No one will miss Justin Trudeau… more than his enemies

«He haunts us still,» as a 1990 doorstopper bio about Justin Trudeau’s dad began. And as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre sort of said about Justin a day after he announced he’d resign. “I will be running against Justin Trudeau … They’re all Justin Trudeau, whether his name is Chrystia Freeland or Carbon Tax Carney.”

He sounded a bit bonkers and definitely in denial. Nor is he alone. Justin will be missed most by those who hate him. .

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Perhaps it began with, “Sunny ways, my friends,” the night he won in 2015. He called himself positive and optimistic. His hate club think it’s not just optimism, it’s shallow optimism — the worst kind. Think of that mindbogglling India trip, blundering all over in saris and scarves. Liberals tend to be excessively cheerful (I’m told they have the only real fun parties in Ottawa) and Justin seems the ultimate optimistic dolt.

People on the right tend to be (generalization alert) gloomier. Poilievre never looks as happy as when he reels off his catastrophe list: hell in our streets, crime on the rise, Canada is broken, spiralling out of control. His solution is to promise to do nothing. More or less shut government down and everything will improve. There’s a touch of being afraid of the world in that. When things start looking better, that’s the worst. You wince up, waiting for the inevitable disasters.

This is a respectable viewpoint. As Christopher Lasch wrote in “The One and Only Heaven,” facile optimism runs counter to “the experience of loss and defeat that makes the texture of daily life.” Shallow optimists are so bloody hopeful with no grounds for it. They aren’t post-despair, they’re self-deluding, and manage to sell it because there’s a market for it. But people like Poilievre are often shallow pessimists, so it’s a sort of mirroring situation.

I’m not sure there’s any way to resolve this split and I speak as someone who spent much of my own life trying to fend off optimism for no clear reason. We are all dancing on the precipice, it’s a question of who chooses to look down all the time and who chooses to never do it, and Justin is a leader of the latter.

In fact, he had another register: rage bordering on the out of control — his outbursts in the House or the 2015 debate, that boxing match, his fury at the F—- Trudeau chants — and that response tended to work better for him than the brainless cheer and furtive smiles. The sunny ways felt a bit too much like compensation or denial of the anger. We know enough about him to say he has a capacity and cause for emotional pain and tragedy, perhaps way too much.

Lasch, who began as a leftist but evolved somewhat toward the right, proposed an alternative to optimism: hope. He liked hope because it wasn’t shallow and self-deluding, it squarely faced the grimness and probable failures but in the face of that still strove for moral goals, likely or not. He contrasted that to smug 19th century certainties about progress. Hope reflected, he thought, more of what could be called a moral vs. a political sensibility, and a human desire for life to have meaning, whatever it turns out to be.

I don’t want to leave this topic without mentioning the true master of shallow optimism, who may even have invented, or at least reinvented the concept. That would be Tony Blair, former PM of the U.K. and Labour Party eminence, still very much on the scene.

Just this week he added to his legend. He told U.K. citizens to stop “self-diagnosing” themselves with depression and then applying to the public health system for funding because the “U.K. can’t afford the spiralling benefits bill.”

What a rotter. I fervently do not wish Justin Trudeau’s future to be like Blair’s ongoing “successes.” But I wish him well.

RICK SALUTIN
RICK SALUTIN
is a Canadian novelist, playwright, journalist, and critic and has been writing for more than forty years. Until October 1, 2010, he wrote a regular column in The Globe and Mail; on February 11, 2011, he began a weekly column in the Toronto Star. He currently teaches a half course on Canadian media and culture in University College (CDN221) at the University of Toronto. He is a contributing editor of This Magazine. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Brandeis University and got his Master of Arts degree in religion at Columbia University. He also studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He was once a trade union organizer in Toronto and participated in the Artistic Woodwork strike.[