He’s halfway to the leadership
convention and has established himself as the strong front-runner. He’s
comfortable in front, just like his father.
Unblinkingly, his success invites Liberals
to believe that a new Trudeau Liberal Party can excite Canadians again, that
they needn’t relax their disdain for their enemies, and needn’t re-imagine or even
repackage who they are.
This is beginning to
infuriate those who’d like to change our politics on a fundamental level. Andrew Coyne is their clearest voice. Here’s his lead in the National Post: “Liberals settle for the
cult of Justin; Soul-searching takes a back seat”:
“Perhaps
it was an impossible thing to expect. Perhaps it was even unfair. To demand
that the Liberal Party of Canada, after a century and more as the party of
power, should reinvent itself as a party of ideas; that it should, after a
string of ever-worse election results culminating in the worst thumping in its
history, ask itself some searching questions, including whether Canada still
needed a Liberal Party, and if so on what basis — perhaps it was all too much
to ask.
‘Because,
on the evidence, the party isn’t capable of it. Or perhaps it simply doesn’t
want to. Either it does not believe such a process is necessary. Or it does,
but can’t bear it. Whatever may be the case, nearly two years after that
catastrophic election, the party shows no interest in reinventing itself, still
less in any healthy existential introspection.”
Nowhere in his cri de coeur does Coyne say that not
doing the unbearable won’t work.
Justin can pull off what his
father pulled off in the winter of 1968.
Sadly, taking charge of the
Liberal Party—Canada’s most Canadian institution—is not appropriate work for
existentialists or disruptive intellectuals. British imperialists first managed
existential questions for Canadians
and, now, a Supreme Court, informed by an American-style Charter of Rights, usually shoulders that responsibility.
“Re-invent Canada” politics
are practices seriously only in Quebec and Alberta; and their most deadly
national opponent has always been the Liberal Party of Canada.
It’s not a handicap to be a smart
Conservative. And you don’t have to be the brainiest or the best read to win the
leadership of the Liberal Party, and then win the country.
In any event, Justin Trudeau can’t
demonstrate that he’s as smart as his father because his father has become a
grandiose myth. Anyway, Pierre Trudeau’s competitive advantage wasn’t his
superior intellect. (Indeed, if he’d not
returned to power in 1980, his record would stand out for its vehemence, not for
intellectual rigor or accomplishment. He was, after all, able to be a Keynesian,
a Milton Freidman monetarist and tax indexer, and a Kenneth Galbraith price-fixer all within one business cycle.)
Justin Trudeau, however, may
have his father’s flair for impressing audiences and the media, without being
tedious. His father often delivered ridiculously short, incomplete speeches,
but they usually involved an alarming alternative. In this respect, Justin’s
latest statements on Quebec secession would make his father smile.
He’s brief, well prepared,
and vicious; he’s spoiling for a fight.
The Trudeau Family Cult isn’t
driven by a soft, inclusive temperament. It’s a very hard-edged politics that
divides Quebec and, in the past, rallied other Canadians—especially in
Ontario. It worked when Conservatives were weak nationally and the NDP was of
no consequence in Quebec. And those wicked separatists in Quebec were taken
very seriously everywhere.
Justin Trudeau will not have
to satisfy Liberals that they’re better than their opponents. That’s easy. The
challenge he seems to have assumed is to convince his Party that it would be
rewarding to replay the battles of his father’s generation.
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