I'll confess to being a little surprised at the backlash Prime Minister Trudeau received following his splashy cover story in last week's Rolling Stone. In addition to an editorial in the Washington Post by yours truly, there were at least a half-dozen critical takes published in major Canadian outlets, sniping sarcastic shots at the Rolling Stone piece and the submission-before-power attitude it embodied. What Trudeau's handlers no doubt hoped would herald a change of narrative after weeks of Omar Khadr bludgeoning wound up being, at best, net neutral.
Conservatives like me sometimes take for granted the degree to which the public and media uncritically embrace the standard line on Trudeau, promoted by his party and the foreign press — that he's the coolest, hippest dude who ever lived, a towering figure of enlightened thought standing athwart a wicked world, etc. Yet we're not all complete sheep in this country; plenty can smell a manipulative PR strategy when it's so consistently shoved up their nostrils.
What's interesting, however, is how much of the everyone-loves-Trudeau pushback comes from the left these days. That the right would be nauseated by stories of socks and selfies is dog-bites-man — that the progressives would be troubled signals a more meaningful political development.
Some of it's sheer left-wing contrarianism to be sure, particularly from the urban hipster left who will always enjoy hating whatever's popular — especially something as drearily bourgeois as the country's leader. Yet a lot of it's ideological too. As much as the right (and Rolling Stone) likes to portray the prime minister as the unchallenged embodiment of Canadian liberalism, he does have vulnerabilities in the eyes of the movement he purportedly leads. Many of these critiques are neither fair nor logical, but… well, welcome to the modern left.
Take Trudeau's vaguely uncharitable reference in the Rolling Stone piece to his one-time boxing partner, the aboriginal senator Patrick Brazeau. Calling Brazeau a "good foil" has been taken as proof by some indigenous activists that the prime minister is, quote, "super-racist." Trudeau has since expressed "regret" for using language that "doesn't contribute to the positive spirit of reconciliation that I'd like to think I know my government stands for," an absurd response to an offence so slight, yet also a tacit acknowledgment that his political future is at least partially dependent on the goodwill of people inclined to find racism wherever they look. (I'm unclear if Trudeau apologized to Black Lives Matter after the co-founder of the Toronto group called him a "white supremacist terrorist.")
A similar note was sounded by Jen Gerson, also in the Washington Post, who accused Trudeau of mishandling that big grand inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), in what has become another standard talking point of Trudeau's critics on the left.
That the MMIW thing is falling off the rails is no real fault of Trudeau, except to the degree he agreed to convene the preposterous thing in the first place. We already know why aboriginal women are more likely to go missing and be murdered — they disproportionately come from the sort of troubled communities and families that produce missing and murdered people of all races. The inquiry doesn't exist to perform criminology, however, but rather produce satisfaction in the Canadian aboriginal community at large that every historic sin and present dysfunction of native life has been addressed in some comprehensive way. Trudeau obviously cannot deliver this with an inquiry, or anything else for that matter, but a faction of his electorate expects him to.
The environment presents another impossible front. As Kyle Smith noted in National Review, Trudeau would have trouble winning a Democratic primary at the moment given he doesn't oppose all oil development in all circumstances at a time when many progressives are demanding precisely that. Charlie Smith in the Georgia Straight declared the Rolling Stone piece had done "the world a disservice" by failing to note that Trudeau's government supports no fewer than (gasp) three different pipeline projects! Smith affectionately quotes an earlier far-left jeremiad in the Guardian that went even further, dubbing Trudeau "a disaster for the planet."
Canada produces about 2% of the world's CO2 emissions, which will surely go down during Trudeau's prime ministership (as they did, it should be noted, under Stephen Harper) and the country is hardly some anything-goes sheikdom when it comes to harvesting and shipping crude. Any Canadian energy project is already subject to numerous layers of political, bureaucratic, scientific, aboriginal, and judicial oversight, and Trudeau has pledged to strengthen them all in the name of protecting Mother Earth. Yet until the PM honours his vow to "phase out" the oil sands (and presumably happily deliver the ensuing economic destruction), he'll remain a sellout to some.
Prime Minister Harper was never particularly vulnerable to right wing criticism for a number of reasons, a large one being that conservatives in this country have relatively low expectations for their leaders beyond keeping the other guys out. The Canadian left is far bossier towards its politicians, with utopian promises explicitly demanded.
Not all progressive voters will hold Trudeau to the standards of perfection his public brand invites. For them, his lofty aspirations are good enough. Yet as left-wing partisans across the globe become more sharply ideological, it's clear there exists an increasingly vocal constituency of Canadians who feel need to feel alienated from a politician the foreign press constantly claims to set the gold standard of progressive excellence.
It's why I continue to be fascinated by the rise of the NDP's Jagmeet Singh, a man seemingly on track to offer himself up in 2019 as a sort of Trudeau 2.0 to scorned progressive voters. Trudeau had best start working on his rebuttal.
Written by J.J. McCullough
