Hope all of them are okay. And that everyone exposed to this remorseless, foul pestilence are okay, too.
#BREAKING: Justin Trudeau and Sophie Gregoire Trudeau are in self-isolation over COVID-19 concerns.
The latest: https://t.co/pjACmRre4w
— Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) March 12, 2020
#Breaking: NEW: NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says he's limiting contact with public, says he's "feeling unwell."https://t.co/pjACmRre4w
— Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) March 12, 2020
Is Justin Trudeau sad?
He sure looks sad. He looks positively dejected, in fact.
In his few public appearances since the election, Trudeau has radiated none of the boyish charm that was the signature of his first term in office. Gone are the selfies, the costumes, and the maddening preoccupation with social media.
In their place: a grown-up Prime Minister, kind of.
The beard, the flecks of grey, the downcast eyes: all of it combines to give the Liberal leader the gravitas that he has lacked for far too long. He may be ineffably sad, but the sadness sits well on him.
Plenty of folks have similarly been struck by how changed Trudeau now seems to be. And – ironically, and whatever is the cause – that it has matured Trudeau.
It may sound a bit like Kremlinology, but it can’t be denied that Justin Trudeau is different, now. Even his detractors say so.
One of his biographers, the CBC’s Aaron Wherry, has observed that Trudeau is showing more introspection, and more humility, than ever before. He seems “less youthful,” declared The Economist.
“Humble,” agreed someone at the Toronto Star. “Sombre,” they said. Even card-carrying Trudeau critic Rex Murphy has acknowledged it: “There has been a change in his manner since the election.”
Now, it’s not as if Trudeau lacks justification. Raging wildfires in Australia, dozens of Canadians killed by Iranian missiles, crippling weather, an impeached and distracted president, climate change and economic uncertainty, a coronavirus global emergency: 2020, the experts agree, has deeply sucked, and it is only days old. There is little about which any Prime Minister can celebrate.
But there’s something else at work here – something that is not easily attributable to 2020’s bleak headlines. More than current events explains the change in Justin James Pierre Trudeau, PC, QC.
The conservative rageaholics tweet wild speculation about Trudeau’s personal life. All of it is fair game, to them. And all of it is is mean and lacking in proof.
The answer, like so many things in politics, may be hiding in plain view. It’s not a mystery.
Justin Trudeau is downcast – humble, sombre, older, changed, and all of the things the commentariat say he is – because he lost the election.
Because, you know, he sort of did. Everyone, including his opponents – particularly the Tories, who selected Andrew Scheer because they thought he’d be a reasonable placeholder leader, until someone better came along – believed Trudeau was preordained a second Parliamentary majority. It was his birthright.
And he didn’t get one.
Blackface, LavScam, Aga Klan, GropeGate, deficits, the Griswolds Go To India: all of it came together to bring Justin Trudeau down Earth. And at the worst possible time, too. An election.
It can’t be denied, of course, that Scheer and his campaign manager ran one of the worst election efforts in recent memory. Jagmeet Singh lost half his caucus. Elizabeth May could only add a single, solitary seat to what she had.
Trudeau did poorly in the 2019 federal general election, bien sur. But he knows he is only Prime Minister because his adversaries did a lot worse.
So, he’s sad. He looks humbled. He’s seemingly older.
Canadians like it. An Abacus poll conducted a few days ago concluded that “a clear majority see him doing an acceptable or better job.” His party is more popular than it was, and Trudeau’s negatives – while still a bigger number than his positives – are shrinking.
We don’t know why you’re so sad, Justin Trudeau.
But we’re kind of happy about it
The Conservative caucus met on Parliament Hill yesterday. Watching them from afar, it recalled a big therapy session. But without a therapist in charge.
It went for seven hours, reportedly. That’s a long caucus meeting. At the end of those seven hours, seven big problems remain.
A seven-hour caucus!
And, at the end of it, they’re in worse shape than they were at the start of it.
Justin Trudeau is less popular than Donald Trump.
Say it aloud, so that those still considering voting for Trudeau can hear you.
