{UAH} Justin Trudeau’s Surprising Ascent

OCTOBER 16, 2015

Justin Trudeau's Surprising Ascent

BY JEREMY KEEHN

• SHARE
• TWEET

Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau campaigning with former Prime Minister Paul Martin in August.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY

For nearly a decade, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has confounded many observers' view of Canada as an open and pluralistic society with an idealistic global face. Its perceived sins have included opposing abortion funding in developing countries, stridently backing Israel, and oil-drenched climate villainy. Its diplomatic posture has at times been belligerent, and even militaristic. To some, the country has come to seem practically un-Canadian.

Harper, who has led the Conservative Party (and its antecedent) since 2002, called this year's election earlier than expected, in early August, setting the date as this Monday, October 19th. His gamble with the long campaign—it will be more than double the length of the previous two—was that the Conservatives could use their considerable fundraising advantage to beat back the threat posed by the traditionally progressive New Democratic Party, led by Thomas Mulcair, which held just under a third of the three hundred and eight seats in Parliament at dissolution, and the Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, which had barely a tenth. At the outset, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's poll average showed the Conservatives and N.D.P. in a dead heat, with the Liberals five points back. Since then, the campaign has wound through stretches of scandal (the fraud trial of a Conservative senator), sorrow (the publication of a photo of a Syrian toddler who died en route to Europe, and whose family had hoped to immigrate to Canada), more scandal (the departures of candidates and apparatchik from several parties, most memorably a former repairman who'd been filmed peeing in a client's coffee mug), and xenophobia (by the Conservatives, following a court decision allowing women to wear the niqab during citizenship ceremonies).

Toward the end of September, the polls began a shift that has crystallized in the campaign's final days. The N.D.P.'s support began to plummet, and the Liberals, who were decimated in the last election, in 2011, under Michael Ignatieff, began to vie with the Conservatives for the lead. In the past week, the Liberals have jumped ahead, and they now sit above thirty-five per cent, four and a half points clear of the Conservatives and twelve ahead of the N.D.P. A substantial contingent of Canadians will vote for whomever offers the best chance to defeat Harper, and that bloc appears to be coalescing behind Justin Trudeau, who was feeling confident enough this week that he asked voters to give the Liberals a majority.

A Liberal victory would be an operatic turn in a long-running Canadian psychodrama. No leader played as great a role in fostering the perception of a pluralistic and idealistic Canada than Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, who was Prime Minister for the better part of sixteen years, starting in 1968. Canada officially adopted bilingualism and multiculturalism during his tenure, forerunners to his crowning achievement: the patriation, in 1982, of the Constitution, which ended the U.K.'s legislative power over the country and included passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a bill of political and civil rights. (A 2012 study published in the New York University Law Review found that the Charter is now the constitutional document most emulated by other countries.) Trudeau, a self-confident public intellectual, was also among the most galvanizing leaders that Canada has had. Writing in The New Yorker in 1969, Edith Iglauer described the elder Trudeau's maiden election campaign as Liberal leader: "His every quip made the headlines, and he was photographed dancing in the streets and kissing his way across the country…. Trudeau's charm produced a nationwide reaction so powerful that it was given a name of its own—'Trudeaumania.' "

This mania had its depressive counterpart, which came to the fore when oil prices crashed in the early eighties, the pain exacerbated by an ill-conceived federal energy policy passed in 1980. The oil-producing West, in particular, blamed Trudeau and the Liberals for the fallout. Harper, who grew up in Toronto, had arrived in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1978 to work in the computer room at Imperial Oil. Within a few years, he had taken to the province's anti-establishment political religion with a convert's zeal, helping to birth a new party that later comprised the base of a reformed Conservative Party. In 2000, after Pierre Trudeau died, Harper wrote a Hitchens-esque scourging of the dead in the National Post. "Under his stewardship, the country created huge deficits, a mammoth national debt, high taxes, bloated bureaucracy, rising unemployment, record inflation, curtailed trade and declining competitiveness. From these consequences we have still not fully recovered," he wrote. "He continues to define the myths that guide the Canadian psyche, but myths they are."

