel Macron’s election debacle and subsequent paralysis? Joe Biden and Donald Trump? I grant this is a political crisis but a normal, fairly mild one. Do stop clutching those pearls.
The Globe’s Tony Keller said we’d “hit intellectual bankruptcy.” What does that even mean? Therefore, “something has to change.” Why, and what happens when it doesn’t? It’s really more a personal plea like, “Help, my hair’s on fire,” or in French, C’est insupportable, both of which acknowledge the affirmation’s basically about one’s self.
Journalists, I’d say, live less with FOMO (fear of missing out) than FONH (fear of nothing happening). They are haunted by Lenin’s insight that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. They want to be covering history’s fulcrum, not those nothing years. So they’re swift to declare.
One CBC panelist said he’d never got so many “No Comments” from his political sources. That isn’t Watergate-level digging, nor is it Hearst’s message to the artist he sent to Cuba in 1897 — “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” — but it’s on the restrained Canadian end of the journalism continuum.
Clinging to power syndrome
It’s not hard to see how this arises. Ten years ago the Liberal party seemed near death. Few believed Trudeau could revive it, but he did. He was right then, why should he credit the doubters now? Extend the logic and you get Assad in Syria, or perhaps Trump. There’s not a lot to be said for electoral politics, IMO. It’s so minimally democratic: Check a name every five years and shut up in between. But it does provide a way to eject a spent leader short of civil war or bloody rebellion. That’s a clear plus.
An oddly matched pair
Both Trudeau and Freeland have the same problem in their public role, I’d say: their personalities. Trudeau in his drama-teachery way and Freeland in a hedging, calculating quality. They’re both at ease in normal human contacts but that vanishes when a screen is involved.
Trudeau’s best public moments have been when he came unhinged: yelling “piece of s — t” at Peter Kent in the House, his boxing match, or barking “Nine/Nein” at Thomas Mulcair (who never got over it) in the 2015 debate. But he clearly prefers the smarmy, smirky style he first displayed at his dad’s funeral in 2000 and it’s hard to imagine anything making him change.
Freeland writes well, as we saw this week, but when she speaks, it’s as if she’s still redrafting her text, in real time, which reads as manipulative. You should worry about making mistakes in public contexts, but in a calm, friendly way. I don’t think either would do well as leaders in the next election, no matter who prevails now.
And the winner is
The most plausible campaigner for the Liberals, I’d say, would be the new finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc, who’s always seemed comfortably himself in public and more so now, when he seems to revel a bit less, about being in the spotlight.
I don’t think he’d win, but he’d have a chance of pulling off a minority government, probably Conservative, which would be for the public good and even reflect the actual democratic will. On the other hand, you shouldn’t count out any woman who’s survived, and even thrived, as Freeland did, during multiple appearances on PBS’s late, lamented torture device, “The McLaughlin Group.”