Because, you know, Donald Trump. The most sexist, most racist, most dishonest US president is more highly regarded than the Canadian Prime Minister. That’s hard to do, but Justin Trudeau has done it.
As far back as March, Trump was doing better than Trudeau. In that month, Ipsos found Trump’s approval rating was 43 per cent. Trudeau’s was 40.
In August, it got even worse. Zogby Analytics revealed that Trump had an approval rating of 51 per cent. Trudeau was “underwater,” Zogby reported, at 43 per cent.
And Toronto Sun pollster John Wright, of DART, has analyzed the data, and come up with the same conclusion as the others. “Trudeau’s personal approval numbers are below Trump’s,” says Wright. “So more selfies won’t help.”
And therein lies the rub. Wright has put his finger on the zeitgeist: this election isn’t remotely about issues. It’s a referendum on Justin Trudeau. And he’s been losing it.
What went wrong? How is Justin Trudeau – once the darling of international media, the beneficiary of Trudeaumania II, and the guy who propelled his party from a Parliamentary third place to first – now facing what HuffPo’s Althia Raj, no less, has declared the “possibility he won’t be Prime Minister much longer.” How did that happen?
Three reasons. The first: he over-promised and under-delivered.
Trudeau did that a lot. On electoral reform, on balanced budgets, on ethical reform, on being the feminist champion and the Indigenous reconciler: in every case, he promised the Earth but delivered only dust.
Trudeau’s true legacy is seen in the LavScam scandal, where he obliterated his credentials as the ethical paragon and liberator of women and Indigenous peoples. There, he cravenly tried to rescue a Quebec-based Liberal Party donor facing a corruption trial – and, along the way, revealed himself more than willing to brutalize two women, one Indigenous, who bravely stood up for the Rule of Law.
Second reason: he thinks he’s far more charming and entertaining than he actually is.
Some time ago, a member of Trudeau’s insular inner circle told this writer that one of their biggest problems was Trudeau’s unshakeable belief that he is funny. “He thinks he’s a comedian,” said this man. “He isn’t.”
Thus, making blackface his go-to party favour. Thus, his puerile penchant for dress-up, even when it humiliates Canadians, as in the infamous Griswolds-style Indian vacation. Thus, his utterly bizarre penchant for making jokes – remember “peoplekind?” – that aren’t merely jokes. They’re jokes that render him one.
Recently, this writer was told by a very senior Grit that Trudeau referred to NDP leader Jagmeet Singh as “Marge Simpson” – presumably a reference to Singh’s turban. (A Liberal campaign spokesman declined to comment about the allegation; an NDP war room member said they were aware of the “joke.”)
Why, why would Trudeau say such a thing? “Because he thought it was funny,” said this Parliamentarian.
The third and final reason that Justin Trudeau is less popular than Donald Trump is neatly, and expertly, mirrored in the Conservative Party’s shrewd attack ad slogan: “Justin Trudeau. Not as advertised.”
That pithy catchphrase, more than anything else, is why Trudeau is plumbing the polling depths, even more than Trump. Canadians have grown to believe that the former drama teacher is, indeed, just an actor.
Donald Trump, as detestable as he is to so many, is at least truthful about who he is. He doesn’t hide it.
Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, wears blackface to parties.
Because he’s never as comfortable as when he is wearing a mask.
I was Jean Chretien’s special assistant. I helped oversee his war room when he won in 1993 and 2000. I ran for the Liberals in B.C. in 1997.
And I can’t vote Liberal. I won’t. And I don’t think you should either.
Here’s why.
People vote for (or against) politicians for different reasons. In 2015, they voted for Justin Trudeau because he wasn’t Stephen Harper, who they’d grown tired of.
They voted for Trudeau because he was fresh and new and charismatic. Because he had his father’s surname. Because we (me especially) thought he’d be different.
They voted for him because he promised ethical and accountable government. They voted for him because he promised electoral reform, and balanced budgets, and harmonious relations with First Nations and the provinces and the world.
And now, many Canadians are voting against him because he didn’t do any of those things. He did the exact reverse.