Harper's politics, with their focus on the resource economy, security, and socially conservative values, formed very much in reaction to Trudeau, and they have resonated in the West and in rural areas, as well as among fiscal conservatives and some immigrant communities. His supporters frequently diagnose his most ardent opponents with Harper Derangement Syndrome, which, in its most acute form, manifests as a compulsive need to compare Harper's policies to those of George W. Bush. Those parallels have in fact hit close to the mark at times, for example when the Conservatives sent Canadian special forces to serve as advisers in Iraq, and in the wake of last fall's terrorist attack on Parliament, when they passed Bill C-51, a draconian security law that took up the sorry torch of the Patriot Act. "Harper Derangement Syndrome" was itself borrowed from the rhetorical wars of the Bush era, which made it an especially apt taunt, and one that highlighted Canada's comparable divisions.

Justin Trudeau initially seemed like an improbable challenger to Harper's legacy, and an improbable heir to his father's. His protracted path to the Liberal leadership began with a florid televised eulogy for Pierre Trudeau, and took him from teaching to engineering school to nonprofit work to a seat in the House of Commons. Since he became the Liberal leader, in 2013, the Conservatives have been trying to tar him as too callow to be Prime Minister. At first, the strategy seemed to work, especially as Trudeau announced his support for the legalization and regulation of marijuana, and made off-the-cuff remarks that came off at times as juvenile. Responding last year to the proposed escalation of Canada's involvement in the bombing campaign against ISIS, for example, he accused Harper of "trying to whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are."

During the campaign, though, Trudeau has confronted attack ads declaring him "Just Not Ready" with upbeat and effective "I am rubber/You are glue"–style spots—part of a strategy meant to contrast him with Mulcair, whose temper is notorious and who ran alternately too hot and too cold in debates, and Harper, whose petrocratic persona typically breaks only when he's watching hockey or singing Beatles tunes to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has also displayed some of his father's charisma. In a profile of Trudeau for the Globe and Mail, Ian Brown writes, "His talent for face-to-face connection is beyond words and logic, which may be why his opponents, Tutting Tom and Strapped-In Stephen, who can't manage it as effectively, mock him so viciously in public."

Then there's the vision question. Trudeau undoubtedly shares many of his father's most deeply felt ideals, and his rhetoric has been marked by principled stands that have at times seemed strategically ill-advised. With Canada in a mild recession, he has said that a Liberal government will incur a deficit in order to fund infrastructure. He has mostly stuck by the Liberals' vote in favor of Bill C-51 (though they now say they will revise the law). And, on Charter grounds, he has criticized Harper's stance on the niqab, despite government polls indicating that most Canadians side with the Prime Minister. These positions all stood to cost Trudeau politically, but they seem instead to have conveyed to many Canadians that he might be a genuine leader.

Of course, the Conservatives, or even the N.D.P., may yet prove the polls wrong, abetted by a new scandal that emerged on Wednesday, when a Liberal campaign co-chair stepped down because he was revealed to be moonlighting as a lobbyist. But as Paul Wells of Maclean's, Canada's foremost Harperologist, has suggested, the obsession with the Trudeau name that propelled Harper's ascent might now portend his decline. "In the last two years, Harper has neither amended his diagnosis of Pierre Trudeau nor drawn any substantive distinction between father and son. He seems to reserve the darkest corner of his political passion for Justin Trudeau," Wells wrote this week. "Again and again, it has distorted Harper's once-formidable judgment until now, when he is running with gadgets and sound effects against a man he once dismissed as a drama teacher."

Should the Liberals win, Harper would almost certainly resign. For many inside and outside the country, that alone would be enough to make Canada feel a bit more Canadian again. The Conservative base, absent the passionate countervision of its leader, would be left to hope that Justin Trudeau doesn't revisit what it sees as his father's sins.