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Name ten federal cabinet ministers. Just ten.

It’s not a lot. Ten represents just a quarter of Justin Trudeau’s cabinets in recent years.

So, name ten. But you can’t, can you?

You’re not alone. Few can. With the exception of weirdos like media political columnists and Ottawa-based bureaucrats, Joe and Jane Frontporch generally don’t know who is in cabinet, and they mostly don’t care, either.

Apart from Chrystia Freeland and Dominic LeBlanc – perhaps – most voters couldn’t pick a Trudeau government minister out of a police lineup (where not a few voters think they belong, but that’s a column for another day). The majority of Trudeau’s ministers are distinguished by being indistinguishable. They are remarkably unremarkable.

In the annals of Canadian politics, successful Prime Ministers have tended to surround themselves with notables. Jean Chretien had Paul Martin, John Manley, Brian Tobin and more. Brian Mulroney had Joe Clark, Don Mazankowski and Jean Charest. Stephen Harper had Rona Ambrose, Peter MacKay and Lisa Raitt.

Even Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, always cultivated talent around the cabinet table – Marc Lalonde, Allan MacEachen, John Turner, the aforementioned Chretien.

But Justin Trudeau? As mentioned, it’s all about him, generally. L’etat, c’est lui – the State is Him. You don’t really hear about anyone else unless they get in trouble – and Trudeau Junior’s ministers get in trouble quite often (Marco Mendicino, Bill Morneau, Bill Blair, et al.).

So why don’t we know more about the people who make up Canada’s federal government? Because Justin Trudeau’s government isn’t really a government. It’s a cult of personality.

It begins and (one hopes) ends with Justin. It is entirely, indisputably, All About Him.

A cult of personality, the dictionary folks tell us, is “a cult promoting adulation of a living national leader or public figure.” Which, in Trudeau’s case, sounds about right.

None of his ministers ever spoke out about, say, the fact that Justin Trudeau is the first Prime Minister to have been found to have violated multiple federal statutes. None of the people within his Liberal Party bothered to check, back in 2008, whether the aspiring politician had groped a woman without consent (he had) or worn racist black face (he had, more than once).

But none of his partisans – christened “TruAnon,” memorably, by CNN’s Jake Tapper – care about any of that stuff. You can see the TruAnon types in the comments below this column, like a swarm of oily earwigs, objecting to anything and anyone who is outside the cult.

So, it’s a cult of personality. Generally speaking, if a cult leader is effective at suppressing dissent and bad PR – like Scientology or the Moonies – then the cult leadership survives.

But that’s the imperfection at the center of Justin Trudeau’s cult of personality: the leader is imperfect. Aga Khan, SNC-Lavalin, WE “charity,” now Chinese interference in our democracy: in every single case, the biggest Trudeau-era scandals have implicated Trudeau personally. Him.

So, in a cult of personality, when the leader stumbles, it jeopardizes the entire organization. It places the whole shebang at risk. And that is particularly the case when there isn’t someone standing in the wings, ready to take over.

And there just isn’t. With the exception of Intergovernmental Affairs’ LeBlanc or Industry’s Francois-Phillippe Champagne, it is very, very hard to picture anyone else taking over and surviving a Tory landslide.

Because they’re all mostly invisible.

Because there was a big-deal cabinet shuffle, this week, and the chances are excellent you (a) didn’t know or (b) don’t care.

Welcome to the club.

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In our hearts, we know: the only certainty in life is death. It comes for every one of us.

The uncertainty of the hour of death is also a source of grief in our lives, someone said, and they’re indisputably right. That death is coming, on whispering feet, and we know not when.

For many years, science – and people themselves, making wiser decisions about what to put in their bodies – has pushed back the tide of death. The years between 1916 and 1920 were notable for that: following the first Great War, people just started living longer.  

Babies born in England or Wales had a life expectancy of just 41 years back then.  Their descendants now routinely live into their Eighties. China and India have recorded the fastest gains in life expectancy of any societies in recorded history, and they have the economies to prove it: a hundred years ago, their people would have been lucky to survive past their late twenties.  Now, in India, the average is 70 years.

