— Feature, Musings —09.12.2023 10:56 AM
My latest: the Weekend from Hell™️
The Weekend from Hell™️.
All of us have had one, at one time or another. A fender-bender on the way to an important appointment. A flooded basement. A positive Covid test. Getting dumped by text.
Justin Trudeau’s Weekend from Hell™️ was different. His wasn’t private. It was right out in the open, observed by millions.
Such are the foibles of leaders of countries, and such are the foibles of Justin Trudeau these days. Try as he might, the Liberal leader can’t seem to catch a break.
As his Weekend from Hell™️ unfolded, it was almost (almost) possible to feel sorry for the guy. Almost.
Trudeau went to India for the G20. Based on the photographic evidence, nobody really wanted to talk to him or shake his hand. He looked miserable. And his plane was grounded there for nearly two days.
Meanwhile, back home, his main adversary, Pierre Poilievre, was having the best weekend of his political life. Ahead 14 points in the polls. Old rivals lining up behind his leadership. Party united. A multi-lingual, photogenic spouse charming everyone. And a picture-perfect convention in Quebec City.
And, to top it all off, Trudeau’s rust-bucket plane was wheezing back to Canada, and his timely arrival to a caucus retreat in London, Ont. was in doubt. Late for his own meeting. Ouch.
That’s not all. Over in the Liberal Party house organ, the Toronto Star, columnist Althea Raj was reporting that mutiny is brewing. While none of the quoted Liberal MPs were willing to go on the record, quite a few were prepared to dump on Trudeau anonymously.
Said one: “We don’t feel that we have a partner in the Prime Minister’s Office that is doing what it needs to be doing to help us at this time.”
Another: “This is a prime minister who never likes to even allow you to finish your sentence in national caucus…[If] you’re going to say something he’s not going to like, he always cuts you off.”
Said two different MPs: “People are really disillusioned.” Another: “Really, really, disillusioned.”
Finally, at least one said it was time for Trudeau to leave: “Do the right thing for himself and for the Liberal Party.” And go.
Like we said: it was Justin Trudeau’s Weekend from Hell™️.
Can he reverse it? Can he become competitive again?
As we all know, a week is a lifetime in politics. Conservatives have a well-documented history of shooting themselves in the foot. Trudeau is an excellent campaigner. And, as my colleague Brian Lilley likes to say, voters are fickle. They change their minds.
But right now, one thing is certain: a stench of death can be detected around Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
And we suspect many more Weekends from Hell™️ are on the calendar.
Odd how the luckiest person in Canadian politics instantly ran out of luck. Trudeau has always been ineffective, inarticulate and incompetent. What changed for that to actually surface? Have the Conservatives really upped their game that much? Paradoxically, Trudeau’s scandals may have inadvertently maintained his facade of competence through distraction. The CPC hinted at issues of affordability and poor economic growth in the 2019 and 2021 campaigns but pivoted too much to black face etc. Perhaps Trump benefited from the same phenomenon. Opposition focused on the names he called opponents rather than his poor decisions.
Canadians realized how far behind we had fallen vis American standard of living. No amount of scare tactics about guns, private health care or abortion can distract from that.
Doug I think it’s been a three things:
1. Most Canadians don’t pay much attention to politics. A lot of middle of the road blue Liberals and red Tories were quite satisfied with the idea of the son of PET as PM. He had a similar look, mannerisms etc…It gave them a political comfort blanket that reminded them of happier times. They just couldn’t believe that the son of PET could be such a walking disaster. It just didn’t compute. It’s taken eight years but reality is finally sinking in.
2. The post pandemic inflationary crisis, tied in with the housing crisis and the somewhat connected drug/crime crisis has put a lot of middle of the road Canadians on edge. They don’t want explanations / observations / studies etc… They want answers. Poilievre is offering answers.
3. Young people are angry. They’ve done everything asked of them but they can’t find jobs with powerful paychecks and they certainly can’t afford a home. They know its become worse over the past 8 years and they are naturally turning to someone who represents their anger.
