Categories for Feature

Hero to zero.

That’s the transformation that takes place in politics, if you overstay your welcome. And it happens pretty fast, too.

That’s why they say a week is a long time in politics. Because it is.

One day you’re on the cover of Rolling Stone, being touted as the literal personification of wokefulness — and the next day you’re miserable and cooling your heels in India, because your plane broke down and no one wants to shake your hand anymore. Boom. From hero to zero, just like that.

Politics is weird in that way, and unforgiving. Brian Mulroney won two big majorities, and ended his tenure with the support of 12% of Canadians. Paul Martin was supposed to be a juggernaut, a Toronto Star columnist decreed, and then went from juggernaut to after-thought.

Stephen Harper was supposed to be Mr. Economics, started fretting about niqabs and “barbaric practices,” and thereby got clobbered by no less than hopey-wokey Justin Trudeau. (That barbaric practices nonsense, by the by, was cooked up by Pierre Poilievre’s brain trust. Hero to zero can happen to anyone, and does.)

And so on and so on. One minute everyone wants a selfie with you, applauding when you hijack a plane. And, the next minute, they’re looking at the tops of their shoes when you enter the room.

Trudeau has experienced metamorphosis in reverse. He started off as a beautiful and delicate butterfly, flitting from one social justice flower to the next. And now he’s turned into a caterpillar, chewing away at leaves and detritus in the dark. He is in profound danger of being stepped on by voters.

Fifteen points! Young people! Liberal strongholds! Those are the things he’s lost, in his devolution into something less than he was. Without them, he’s hooped.

How did it happen? Lots of reasons. Serial scandals, over-promise and underdeliver, circumstances and events. But, mainly, it’s because he’s become the party guest who won’t leave.

The hosts are sweeping the floors and putting away the silverware, but Justin still sits over in a corner, loudly recalling past glories and the time Melania Trump gave him a look you could pour on a stack of waffles. He won’t leave.

He doesn’t listen to many, ever, but he was indeed advised by a few smart folks to start inching towards the exits. One majority and two minorities is plenty, he’s been told, something about which to be proud. That’s a decade. As good as it gets.

But he demurred. He declined. He deferred. And, now, it feels like it is too late to install a fresh new Liberal face, and rescue the brand of the Liberal Party of Canada. Smart Liberals know that another victory is impossible. They just want to save the furniture, now.

Trudeau, the caterpillar who thinks he’s still a butterfly, doesn’t get it — or he doesn’t care.

This writer’s working theory is that — like many men — his father’s shadow looms large over Justin’s path through life. He wants to equal, or surpass, his father’s record. (It happens. Ask George W. Bush about it.)

Whatever the reason, he is just about out of time. If he doesn’t leave — and for the love of God, Justin, please leave — he’s done like dinner. He’s got to Christmas to rescue the party. Maybe.

Hero to zero. It’s a political cliché, sure.

But it’s also Justin Trudeau.

Comments (66)


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.

Comments (58)

Mark Bourrie is acting up again. So, here's some facts about him that were filed in Court as evidence in Bernier v. Kinsella (which Bourrie lost). Bourrie tried to get them removed. The judge declined. #cdnpoli @ShillersLLP pic.twitter.com/t2fmeq2Mbl

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) June 6, 2023

Comments (4)

Comments (28)

Watch Dominic LeBlanc.

Watch what he does.

As everyone knows by now, reputable pollsters are saying that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are as much as 14 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. 14 points!

Depending on how the votes break, and where, that’s not just a Conservative majority. That’s a Conservative landslide victory.

And, as much as the winged monkeys who make up TruAnon try to do so, Abacus and Angus Reid can’t be dismissed as fly-by-night bucket shops. They do good survey work – including, over the years, for Liberal governments.

So, it’s real. The Tory leader’s lead hasn’t been an erratic leap upwards – it’s been slow and steady. In just about every demographic, in just about every region, Poilievre is ahead. Sometimes far ahead.

So what’s the big deal about Dominic LeBlanc, you ask? Pull up a chair.

And, first things first: I know LeBlanc well. His office was right next to mine when Jean Chretien was opposition leader. Dominic was an Atlantic desk advisor, and I wrote speeches and helped prepare Chretien for Question Period.

