By the time Justin Trudeau emerged from the front door of Rideau Cottage last week to announce his intention to end almost a decade as Canada’s prime minister, any element of surprise had evaporated. His future was sealed – and not by his choice.
As is so typical in our polarized times, Trudeau’s reign has been neither as masterful as his PR flaks suggest nor as disastrous as the monster truck crowds with their “[Expletive] Trudeau” stickers would have us believe. The truth lies somewhere in between. Despite the apocalyptic rhetoric of some opposition figures depicting Canada as a failed state in line with Somalia or Haiti, we remain arguably the most fortunate people on the planet and any commentary to the contrary is either self-serving propaganda or the worst example of First World ingratitude.
Among those who are glad to see Trudeau go there is a prevailing crankiness that he waited too long. True, abandoning ship days before our greatest trading partner and rather obtrusive (at the best of times) neighbour is set to (re)inaugurate an unpredictable kook as their head of state does raise some concerns. But let’s get some perspective.
Canadians are sleeping with an elephant, as the current prime minister’s late father, Pierre Trudeau, famously quipped. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Under the incoming US president, that country seems destined to become twitchier and gruntier.
Trump is proposing an Anschluss in which Canada becomes the 51st state. Why 51st, we have to wonder? Why not the 51st to, at a minimum, the 61st? How do Lilliputian Vermont and Rhode Island and the practically unpeopled Wyoming justify statehood, two senators each and the assorted benefits of statehood but our 3.8 million square miles is mooted to get a single state and a measly two senators? Canada’s 40 million people exceed the combined populations of the 21 smallest US states so excuse us for being a little miffed at the idea that our landmass and people deserve an American presence equivalent to Arkansas or New Mexico. But perhaps we’re getting ahead of negotiations here.
We josh, of course. But this much is deadly serious: were an American president to genuinely promote annexation – either militarily or through the economic bullying Trump suggested last week – Canadians would have little defence but throwing Timbits and snowballs at the invading forces. There is plenty of comedic fodder around this subject but laughing has a tendency to stop abruptly when an underestimated madman gets his hands on the levers of power.
The idea that who occupies 24 Sussex Drive makes a whit of difference in the circumstance is an exercise in national self-delusion. In the event of an American invasion of Canada, Greenland or Panama, who ya gonna call for backup? Perhaps China or Russia might be willing to come to our aid. There’s a cheery idea – although not entirely out of the realm, given evidence that both these countries have already had their fingers in our democratic processes, and geopolitical and economic interests in the Arctic landmass.
The Liberal party is now charged with finding a new leader to pull it back from an apparent electoral abyss. In most instances, we would argue that this is an internal party matter for partisans to decide. The added wrinkle of our constitutional conventions, in which the leader of the party in power effectively automatically becomes PM, adds gravitas to the current situation.
Whether or not one is a Liberal partisan, it may be worth participating in the process. In the last bun toss, in which Trudeau was selected, it was an effective free-for-all in which, without even coughing up a membership fee, anyone was pretty much welcome to cast a vote – sort of like a “no purchase necessary” cereal box contest for a balsa-wood airplane.
We are in a challenging political environment right now, where single-interest groups are flexing their disruptive muscles – anti-Israel activists, for example, are trying to cancel Christmas, they are disrupting public events, have shut down theatre performances and generally are making their small numbers have outsized impacts. While there is not on the horizon, at this point, a standard-bearer for the hate-Israel demographic, count on the myopic activists to inject this issue into the contest, likely to the detriment of the Jewish community’s safety and interests and, we would argue, to Israelis and Palestinians.
Those who believe in a multiculturalism where Jews are welcome, a world where both Israelis and Palestinians are safe, and a body politic where dialogue trumps flag-burning should really pay attention to the process the Liberal party is about to adopt to select their next leader – who will be our next prime minister – and ensure that our views and interests are at least as well represented as the regressive mobs, be they on one side or the other of the issues we care most deeply about.