Liberal Cabinet ministers one by one are tweeting out hysterical (in both senses of the word – psychotic AND funny) shrieks warning Canadians that Poilievre will send kids back down the mines and force poor seniors onto ice floes.
One thing that struck me about those hysterical tweets are the claims that Poilievre will take Canada back to the 1950s.
This really shows how privileged-homeowner Boomer-ized (both in terms of actual age cohort and general outlook) the Liberal Party has become. What they fundamentally don’t understand is that to a great many Millennials, the 1950s sound fantastic. Safe, affordable homes. Pleasant middle class lifestyles. Salaries rising above inflation. Stable and close-knit communities. Social cohesion. These are things that Canadians under 40 have largely not experienced during their adult lives. Yes obviously there was intolerance in the 50s and stifling social mores. No era is perfect, and the kinks would need to be ironed out. But the Liberals warning that the CPC will take Canada “back” to that is not quite the body blow they think it is.
Andrew Coyne doesn’t often make good points anymore, but he did make one recently on At Issue. He said, moreso than Canadians simply disliking Trudeau, people are now tuning him out. Nobody listens to a word he says, nor cares what he has to say, except as comic relief. After years of non-answers and non-action, nobody is listening.
It’s not the Trudeau-haters the Liberals should be concerned with. It’s the Trudeau-indifferents and Trudeau-exasperateds, including a large swath of formerly young people who elected him in 2015. They’re the ones who will deliver a CPC majority.
Pedant,
It has been one of my life observations that linking one’s political fate, victorious or otherwise, to the notoriously politically unreliable is but fantastical folly, at best. I’ll believe those cohorts voting en-masse to seal the CPC majority deal when I see it. Our ground game better be better than ever before otherwise…
That is very good. Sending the kids down into the mines again very funny. Need to add that to the rest of the things PP will do.
Pedant – nailed it 100% Especially what you say about the ’50s!
If you told a 20 year old about the ’50s, they’d say yes please, more of that and thank you.
And added to that, unlike the actual 1950s, this time around nobody is going to criminalize abortion, and we have a Charter of rights etc. So Liberal scare tactics are simply stupid and misplaced. They’re really firing blanks, except to their own core supporters.
Doc,
Take a gander down south to determine how many
states are throwing roadblocks up for women seeking
an abortion. More than three states is a trend, eh.
Yeah. In the southern US. Armed with a US Supreme Court decision, the likes of which we will never see here.
Can anyone put their finger on a single policy item / reason / agenda that could explain why he would stay beyond this caucus retreat?
Even if there was, I don’t think anyone would believe it at this stage.
I remember a previous commenter here saying “he’s a fighter”. For what?! What the hell is he fighting for?
Trudeau needs to stay on to keep defending a woman’s right to choose. It is the solution to not only the inflation problem, but all problems. Katie Telford X’d (Tweeted) as such.
So no Ron Wood III are born?
😉
Nice one!
Karina Goold on the CBC-“Justin is our best asset”.
Did she mean Justin is the best CBC asset?
Martin,
Incredibly, yet another MENSA calibre Trudeau Liberal cabinet member! For us to be so lucky…LOL…
You’re sure it wasn’t Mélanie Joly? Sounds like something she would say.
Ha-and I see I didn’t spell her name right.
Can he reverse it? Can he become competitive again? Do Canadians care? (Not this poster).
The push over the edge may come from the media who have been complicit in covering up trouble, underreporting trouble and failing to push back against the BS and ring around the rosie that masquerades as answers. If the media see blood in the water and see a change in Administration coming, all bets are off.
Warren,
What kind of an asshole dumps someone by TEXT? A no-class loser, that’s who.
Justin goes to the G20 with the Canadian media saying Justin will be giving a stern message to many of the G20 leaders.
Many leaders have noted that Justin is all lecture and photo op, but no action.
So Justin’s poor reception at the G20 is of his own making.
I half expect Justin and Team Trudeau to blame his poor reception on Stephen Harper.
