M. Trudeau is 41, white, straight, and married with two kids. He worked for a couple of years as a high school teacher (teaching drama) before being elected Member of Parliament for the Montréal riding of Papineau. He has more charisma in his little finger than the incumbent Prime Minister, "Call me Steve" Harper has in his whole cold body.
Other than that, however, young Trudeau doesn't have a very lengthy résumé. Not much to recommend him for the job of Supreme Leader of the Great White North. He is not given to making weighty pronouncements, either oral or written, about the issues of the day or what he would do to make Canada a better place.
Indeed, Justin Trudeau has been accused (already) of being nothing more than a pretty face framed in curly hair, the political equivalent of the other Justin, aka the Beaver. [It appears you're not really in tune with pop culture. Ed.] Questions arise. Who is the power behind the throne? Who is pulling the strings that animate the adorable puppet?
Agent 3 was a card-carrying Liberal for decades. He was present in 1968 when Trudeau Père (Himself) was chosen to reinvent the Liberal Party, the "Natural Governing Party" which had fallen into something of a rut under the bland and ineffectual leadership of Lester "Mike" Pearson.
Pearson's nickname -- "Mike" -- tells a story. Although the moniker had been hung on Pearson years before, it was seized on by one Keith Davey as a means of brightening Pearson's dull and stodgy image, making him seem more the sort of dynamic, straight-up guy that the voters of the 60s wanted to lead them. Not quite JFK, to be sure, but not Dwight Eisenhower or Louis St-Laurent either. So "Mike" it was, and Pearson finally managed to beat the old dinosaur, John Diefenbaker.
Keith Davey became known as "the Rainmaker", a reference to his alleged prowess in manipulating the electorate. He guided Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau (all the same person, and father of Justin) to smashing electoral triumphs, overcoming the enmity of the majority of westerners and WASPy bigots east of the Manitoba border. No book on Canadian politics in the 20th century would be complete without a lengthy chapter on Senator Davey, as he eventually became.
Davey was inevitably surrounded by a number of acolytes and hangers-on, among them two young fogeys who would in due course be elevated the hog heaven, Senators Jerry Grafstein and David Smith. Both Grafstein and Smith are Toronto boys, whose view of Canada extends about as far as you can see from the top of the CBC building on a clear day. Neither of them was able to get elected to the Commons, yet they were powers in the smoke-filled back rooms. And so they remain.
To come to the point [at last! Ed.], if the likes of Senators Grafstein and Smith are the ones who really run the Liberal Party today, Canadians would do well to reject the attractions of their latest front man, young Justin. It was not his father, but a clique of Toronto and Montréal academics, intellectuals and media types -- John Ibbotson calls them "the Laurential elites" -- who devised the disastrous policies for which Trudeau the father is reviled even today.
One example would be the National Energy Policy, designed to ensure cheap power and gasoline for the cities of the east, at the expense of the Canadian west. Why? Because the majority of voters lived in the east. Carry Toronto and Montréal and you carried Ontario and Québec. Carry Ontario and Québec and you carried Canada. And so it came to pass.
One more example -- the opening of the floodgates to immigration from the Third World. Canadians of the 60s were hardly clamouring for hordes of brown and black people to move into their neighbourhoods. But the Laurentian elites -- "Volvo liberals" is what I call them -- felt the power of white liberal guilt for all the evils of the colonial era, and thought it would be an act of contrition to invite the Pakistanis, Jamaicans, Indians etc etc to bring their cultures and their appetites to Canada. Besides, in a few years after arrival, those wretched huddled masses would be voters... grateful voters! And so it came to pass.
In its never-ending and insatiable quest for perpetual power, the Liberal Party of Canada forgot that power comes from the people. Not just the immigrants and urban elites of Canada's two largest cities, but the real people who live out in the boondocks -- the "905" region of Ontario and the vast white-bread tracts beyond. John Ibbotson describes the result in "If Trudeau leads, will Liberals follow?"
The Liberal Party, Ibbotson writes, "no longer understands Canada: the dynamism of the West; the beleaguered, defiant French in Québec; and especially the many millions who live in the suburban cities that dominate Southern Ontario.
"Those millions...mostly belong to a middle class that is suspicious of governments that promise to help them with health care, education and other needs, but that seem careless about protecting and promoting the businesses that make those services possible. Stephen Harper has made it his life’s mission to connect with them, to understand them, to talk to them in their language. But this is now a second language for Liberals, and they are far from fluent."
Last night, Justin Trudeau launched his campaign for the Liberal crown in Montréal, naturally enough. He mouthed the inevitable platitudes about working harder, building a newer and better Canada, yada yada yada. But he has yet to convince Agent 3 and other ex-Liberals that he is speaking for himself, and not for the Laurentian elite which still seeks to impose its outdated and exclusionary brand of liberalism on a disenchanted and disaffected party and country.
Suggested reading: "If Justin Trudeau listens to the old guard, he'll lead the Liberal Party to its doom", by John Ibbotson, in today's Globe and Mail.
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