We were close, back then – close enough that Dominic’s father, the legendary Romeo LeBlanc, became godfather to my daughter. We’re not close anymore, however. (Dominic didn’t even bother to send along a note of sympathy when my mother died in July.)

That’s politics, I suppose. But one relationship cannot be denied: Justin Trudeau and Dominic Leblanc are very very close.

It’s hard to know if Justin Trudeau actually has a best friend. But if he does, it’s LeBlanc. Whenever Trudeau gets into trouble – a frequent occurrence – LeBlanc is one of the trusted ones who regularly gets sent in to do cleanup. As he did, this week, announcing a public inquiry into Chinese election meddling.

It’s a question that was asked   often this week, as the magnitude of Trudeau’s electoral problems becomes more clear: who has the guts – or the clout – to tell Justin Trudeau it’s time to take a walk in the snow?

Because, make no mistake, if the Liberal brand is to survive, it needs a change in leadership. It needs a Trudeau – Liberal leader for more than a decade – to retire to speech-making and memoir-writing.

At this stage in his mandate, unfortunately, Trudeau surrounded by the C team. None of his aides have the seniority or wherewithal to tell him that he needs to quit.

So that task must now fall to Dominic LeBlanc.  He’s the only one who can do it, at this stage.

Will he? He certainly has personal motivation to do so. The Reid and Abacus surveys found that Trudeau’s Liberals are in big trouble in Atlantic Canada generally, and New Brunswick specifically. And LeBlanc watches the numbers in New Brunswick like a hawk.

He knows that if the so-called “red wall” crumbles in Atlantic Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada is heading for second place, or worse. And Dominic LeBlanc doesn’t want that for himself – or his best friend.

As the Conservative convention kicks off in Quebec City, the delegates are understandably cheering their good fortune. But some of the smart folks in Pierre Poilievre’s office will be keeping an eye trained on Dominic Leblanc, too.

Because if he tells his best friend to leave – and his best friend does – it’s a whole new ball game.

Watch Dominic LeBlanc.

Comments (63)

Comments (17)

Almost-end-of-summer, long weekend political bits and pieces:

**

Crickets.

That’s what you will hear if you are waiting for a public inquiry into Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal general elections. Crickets.

Towards the end of the last Parliamentary session, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously dangled the prospect of actually having such an inquiry. Back then, it looked like he had no choice.

His chosen “rapporteur” David Johnson — he who helped lead the Trudeau Foundation, that itself received boodle from the Chinese regime — had quit.

And an overwhelming number of Canadians — including more than 70% of self-described Liberal voters — wanted an inquiry into well-documented allegations that the Chinese had attempted to gut our democracy.

All of the opposition parties wanted an inquiry, too. But they, and we, all made a big mistake: we trusted Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau sent out his Maytag repairman, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, to rag the puck. LeBlanc did.

So, here we all are in September, with no public inquiry in sight. Just the unmistakable sound of crickets, reminding us that nothing has happened.

Oh, wait. Something has happened. A U.S. congressional committee — that is, a legislative committee found in another country — has invited one of the victims of Chinese political meddling, Canadian MP and former cabinet minister Michael Chong, to testify.

Before them. In America.

Get that? The Americans are calling Canadian witnesses to investigate Chinese interference in democracy.

Not us.

**

Look, Tasha Kheiriddin is a nice person.

She’s been a Conservative, and is a conservative, but I don’t hold that against her. She is smart, and perceptive, and a great writer. In fact, she is a writer who is a colleague: she writes about politics for The National Post, which shares an owner with the Toronto Sun.

A few weeks ago, Tasha sought media credentials to attend the upcoming Conservative Party convention in Quebec City. A party functionary wrote back: no.

She got her bosses at The National Post, no Trotskyite leaflet, involved. They also stressed that they wanted Tasha at the convention.

Her conservative credentials are pretty impeccable. She cochaired the Tory leadership campaign of Jean Charest and she has written books about being a conservative.

Even after the intervention by her editors at The National Post, the answer came back: no. Podcasters were allowed, assholes at Rebel “Media” were welcome. But not Tasha Kheiriddin, longtime conservative operative.

