Trudeau Missing His Aline

When I was elected in 2015, I told my staff that if Prime Minister Trudeau rose, we would rise with him, but if he fell, we would need to have found our own way. It was important not to tie ourselves, our work, our message to the leader beyond what was necessary. We were there for the people of our riding through the vehicle of the Liberal party — with which I was personally most philosophically aligned — to get their message to, and needs addressed in, Ottawa.

I resented the “Team Trudeau” messaging of the Liberal Party through the 2015 campaign. Trudeau himself had told us when he won the leadership two years earlier that the Liberals were finished with hyphenation. The era of Chretien-Liberals and Martin-Liberals, of red-Liberals and blue-Liberals, was to be behind us. Yet we were hyphenating ourselves to him and deemphasising the very Liberal brand that had brought us together.

I did not, however, resent what he and “Team Trudeau” stood for, the ideas he brought forward, the intensity with which he was willing to fight for them, the risks he was willing to take to move Canada ever so slightly forward. He was unapologetically progressive in that first campaign, daring the NDP to move left. I privately teased my NDP opponent, who had beat the incumbent NDP MP at nomination and was favoured to win my riding, that they were the centrist party under Thomas Mulcair and we were the left wing party. The quip clearly stung, but we were able to have an enormously respectful relationship through the campaign.

Canadians were tired of the autocratic Conservative government of Stephen Harper and were looking for a better way forward. Thomas Mulcair came across as an angry pragmatist intent on winning power. Justin Trudeau came across as a young idealist looking for an opportunity to change the world.

Early in the campaign, I had an opportunity to meet Sophie Grégoire, the leader’s wife, at a private event. She impressed me enormously and showed herself to be an integral part of who Justin Trudeau was, a part of the leadership that the public was not able to see. In that brief moment, the pure love between them seemed infectious, and their relationship symbiotic.

When they split up in the summer of 2023, a critical part of Team Trudeau was lost. I felt that Grégoire had not been given the credit she deserved for the success of the Prime Minister and expressed my concern that summer that Trudeau would need to find a new source of balance, in the absence of his partner of the past two decades who had been such an integral part of his success.

In the year since, Trudeau’s decisions have changed tone. His public courtship of Mark Carney appears increasingly desperate and altogether odd. A central banker is hardly the anti-establishmentarian visionary leadership Canadians are so desperate to find. With the return of Trump south of the border and Pierre Poilievre’s clear indication that he would be subservient to the Republican president, Trudeau seems to believe that he must stay to protect us from this new threat.

His idea of naming Crystia Freeland the Minister responsible for Canada-US relations was not, on its own, a bad one. There is nobody in cabinet more qualified for the role. But it was handled in such a spectacularly hamfisted manner that it reflected a missing background damper in decision making. It is unlikely that such a move would have been handled quite as badly four years earlier.

The Prime Minister’s entourage is controlled by a tired, insular inner circle that does not participate in or observe the real world, and there does not seem to be anyone close enough to the Prime Minister who is able to tell him. That he has not refreshed the highest ranks of his office in the more than nine years since he took power is profoundly damaging. The results, where a significant portion of his own caucus, most of whom won on his coattails, want him gone, where the Liberals are losing every by-election they fight, where Canadians polled overwhelmingly want to stop hearing his name, speak for themselves. The Prime Minister’s team needs a refresh. Failing that, the Liberals need a refresh. If they fail that, Parliament will get the refresh Pierre Poilievre so desperately craves at the polls.

Leading the country through progress and times of crisis is not, on its own, enough to win the next election. The country has to see where you are going and want to go there with you, not only where you have already been. Even Winston Churchill was resoundingly ejected from the Prime Minister’s office within just a weeks of winning the Second World War in Europe.

Jean Chrétien was famously reliant on his late wife Aline as his closest advisor. She was a part of his government, his entourage, his personality, his leadership, his success. She offered the balance he needed to govern competently, a dampening voice against whom he could bounce ideas without the interference of an insular senior staff. After ten years in power, Chrétien was nearly as popular as the day he arrived, and he — they — knew when it was time for him to stay, and when it was time for him to go.

Trudeau has lost this balance. He is missing his Aline, if only to tell him what he needs to hear.