He lied about balanced budgets and electoral reform. He didn’t deliver on harmony with other levels of government: First Nations and the provinces, and important international players — like China and the U.S. and India — think he’s a child.
And ethics? That didn’t work out so well, either. He’s the first sitting prime minister to have been found guilty of breaking ethics laws — in the Aga Khan and Lavscam scandals. In the latter case, the RCMP have said they are now reviewing the conduct of Trudeau’s government “carefully.” Some people may go to jail.
But for this writer — who happily voted for Liberal Nate Erskine-Smith in the Toronto Beach riding in 2015 — I can’t vote again for the Trudeau Party, which bears no resemblance to the Liberal Party of John Turner and Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. I can’t vote for it because it isn’t a political party.
It’s a cult.
It bears all the hallmarks of a cult. Slavish and unquestioning devotion to the leader. The willingness to punish and isolate critics and outsiders.
The fundamental belief that they are everything — in Trudeau’s case, that the Liberal Party is Canada, and vice versa. If you are against them, you are literally against Canada. That’s what they think.
Along with running some campaigns (winning and losing), I’ve written books about politics. Along the way, I’ve learned that people vote based on emotion, not reason.
In my case, my reasons for objecting to the Trudeau cult are deeply personal and real. I have written about, and opposed, racism for more than three decades. I am also a proud father of an indigenous girl.
How can I look my daughter in the eye and say I voted Liberal, after what Trudeau did to the female indigenous hero named Jody Wilson-Raybould? After he attacked her and exiled her for telling the truth? For saying no to a group of grasping men? For standing up for the rule of law?
I can’t do that.
How, too, can I vote for a man-boy who donned racist blackface — not once, not twice, but at least three times that we know about — and still say I fight racism? How can I claim to be against bigotry when I legitimize the bigotry of a clueless, overprivileged brat with my vote?
Politicians like to say that elections are about choices, because they are. They also are choices that are highly emotional and highly personal. Emotionally, personally, rationally, I cannot bring myself to vote for this loathsome cult.
And, with the greatest respect, I don’t know how you could either.
Here’s the thing about Monday’s leader’s debate, Canada.
You won’t be watching it.
Well, let’s amend that. Sun readers are a scrappy, elbows-up lot, who dig politics and a good scrap. Sun readers are likelier to be watching the debate. They like debates.
But most everyone else? They won’t be.
Everyone else will be watching Shark Tank (which this election kind of is) or Wheel of Fortune (which this election isn’t). Or, they’ll be binge-watching old episodes of Arrested Development (which neatly describes most of our federal political leaders).
Increasingly, voters simply don’t watch leader’s debates in Canada. For example, Maclean’s magazine put together a debate in 2015, but it had fewer than 40% of the viewers who took in the 2011 English-language debate. And Maclean’s actually counted people who only watched part of that debate, not all of it.
Master Chef got way more viewers.
Last time around, there was a Globe and Mail debate, too, and it was absolutely awful to watch. YouTube later found only about 400,000 Canadians did so. That’s in a country, in 2015, with 36 million people in it. Ipsos later did a poll and found only about 20% of Canadians watched the first couple debates in 2015.
There’s been one debate in 2019 that Justin Trudeau has deigned to attend. It was entirely in French.
Around 1.2 million Quebecers allegedly took in the TVA leader’s debate, in which Andrew Scheer, Jagmeet Singh and the separatist leader, Yves-Francois Blanchet, also participated. In a province with more than six million eligible voters, 1.2 million viewers isn’t anything to brag about, although TVA did.
Oh, and in English Canada — in English — nobody got to watch the French debate when it was happening. Because it was entirely in French. To get a sense of what happened, the vast majority of Canadians needed to check out the media after the fact (Widely-held consensus: the separatist guy won, hands down).
As someone who owns a public opinion firm — Daisy Data, at your service! — I can relate one empirical statistical fact: a dwindling number of voters watch debates from gavel to gavel. They may in take part of a debate, sure. But not all of it.