Since the great global influenza pandemic a Century ago, life expectancies have actually doubled.  The reasons why are myriad and multiple: defeating cholera with better water and sewage systems; embracing pasteurization to kill bacteria in foods, saving billions of lives; the discovery of antibiotics, to slow and kill the growth of bacteria in our bodies; the development of vaccines to fight polio and measles and more.

We collectively live, then, in an era where few before us have lived as long.  While we have not defeated death, we have greatly delayed his arrival at our doors.

In Canada, while we live among the longest in the world, death has naturally continued to claim us in different ways.  Before the Covid-19 pandemic commenced in earnest, the leading cause of death, year after year, was what is called “malignant neoplasms” – cancerous tumors.

Diseases of the heart come next, and the cerebrovascular afflictions – strokes, mainly.  Respiratory diseases and influenzas after that.  And so on.

The pandemic revised the list, everywhere. In New York, just next door, life expectancy dropped by about five full years in 2020, the dark year when the coronavirus was in full bloom.  There, the death rate doubled what it had been the previous year.  Across in the US, life expectancy went from 79 years to 76.

In Canada, lives were cut shorter, too, but not by nearly as much.  However, Covid became one of death’s grim medallists in Canada, beaten out only by cancer and heart diseases.  And, globally – because Covid laughed at the notion of borders – seven million people were killed by it. Another 700 million got it, and about 100 million are still dealing with it, their lives upended by long Covid.

Covid death counts have largely faded from view, and people have mostly gone back to believing that they will not experience something like that again.  But, generally, the odds are pretty good (30 per cent, they say) there’ll be another pandemic in the next decade or so: the ubiquitousness of international travel, and the stupidity of humans, practically guarantees it.

But, even if we somehow escape death from an unseen virus, we all – right now, this week – face another existential threat: the world is getting dramatically hotter.  You don’t need to be a scientist to notice. And, at this stage, it doesn’t matter whether we did it to ourselves, or it’s the result of some preordained Biblical event – it’s well underway, and no one seems to know how to stop it.

So, we in the media report records being broken until no one is shocked enough to pay attention anymore, and a Texas woman (insincerely) claims to bake a loaf of bread in her mailbox: it’s become the stuff of bathos.

The reality is that a hotter planet will continue to affect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the shelter we seek. Smart people, educated people, say that the future will include wars over water, and the mass displacement of people seeking food and refuge from the heat.

So, yes: in the hundred years since World War I, we have delayed – but never denied – death.  Sooner or later, death comes for us all.  It is relentless.

And, this week, he came for my mother, Lorna, who lived a long and wonderful life. We love her and we will miss her, always.

But death always prevails in the end.  And it always breaks your heart.

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KINSELLA, Lorna Emma Bridget. Artist, loving mother, grandmother and wife. Born in Montreal, July 7, 1932; died in Toronto, Ont., July 15, 2023. Daughter of Irene (Danaher) Cleary; survived by loving sister Saundra Cleary; pre-deceased by cherished siblings Eddie, Mickey, Carol, Gail and Irene.

Married T. Douglas Kinsella MD, CM, the one and true love of her life, in Montreal on June 18, 1955; thereafter followed fifty wonderful years of marriage, until his untimely death on June 15, 2004.

Hero to her four boys: Warren, Kevin, Lorne and Troy. Beloved grandmother to Emma, Benjamin, Samuel, Jacob and Kane; missed greatly by her daughters-in-law Annette (LaFaver) and Barbara (Joy).

Lorna was an artist of renown, her works seen in homes and galleries across Canada. She taught art and loved art; she gardened; she donated her time and energy to the homeless and Ukrainian relief and more. We love her and miss her already.

Funeral Mass will take place at 11 a.m. on Friday, July 21 at Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church, 1810 Queen Street East in Toronto. In lieu of flowers, we respectfully request donations to the Ukrainian Red Cross or the Salvation Army.

FORTIS IN ARDUIS.

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