The End of Trudeaumania. Luke Savage, Jacobin. Oct. 21, 2019.
Justin Trudeau may be decisively rejected in today’s Canadian election. The race has been shaken up by a surge in support for Jagmeet Singh and his social-democratic NDP, whose left-wing program is what many Canadians thought they were getting when they voted for Trudeau four years ago.
In 2015, the Liberals gained millions of votes on the basis of Trudeau’s personal popularity and a platform many mistakenly believed was a blueprint for transformative change. Predictably enough, Trudeau soon frustrated these hopes with a run of broken promises and a refusal to implement many parts of the ultimately modest agenda he had once campaigned on.
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As the Liberals governed from the technocratic center, the Trudeau brand carried on as usual, creating an ever-widening disjuncture between the government’s meticulously crafted political artifice and reality. When it emerged several weeks ago that the same prime minister who had built a cloying international image as the standard-bearer for inclusive liberalism had done blackface more times than he could count, the symbolism could hardly be missed.
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In essence, the NDP’s pitch is a more tangible and cogent version of what many voters — particularly the young — mistakenly believed they were going to get with Trudeau in 2015.
What all this means is that Canadian federal governments have comparatively few obstacles to passing transformative legislation, if indeed it’s their intention. Except in extreme cases, a prime minister with a majority in the House probably won’t face a backbench rebellion and isn’t going to run afoul of big donor money in the event they push legislation private interests dislike. Public opinion, of course, might be an obstacle: Governments aren’t generally prone to pursuing policies that are wildly unpopular. But majority public opinion in Canada appears predisposed to supporting big new social programs and higher taxes on the rich (recent polling, for example, has found that more than two-thirds of Canadians support a wealth tax and a big majority support the creation of a national universal prescription drug program).
For even more evidence of this, we need to look no further than Justin Trudeau’s own campaign messaging in 2015—which gestured, rhetorically at least, towards an activist and equality-minded style of governance. In office, however, Trudeau has largely governed from the neoliberal center: paying lip service to the problems and injustices facing Canadian society while doing little if anything to meaningfully alleviate them and, in some cases, actively moving things in the opposite direction. Unlike its predecessor, his administration has been willing to acknowledge the threat of climate change, but nonetheless remains fiercely committed to the construction of new oil pipelines. For the first time in Canadian history, it has tabled a poverty reduction strategy, a document which in practice amounts to nothing more than a series of new metrics for measuring poverty and includes no resources for actually reducing it. In a cynical sleight of hand, its signature tax hike on the rich was neatly paired with a tax cut for the slightly less rich. Having promised to reform Canada’s archaic electoral system, it reversed course midstream and denounced the very efforts it had sworn to take up as risky and dangerous.
Despite four years of a Liberal government in office preaching the rhetoric of progressive reform, little about Canadian society has fundamentally changed and there’s every reason to believe things will stay that way if the government is re-elected with another majority. And yet, members of the Canadian left can probably expect all the familiar sermons to be repeated when they inevitably protest. Despite the relative lack of obstacles they face compared to America’s Democrats, Canada’s liberals have long been masterfully dextrous when it comes to lecturing progressively-minded voters about the need for “pragmatism” and the necessity of never breaking too much with the status quo, even as they rhetorically acknowledge its injustices.
The Election and the Climate Crisis: A Tyee Reader. The Tyee. Oct. 16, 2019.
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