I wonder if Chrystia Freeland has a cabinet colleague who will do the dirty work and lead the charge to dump Trudeau, allowing Chrystia to position herself as heir apparent? The eventual reward for the colleague being a nice cabinet position (with lots of opportunities for family profit?)
Peter,
In a word. No.
Right now the Liberals are losing their insane snowflake infested minds because PP said a few things on a mic on a plane with the permission of anyone he had to ask. The Truanons are “reboycotting” WestJet. This all despite the fact that Justin and at least one cabinet minister took a mic over on a train no doubt WITHOUT permission.
And I just got blocked on Twitter for pointing it out:
https://twitter.com/MartinDixon13/status/1701977164835365368
JT also photobombed weddings etc WITHOUT permission. The whole thing is so inane. Liberals are flailing.
The P and P panel on the CBC dismissed(while laughing) this “scandal” as silly. About right. Even the CBC is laughing at these people.
“Sunny ways”. “Openness and transparency”. 2015 seems so long ago. The promise came up short. Parallels with USA: how could so many be duped. Ironically, saved by his own false promise of electoral reform. If not for ‘first past the post’, Canada would not have experienced its least popular Prime Minister. The political Gods work in mysterious ways.
If Trudeau had implemented electoral reform, he’d still be PM.
Trudeau would cut a deal with Jagmeet Singh, who would support Justin in House votes, while tweeting up an anti Liberal storm.
Max-the duped part-look to the fact the Butts and Bannon were BFFs. But A LOT of smart people got duped. A LOT. No one has yet really explained to me what was so terrible about Harper given the alternative we got. I get the Liberals voting against him(the first time but that’s it) but no one else given that alternative. Especially when it was patently obvious just how unqualified he was. Given what they know now then, would they make the same choice? It is actually a relevant question because many of those very same people were resistant to PP and are still holding their nose to vote for him.
Good points. I think a related one is that the Liberals and their core supporters patted themselves on the backs way too much circa 2015, thinking that Canadians gave them this massive mandate. Yes they ran a good and successful campaign. But a lot of that wave that swept them in was a (not always rational) massive anti-Harper sentiment. And let’s not forget, he currently leads a minority government, propped up by feckless Dippers who deserve to be flogged at the polls for doing same.
It’s part of this eternal partisan phenomenon, in which Liberals overestimate how Liberal Canadians are, and Conservatives tend to overestimate how Conservative Canadians are. Plain old partisan bias, but it’s hurting the Liberals much more right now. And it’s preventing them from seeing that a housecleaning and fundamental rethink is in order.
One of the related things is the absolute paucity of ideas, new ideas, from the Liberals these days. Part of the reason people are tuning him out is he’s still playing the hits from 2015. It just grates.
Martin,
Bannon, on his best day is a nut job. Why would anyone want to be his friend?
Ronald-ask Gerald!
Well, my mother said to me recently regarding PP “I don’t understand why anybody would vote for him”, and they’re lining up to do just that.
Maybe we should give Zoolander some space. I honestly believe he is as confused as a Golden Retriever that has just been kicked. The man came to power as giddy as a child emperor giggling while running through the silk bunting of his new golden palace. The world loved him as well as the Canadian population fawned over his breathy tone and his white knight for feminist rights . He performed Woopsie Doodles and had super fun socks. He looked sad when he was outed as a Gropper and his adventures in Black face but as with Peter Pan, Wendy soon realized that the forever boy and his amazing Woopsie Doodles and fun socks did not put food on the table or heat in the house and this is most perplexing to Peter Pans that Wendy is moving on to the real world.
Totally agree. The virtue signalling schtick got old a long time ago.
Another devilishly good column, Mr. Kinsella……
Mr Angry is a jerk – he lied that he was the Housing Minister – there was no such position. He has never held a real job – he has only every been a politician. He is anti-LGBT – he has no policies re: Climate Change – I will never vote for the Conservative party while Mr Angry is the opposition leader. He is socially conservative.
Beth,
You’ll have some company in not voting CPC, but dare I say it, I suspect I’ll have a lot more in voting CPC. That’s democracy for you.