Says she: “I was disappointed with the Conservative Party’s decision to deny my media accreditation. Ironically, the only places where I am not welcome as a journalist are Russia, where I was banned last year, and the Conservative Convention, where I am persona non grata this year.”

She notes that representatives of other political parties are also being barred: “This kind of hostility is not only petty but feeds the polarization people deplore in today’s politics. It’s also a great example of gatekeeping — which I thought the party opposed.”

All of this reminds us, once again, of the famous words of my colleague Brian Lilley: “Politics is about addition, not subtraction.”

Meaning: You should always be trying to keep good people, not drive them away.

**

A final note on the polls.

All of them, pretty much, are now showing Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives far ahead of the governing Liberals. For instance, late last week, the pollster with the best record for accuracy federally, Leger, also confirmed the Tories are ahead of the Grits by nearly ten points.

That’s a majority government, folks. That’s lights out for Justin Trudeau’s team.

The horserace numbers probably don’t mean a whole lot, however. What is more meaningful is the reason why. Why is Pierre so far ahead, and Justin so far behind?

Trudeau’s tendency to overpromise and under-deliver is part of it. His fondness for Nanny State “woke” stuff, too. Serial scandals, the housing crisis, soaring inflation, and the total absence of a policy agenda haven’t helped, either.

But the main reason why Trudeau is losing so definitively to someone he clearly considers to be beneath him is this: we have grown sick of his face. He’s been Liberal leader for more than a decade, and he’s reached his best-before date.

In politics, the best you can hope for is eight years at the top. After that, voters are generally coming after you with nooses and pitchforks.

If Justin Trudeau wants to prevent the election disaster that is looming ahead, he needs to leave. Sooner than later.

Will he?

That’s a question worth debating after Labour Day!

Comments (64)

Punish him. Make it hurt.

When this writer — an aspiring painter — heard that someone had thrown paint on Tom Thomson’s masterpiece Northern River, I was very angry.

It happened this week. A man came to the National Gallery in Ottawa and smeared pink paint across the front of it. He was a member of an “environmental” group called On2Ottawa, reports said. After he defaced Thomson’s work, he glued himself to the floor.

A “climate activist,” some media called him. A “terrorist,” others might call him.

I come from a family of artists, you see. “Art is the greatest form of hope,” the British artist Banksy once said, and it’s true. To deface Thomson’s painting — which took two years to complete and is considered one of the greatest works of art ever produced in this country — was to deface hope itself.

My initial reaction, I confess, was that someone should break the fingers and arms of the paint-thrower, so that they can never do it again. I was that angry.

But, no. That’s extreme. That’s the kind of thing the Taliban does, isn’t it? Ironically, the paint-throwers share quite a bit in common with the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group that now rules over Afghanistan. They try to murder art, too.

The Taliban burn books, prohibit music and — infamously — kill works of art. Upon seizing power in the 1990s, the Taliban systematically and efficiently destroyed thousands of works of art at the Afghan National Museum and elsewhere because they were “un-Islamic.”

In all, 70% of the museum’s artifacts — some 100,000 individual works — were destroyed by the Taliban. In 2001, they obliterated the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan because they were considered un-Islamic and blasphemous. The statues were more than a 1,000 years old.

The destruction of art — the extermination of art — was not something invented by the Taliban, however. Over the centuries, it has happened many times.

Acid thrown onto a Rembrandt by a mentally ill man in Russia. A Velazquez ripped to shreds by a British feminist who later embraced fascism. A shotgun blast fired into a Da Vinci depicting The Virgin and Child in London’s National Gallery.

And, of course, fascists and extremists often target art first. The Nazis destroyed thousands of works of art by cubists, expressionists and impressionists in Germany and France — because they considered them “degenerate.”

So this week’s attack on Thomson’s masterwork is not without precedent. (It was not permanent, either; glass protected it from permanent damage.) Lunatics and monsters are always using beautiful works of art to make a political statement.

And Thomson’s Northern River is unquestionably beautiful. It is extraordinary.

Our greatest artist worked on it on a large canvas — unusual for him — over two years in 1914 and 1915. It depicts thin, dark trees reaching for a Canadian sky, some water glinting in the background. It is a scene that every Canadian has seen or should. It has been described as perfect. It may not be that, but it certainly seems like a perfect rendering of the Canadian wilderness.