What voters do, instead, is watch the news media’s coverage of a debate. They’ll see a clip of a fiery exchange on TV, or they’ll hear a so-called defining moment on the radio heading into work, or they’ll read expert commentary in the pages of the Sun and hopefully nowhere else.
But they don’t watch all of the debate.
I’ve prepared prime ministers and premiers for debates, and I now know I did it all wrong. I assumed, as did my debate-prep colleagues, that everyone else watched the debates as closely as we did. That was a flawed assumption.
It also explains how Justin Trudeau was seen as a winner in the 2015 debates, even against two superior debaters — Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair. Trudeau’s strategy in 2015 was a lot like what he did in his celebrated boxing match with Patrick Brazeau: he waited in his corner for an opening, then he’d go in with a flurry of punches.
He didn’t try to dominate all of the matches — he just did what he needed to do to get clipped on TV, then he’d sprinkle the results all over social media.
It worked, because he knew that Canadians were more likely to see clips of a debate than all of a debate.
That’s what he’s going to do on Monday night, too. In an era of shrinking debate audiences, it works. Will the other leaders let him get away with it in 2019 like they did in 2015? Tune in and see.
Or, join everyone else, and go watch Shark Tank.
— Sun columnist Warren Kinsella will be providing debate commentary on Bell Media radio on Monday night
So, Andrew.
You don’t mind if I call you Andrew, do you? It’s better than what I sometimes used to call you, which was Blandy Andy.
I stopped calling you that because you figured out a way to make the bland thing work, like Brampton Bill Davis did. You embraced your inner ordinariness.
You starting hanging out in hockey rinks and you commenced rubbing Timbits all over your torso – which, unlike Prime Minister Blackface, you have never exposed to a grateful nation. You became the Canadian Everyman, and you made it work for you.
The pocketbook stuff, too. That was good, too. You and Hamish concluded, rightly, that voters regard everyone in politics as an unindicted co-conspirators, so you stopped hollering all the time that Justin is a crook. You just kept talking about how hard it is for regular folks to get by, and left the scandalmongering to the media. That was smart.
And the polls bore fruit, sort of. Ipsos says you’re ahead, and you have been for the entirety of the campaign. Nanos says you’re tied with Trudeau for best choice for Prime Minister, which is way better than you’ve been in the past.
But. But, Andrew, seriously?
Why haven’t 110 per cent of respondents declared you their favoured choice for Prime Minister? Why isn’t your party a kabillion points ahead of the Liberals? Why, Andrew, why?
Because that’s the question everyone is asking themselves, Andrew. Hell, that’s the question members of the Liberal caucus are asking themselves – many of whom had purchased political funeral insurance, and now they’re wondering if they can convert it to another kind of policy at the insurance brokerage where you used to fetch coffee and answer the phone.
By any reasonable standard, Andrew, Justin Trudeau leads the most corrupt – the most casually evil – government in Canadian history. It is shiftless; it is reckless; it is soulless. It is a mess.
And they could still win, Andrew. They could still beat you. How can this be?
A scan of Trudeau’s press clippings reads like a grand jury indictment.
• In LavScam, he obstructed justice when he tried, repeatedly, to stop the criminal corruption trial of a Québec-based donor to his party.
• He violated conflict of interest laws when he accepted freebies during a junket to the Aga Khan’s private island.
• He lied about electoral reform, and balancing the budget, and improving relations with the provinces and the world.
• He made us an international laughingstock with his Griswolds Vacation India trip, and enraged the world’s largest democracy – our ally and Commonwealth partner.
• And, most recently, he admitted he repeatedly mocked black people by wearing blackface and jumping around like an ape – and he admitted that there’s more of it out there in the ether, but he doesn’t know how much, because he was wasted a lot of the time.
After all that, Andrew – after all that scandal, more of which this newspaper has been investigating for weeks, stay tuned to this bat-channel, everyone – why aren’t you way ahead? Why aren’t you creaming Chewbacca Socks?