On the job issue, he passes the paper person test. Justin doesn’t. If you had one, you have forgotten the lessons, if you haven’t, then you don’t understand.
He had a paper route as a teen.
Justin? Really? Have never seen that although I suppose that makes sense. Only someone who doesn’t have a literal clue wouldn’t promote it. Perhaps his mom or a nanny drove him around to deliver them? I had friends that did that which kind of defeats the purpose.
A paper route isn’t a big deal – he has never had a real job outside of politics. As a kid he had a paper route, well that really isn’t anything to brag about – the real point to make is that PP has never worked a real job – never gone home with a sore back, knowing he’ll have to work in pain the next day, he’s never had an injury, he’s never had targets to hit, he hasn’t done anything to qualify himself for the job he’s applying for
We’re talking about Mr. Angry, Martin.
Please try to stay on the same page, eh.
:-)’
Right Robert. That’s my point. And, Curious. It’s just math. First of all, nice condescending comment about paper people(taught me lots) but, secondly, it’s a binary choice. What has Justin EVER DONE to qualify himself to be PM other than being a member of the lucky sperm club? Pierre took down a liberal cabinet minister right in the middle of Laurentian Elite territory. Who does that? Certainly Justin Smith couldn’t.
Back in Toronto in 1968/69/70 I delivered the Toronto Globe & Mail & Toronto Star as a helper on my older brother’s paper routes. And in 1970 I delivered the
Toronto Enterprise & Toronto Mirror local newspapers to the Forest Hill Apartments adjacent to the Fairview Mall on Don Mills Rd. & Sheppard Avenue in North York. I had to get up at 5:00am for
work when I was 8-10 and go to work uphill in the snow & slush.
By August 1971 I was moved to Ottawa because the Government of Canada poached my CA father off of
Bay Street.
Robert-clearly we must agree on the merits of being a paper boy. I have no idea why Curious doesn’t get it given his background. And just for the record, it will always be the Toronto DAILY Star to me. I delivered it in Hanover during the same stretch as you. And was still delivering it for sure on the day the Toronto Sun started. I remember how big of a deal that was.
Had the liberals not blundered strategically, and made sure all Canadians understand that PP is a social conservative from the fringe of his party, then maybe the polls would be closer.
Curious, the more Canadians learn about him, the better off he is doing. You want your peeps to push a caricature and the voters are not that stupid and won’t buy it.
Curious V,
Trouble is for the Trudeau Liberals is that Pierre is not a social conservative. He’s a fiscal conservative. You need to do more research.
Ronald, if he did more research, he would learn about his gay-step dad and immigrant wife. There are a lot of inconvenient things he really does not want to learn.
https://tenor.com/bEzrV.gif
But I already know all about his long history of social conservatism. Pro life, against gay marriage, anti-immigrant – that’s his resume until recently when he changed his colors for electoral gain.
Yes-we know Curious, only Liberals like Justin are allowed to “evolve” on his interactions with women, abortion, etc. Pierre has never assaulted anyone like Justin did in the HOC nor has he groped anyone like Justin did Kelowna. So there was never a need for him to “evolve” on those issues. So there IS that. Right? And I am a little unclear how the FACT that he has a gay step-dad and his wife is an immigrant is changing his colours. Walk me through that please.
Curious V,
You mean like the Liberal caucus who were almost up in arms in revolt when Chrétien pushed ahead to legalize same-sex marriage? That Liberal caucus? Did they only “[change] [their] colors for electoral gain”? I don’t think so. It’s called personal evolution. We all do that, or at least should do that, before we die.
We are beyond screwed. It seems we will be stuck choosing vetween Poilievre, a man who openly disdains half the country, or Trudeau, who thinks all people are his personal playthings.
Who does he disdain?
Jason-still cogitating?
For all the people losing their shit about Pierre and the plane, shouldn’t Fraser and Justin have hard hats on that construction site?
https://londonnewstoday.ca/london/news/2023/09/14/pm-announces-74m-housing-deal-to-build-more-homes-in-london
Martin,
It’s my understanding that hard hats don’t actually fit on already hard heads.