It’s not known where Thomson saw what would later become Northern River. Algonquin Park formed the subject matter of many of his masterpieces, of course, but a friend of Thomson’s later said it wasn’t a scene from there. So it could be anywhere in Canada, really.

Why would anyone want to destroy something like that? Why attack beauty? Why would they smear paint on it?

On their website, On2Ottawa says that they are prepared to break laws because “the state is acting immorally.”

Maybe. Perhaps. But the ones who try to destroy art that depicts the very environment that On2Ottawa claims to be concerned about?

They’re the ones who were the most immoral this week.

Comments (23)

BOSTON – A few years back, Jean Chrétien said this:

“A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it’s because it’s proven.”

Get that? It’s quite a few years later, and I still don’t. And I worked for the guy (some say I still do).

I mean, you could read those words 100 times, backwards and forwards, and you’d still have a hard time figuring it out. Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube with 17 sides. You can’t do it.

Politics being a business for people who are nasty, brutish and short-tempered, I thought Chretien’s words – uttered in a Parliament Hill scrum, back when he was Prime Minister – would be roundly mocked and ridiculed.

I thought Conservatives, with their tiny black hearts, would belittle him. I thought us Chretienite spin doctors would be sent out to explain the unexplainable.

Nope. Not needed. Nobody understood what Chrétien had said, really, but it didn’t matter. They loved it.

I later mentioned my bewildered befuddlement to a Tory friend. He laughed. “Oh, I loved that,” he said of the now-legendary Proof Is A Proof thing. “Classic Chrétien.”

Which brings us to Joe Biden, another politician I have worked for, full disclosure and all that. I’m down here in the U.S. of A., and my gal brought it to my attention. “Did you see what Biden did in Hawaii?” asked E. I winced.

In politics, when you get a question like that, it almost always precedes bad news. Like: did you see Robert Stanfield try and catch that football? (He didn’t.) Or: did you see Preston Manning actually read French cue cards at the French debate? (He did.) And so on.

So, when he was in Hawaii to survey the terrible damage and destruction and death caused by the Maui fire, my guy Joe Biden said he understood what the people of Hawaii had gone through. Because he’d almost lost his ’67 Corvette one time.

Seriously, he said that. This is exactly what he said: “Lightning struck at home, on a little lake that’s outside of our home—not a lake, a big pond—and hit a wire that came up underneath our home into the heating ducts and air conditioning ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette, and my cat.”

His Corvette. And his cat.

Is it bad? It’s bad. Is it embarrassing? It’s embarrassing.

Will it matter? It won’t matter.

Stay with me, here. I know you conservative types already hate me for working for Chretien and Biden. I get it. How can I work for two guys who can’t string two sentences together, you’ll say on Twitter or whatever the Hell it’s called now.

Except, conservatives, if you are being honest with yourselves – hard, I know – you’ll admit that you’ve got your fair share of politicos who mangle meaning, gut grammar and shred syntax. You’ve got conservatives who deal in multiple malapropisms and mistakes, too.

Take George W. Bush. Remember this gem? “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” Or: “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” Or, my all-time favorite: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

And you know what happened after W. said those sorts of things? He got re-elected, that’s what. People didn’t get mad. They laughed.

Donald Trump, too. Most of the time, it sounds like the cheese has slipped off the Mango Mussolini’s cracker. “The buck stops with everybody,” he said once. Another time, speaking about trade with China, he said: “We have the cards, don’t forget, we’re like the piggy bank that’s being robbed, we have the cards.”

Seriously: what does any of that have to do with trade or China? Beats me. And: Would you like a cup of covfefe to wash those down?

The point – and I have one – is this: humans make mistakes. Everyone does. It’s one of the things that makes us human.

People therefore like politicians who make mistakes, too: it makes them seem more like humans, and not lying, conniving criminals, which is what many of them are, most of the time.

So, cut Biden some slack. Bush and Trump for their verbal missteps, too. Nobody’s perfect.

You want proof? Well, a proof is a proof. Because it’s proven.

Comments (24)

Comments (34)