Why, to cite just two examples from the past 24 hours, did you attract fewer people at a Brampton rally than Justin Trudeau’s Portuguese Water Dog, Kenzie, gets during a stroll through the park?
Why can’t you put an end to the interminable questions about your CV, and simply joke that you’re so boring, you’re the only guy in Canada who brags about being an insurance broker?
None of it makes sense, Andrew. None of it. You should be playing Fortnite with Hamish about now, getting ready to move into wherever we put Prime Ministers these days.
Instead, you’re fighting to get a decent lead. Instead, your caucus are whispering about the next leader.
It’s crazy, Andrew. But one thing isn’t crazy at all:
You’ve got three weeks left to win this thing.
And if you don’t, you’ll forever be remembered as the guy who couldn’t beat Prime Minister Blackface.
Who won? The separatist guy, Yves-Francois Blanchet. He was calm, he was cool and he was collected. He totally dominated.
Who lost? Justin Trudeau. He needed to remind everyone that that hopey-changey guy from 2015 is still around. He didn’t, because he isn’t. (And he was clobbered on one key point. More on that in a minute.)
Who won a silver? Jagmeet Singh. His French was better than expected, and he played the class-warfare card expertly.
Who barely won a French-language bronze – but seized an English-language gold? Andrew Scheer, with a caveat, which is also discussed below. Because, while he may not have won the French debate in French Canada – his equivocation on abortion was pretty bad – Scheer definitely won a French-language debate in English Canada. (I will explain.)
Anyway. Here’s my caveat about Scheer, who as I say won the debate outside Quebec, partly because no one watched it outside Quebec.
In a leaders’ debate, you need to make certain that your story that dominates. Here’s why: no matter how nice your opponent looks — no matter how articulate, no matter how charming — he or she can’t win if your message is the dominant theme of the night.
Like Andrew Scheer’s attack on Justin Trudeau’s two campaign planes. Because it (a) exposed Trudeau to be a hypocrite (b) it made him look vain (because he uses the second plane for his “canoes and costumes,” as Scheer quipped) and (c) it was the dominant theme in all the subsequent coverage in English Canada, and the Tories had graphics and ads ready to go to ensure that it dominated. It reminded me of what Jack Layton did to Michael Ignatieff in another debate, with devastating results.
Televised leaders’ debates show us all why having the dominant narrative is so crucial. TV debates give candidates a chance to stress basic campaign themes, and in front of what is usually the biggest audience of the campaign. They also let candidates depict their opponents’ campaign message in an unflattering way. But contrary to what some media pundits claim, debates are not about defining moments.
Debates are about ratifying your side’s issues — and the issues in the campaign — and looking good at the same time. They’re not about defeating the opposition’s claims, proving something, or answering reporters’ questions, either. They’re about getting your story — your spin, your message — heard by as many people as possible. Full stop.
Now, keep in mind that last night’s debate is not going to change voters’ minds about the key issues. Most of them have their minds made up by now. But in a tight race, like this one, debates can make a huge difference.
The most successful presidential and prime ministerial performers enter debates with a single clear message they wish to get across — and they use questions and interruptions to return to, or highlight, their single key message. As Dick Morris told me once, a simple way to measure success is to count the number of debate minutes devoted to your key messages (eg. for a progressive, health or the environment) and not the opposition’s (eg. for a conservative, tax cuts or “getting tough on crime”). You win when your story has taken up the greatest number of minutes. Before they head off to bed, you want the people who tuned in to conclude that your guy or gal is humble, energetic, trustworthy, passionate, positive — and that he or she is “fighting for me.”
Losing, on the other hand, is easy. If a liberal guy or gal performs well on an issue like “getting tough on crime,” and the other side doesn’t, it doesn’t matter that the liberal did a fabulous job presenting his or her case and sounded like the best debater in the history of planet Earth. The “getting tough on crime” issue is their issue. The other side will always sound more credible when the subject matter is their issue.
Anyway: facts tell, stories sell. And when you’ve got a winning story, stick to it. Don’t talk about the other guy’s story.
The plane thing is a winning story. It hurt Trudeau, big time.