John Ivison: Another warning about Trudeau from yet another former Liberal insider
Old age and death are the only
guaranteed routes to forgiveness for politicians.
As English playwright Alan
Bennett once said: “If you can eat a boiled egg at 90, they think you deserve
the Nobel Prize.”
Perhaps it’s too much to expect
a dispassionate appraisal of a sitting prime minister.
But has anyone been as roundly
abused as Justin Trudeau by people who were formerly some of his closest
associates and colleagues?
Former government whip Andrew
Leslie, in his recent interview with National Post, is
merely the latest senior Liberal to publicly pour scorn on Trudeau, his cabinet
and the cabal of senior advisers around him.
He can be added to the list that
includes former ministers Bill Morneau, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott
in recent books and memoirs. Other former ministers who have left government,
such Catherine McKenna and
Scott Brison, have hinted at their exasperation, while publicly keeping their
own counsel.
Can they all be dismissed as
disgruntled former employees, or is there merit to the criticisms that the
prime minister and his entourage are unprincipled hyper-partisans who care more
about spin than substance?
A common complaint is that
Trudeau makes brazen commitments that he knows he can’t, or won’t, deliver
upon.
The latest charge from Lt. Gen
Leslie is that the prime minister and his cabinet are not serious about defence
and have no intention of meeting spending targets because they believe the
Americans will always defend Canada.
Leslie was involved in drawing
up the Liberal defence policy document prior to the 2015 election. He says that
this contributed to 2017’s “Strong, Secure, Engaged” policy that
had specific timelines for equipment and an annex of 110 or so deliverables
that were mostly missed. He said that since 2015, the Liberal government has
not spent or has reprofiled, deferred or lapsed around $20 billion that was
promised to defence, leaving the army “in a state of despair.”
Wilson-Raybould was at the
centre of the infamous SNC Lavalin scandal, in which Trudeau was found to have
used means that violated the Conflict of Interest Act to exert influence on his
attorney general. Wilson-Raybould later resigned from cabinet, was kicked out
of the Liberal caucus, won her seat as an Independent and then left politics in
2021.
Trudeau said he was merely
standing up for the jobs of his fellow Canadians.
In her book, Indian in the
Cabinet, she said she thought Trudeau would make a good prime minister and
create a good team but was proven wrong.
“There are lots of pretty words,
but there are a lot of promises that have been made that have not been kept.
And that leads, of course, to disillusionment and disappointment,” she said in an interview with Reuters
in 2021 .
In her book, she said she was
angry that she had believed Trudeau “was an honest and good person, when in
truth, he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away
with it.”
Philpott has also written a book
— Health for All — which is diplomatic about her exit from the Liberal party,
after leaving in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould.
But she also notes the demands
by Trudeau’s staff to land partisan punches on the opposition. “I don’t think
that things turned out the way they were initially described. The
hyper-partisanship is so built-in, it just becomes insurmountable,” she wrote.
Morneau’s criticisms in his
book, Where to From Here, are more explicit and damaging. The former finance
minister said policy rationales were often tossed aside in favour of scoring
political points.
He noted the recommendations of
the Department of Finance were disregarded on the emergency wage subsidy during
COVID, as Trudeau announced a much more generous program than the one Morneau
thought had been agreed upon. “It was one of the worst moments of my political
life,” Morneau wrote.
Challenges, he said, were not
managed on a daily basis at the highest level and Trudeau’s management and
interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking.
“The prime minister had an
inability (for) or lack of interest in forging relationships with me, and as
far as I could tell, with the rest of his cabinet,” he said.
Wilson-Raybould said she was
chosen because she was “an Indian in the cabinet” and Morneau agreed that
ministers were picked for promotional reasons rather than for what they brought
to the table. But that hardly mattered because power resided in the hands of a
cabal of advisers around the prime minister who compelled agreement from
cabinet ministers, he said.
One example of the improvised
nature of public policy-making, according to Morneau, was the “baffling”
decision to commit to a public dental plan when the pledge to bring in
pharmacare remained unfulfilled.
There are, no doubt, other sides
to these stories. Memoirs tend to ring their writers in halos and there is
clearly some score-settling taking place.
My point is, the consistency in
the accounts of some of the most senior Liberals elected in the sweep of 2015
adds to their credibility.
Not all were political rookies
who became quickly disenchanted at the grubby compromises of politics. Veterans
no longer in the frontlines complain that the Liberal party’s centrist
traditions were trashed to allow Trudeau to become Canada’s “first NDP prime
minister.”
When Trudeau launched his
leadership campaign, he appropriated Goethe’s mantra: “Dream no small dreams,
for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
It was the depiction of those
dreams that always fascinated Trudeau. Before the 2015 election, he told the
Globe and Mail: “I set the frame … And I’ll figure out how to get it across to
people.”
He has done that very
successfully ever since.
But his has been a government
captivated by words, not action.
Trudeau has no apparent interest
in the banalities of government, including the management of his cabinet or
caucus. Ministers — senior ministers — report that they rarely talk about their
portfolios with their boss. In the 2018 book, Un selfie avec Justin Trudeau,
Jocelyn Coulon, a former adviser to Stéphane Dion, said the relationship
between prime minister and his then foreign affairs minister was “glacial” and
the only private meeting the two men had was when Dion was fired. “The prime
minister is a man incurious about the affairs of the world,” Coulon remarked.
It is a situation that is
unlikely to have improved as capable ministers were replaced by less able men
and women, who, it was made clear, reported not to Parliament but to the
issues-management team in the prime minister’s office.
Senior bureaucrats say the
partnership with cabinet is frayed and the exhaustion palpable.
In the wake of the pandemic,
there was a near breakdown in the delivery of core services — from
passports to immigration visas; from airport security to the flow of travellers
across borders.
This week, years after the
crisis passed, CBC is reporting that
Canadians who want a passport still need to wait for three hours for service at
a Passport Canada office.
The sage of Baltimore, Henry
Louis Mencken, once satirized a government that sounds remarkably like
Trudeau’s as a “a broker in pillage”: a collection of individuals whose only
talent was getting and holding office and whose principal device was “to search
out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and promise to give
it to them. Nine times out of 10, that promise is worth nothing. The 10th time
it is made good by looting A to satisfy B.”
The prime minister may have to
wait until his old age before he gets any respect. The voting public seems to
have come around to the views of his former colleagues that the country doesn’t
need dreams that move the hearts of men, it needs some basic managerial
competence.
National Post
John Ivison: Another warning about Trudeau from yet another former Liberal insider (msn.com)
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