A Nation Without Grace

As Justin Trudeau comes to terms with the loss of his own caucus’s support and the inevitable end of his premiership, we have much to thank him for. Canada is far from the basketcase his haters will lead you to believe. It was his leadership that brought us programs we already take for granted like the Canada Child Benefit, and his guidance that brought Canada through the worldwide Covid pandemic with a per capita death rate less than half that of the United States and among the lowest in the world. It was his government that ensured that people whose jobs were destroyed by a worldwide economic shutdown would not starve and lose their homes, and that countless thousands of small businesses would remain solvent through the same period.

Did he make mistakes? Many. Show me someone who has never made a mistake and I will show you someone who has never tried to accomplish anything. Many of the things he did frustrated me, mostly around his continued inattention to the needs of rural Canada, and his weird courtships of foreign corporations. Many things he did frustrated the general public, too, with objectively small mistakes amplified with the help of an overwhelming Conservative media space eager to bring down a genuine progressive, buoyed by a preachiness to his idealism.

What matters at the end of the day is what drove Justin Trudeau? For that, I’ll refer to one of my favourite movie lines from a politician, the character Senator Gracchus, in the Gladiator, “I don't pretend to be a man of the people. But I do try to be a man for the people.” He has never understood the day to day struggle of the people, but he has always been aware that he has never understood that struggle, and has strived to do his best for those who face it. That approach, wanting to do well for others, is very easy to be taken as condescending and many Canadians saw it exactly that way.

No person who hates Trudeau has ever given me a credible, fact-based analysis of why they hate him. There are many insults hurled, there is a widespread belief that he has destroyed Canada, there are spurious statements about how he did not deliver on his values, that he has let in too many (non-caucasian, but they don’t say that part out loud) immigrants, or taxed us into oblivion, but none of them are based in empirical data rather than perception.

But on the facts, on the real-world outcomes for Canadians today within the powers of the federal government, we are in a generally better place than we were in 2015. Effective tax rates on everyone but the wealthiest have been reduced, not increased. Carbon taxes are cost neutral or better for most Canadians with the rebate program and have been shown to have played no part of inflation — and at that are only implemented in provinces that refuse to take action on climate change. There is less abject poverty in Canada today, especially among families with young children. Over a hundred Indigenous reserves have clean drinking water for the first time in generations. To name but a few examples.

The major failings Canada is facing are on housing and healthcare, both of which are provincial jurisdiction, and inflation, which is largely back under control and is international in scope, not a problem specific to Canada.

The federal government under Trudeau has spent the past decade trying to invest in improved healthcare across the country by making deals with provinces to fix specific weaknesses in exchange for additional money. Provinces are pushing back and so the investments don’t go anywhere near as far as they need to, and many are allowing user-pay health services to undermine the very fabric of universal healthcare.

On housing, Dalton McGuinty’s government focused on solving the problem with programs like urban intensification through the “Places to Grow” legislation of the mid-2000s in Ontario, in the face of already skyrocketing housing prices amidst rapid immigration. When the Conservatives retook the province after Kathleen Wynne’s mandate, the priority changed to how to maximise the profits available from housing and development, not how to maximise housing from the space available. Most provinces did not even do that much, and let “market forces” guide housing, resulting in the situation we are in today where corporations and both domestic and foreign investors are buying up housing and forcing ever increasing numbers of people to rent, raising rents, raising rentable house values, increasing homelessness, and creating a death spiral. Trudeau worked to fix this within the confines of federal power and resources, yet is blamed for this widespread neoliberal greedfest that is affecting far more countries than Canada.

Inflation, driven in part by rapid emergency injection of funds into the economies of several countries to get through the Covid pandemic, followed by greedy retail corporations jacking up prices to take advantage of the extra money in the economy while reducing their costs, was misdiagnosed. Central banks raised interest rates to cool the economy rather than having the federal governments rein in usury and price gouging. It did nothing to solve run-away prices, and put millions of people into unnecessary economic hardship. It did succeed in bringing inflation under control insofar as the rocketing prices for essential goods and housing reached the point where people could no longer afford them, so the retail sector has been forced to slow their untethered profiteering.

The rapidly rising interest rates only made it harder for people to borrow to buy overpriced homes and essentials in the meantime. Technically, then, they did work to cool the economy, but not by addressing any of the underlying causes of its turmoil, and caused hardship to those who needed the most help. Interest rates are at the discretion of the central bank, not the national government.

The people who say Trudeau is too woke, that he is too focused on social issues, are exactly the reason that Trudeau needed to express the ideas associated with being woke. The naked bigotry has been increasingly evident since Obama became US president in the 2008 election, when underlying racism broke out into the open, pushed most forcefully by people like Donald Trump and the birther movement, who could not handle the idea of a President who was not a white male. We saw it again when Greg Fergus became Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada, when the Conservative caucus tried hard to turf him from day one, unwilling to acquiesce to being kept to order by a black man. The anti-woke are overwhelmingly bigoted people who cannot handle being called out for it, who can dish it but cannot take it.

Ultimately, alt-right propaganda and a sustained multi-year campaign to target Trudeau paid off. Canadians got tired of his preachy personality, his stated desire to fix things beyond his power to accomplish, and his insistence on treating people from all corners of life as generally equal when those people often do not see each other as equals. His successes were taken for granted, while his failures were pinned to his chest.

The timing of his departure, announced on the morning of January 6th, four years to the day after Trump’s attempted coup for which he has been rewarded with another mandate, and putting Parliament in a position to be unable to rapidly respond to the returning aspiring dictator’s whims, is unfortunate. His time to move on had come some months ago, before he lost the thread in his belief that he needed to hold on for the good of the nation.

When I lost in 2019, the message at the door was already strongly anti-Trudeau, and his exit strategy should have been mapped out after losing the popular vote in 2021. While he saved the Liberal party from irrelevance by leading the party into the 2015 election, he may well save the Liberal party from irrelevance a second time by not leading them into the 2025 election.

He may be a day late to find the door, but to insult the Prime Minister on the way out is unjustified. Trudeau tried. He tried hard and for the right reasons, selflessly and at great cost to his family, whatever the perceptions are of him, and for that, Canadians should try, for once, to say thank you.

So, thanks Justin, for your hard work and your leadership!