The Paul Wells Show - Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Little Trumps Everywhere

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Today, we're sharing another except from Paul Wells' audiobook, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, read by the author himself.  Much of Trudeau's reign as Prime Minister has been shaped by major external events, including the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. This section of the book looks back on how Trudeau adapted to a Trump presidency. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes is published by Sutherland House. The audiobook was recorded at the National Arts Centre. You can download the entire thing wherever you get audiobooks.

Hi, it's Paul Wells. Today I'm sharing another excerpt from my audiobook, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, published by Sutherland House. You can get the full audiobook wherever you get audiobooks. Enjoy! Enjoy! Trudeau had such high hopes for the world and Canada's place in it when he was elected. In February 2016, he threw a dinner for Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations,

at the sprawling Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. Hundreds of guests were there, including every living former Liberal foreign minister and one former Conservative foreign minister, Joe Clark. Bonn repeated a bit of post-election Liberal rhetoric, telling the crowd that Canada is back. Nobody could blame him. He was in a good mood. Trudeau had told him Canada would contribute more troops to UN peacekeeping operations and compete for a rotating non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In fact, the peacekeeping contribution wouldn't begin for two more years, and would be so small as to be negligible. After a mission to Mali ended in 2019, Canada had fewer peacekeepers deployed overseas than at any point since modern peacekeeping began in 1956.

The Security Council bid lost by even more votes than Canada's previous candidacy under Harper. It was a cold shoulder for Trudeau's Canada. Of course, the cordial divorce between Trudeau and his dreams of a better world wasn't all about Trudeau. The world was going through some stuff. Canada would be lucky just to hang on. In March 2016, a month after Ban Ki-moon's Ottawa visit, Trudeau took nine cabinet ministers and a plane load of journalists to Washington for a two-day visit with Barack Obama.

There was a party when the delegation arrived in Washington. The weekend, a medium-high profile Canadian pop star dropped by. The PMO sent out lists of the fashion designers whose clothes Sophie was wearing. And yes, there was a state dinner and some serious work aligning the agendas of two governments. It felt like the launch of a new era. But Obama's presidency was in its last year, and everyone was trying to take the measure of a troubling new development in U.S. politics. On the flight home from Washington, Trudeau told reporters he was watching Donald Trump's candidacy for the Republican nomination with interest. You could argue that I won because I read the public better than the other leaders did, Trudeau said. I think Trump might be the guy down here with the best read of American voters.

It was a good call. Yet Trump represented a rejection of most of the things Trudeau was trying to do at home and in the world. He was against free trade agreements, multilateralism, immigration, NATO. The whole apparatus the Trudeau team embraced with the catch-all term, rules-based international order. The first sign that the old optimistic political consensus was under siege came in June, when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Trump's election in November was much more of the same, and far more threatening to Canada. It was a political earthquake. During his campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump had called the continental NAFTA free trade zone the worst trade deal the U.S. had ever made.

Taking the measure of this erratic new president, and trying to counter his instinct to blow up every trading relationship the U.S. had, became full-time work for Trudeau's government. Two months after the presidential election, Trudeau shuffled his cabinet, replacing Stéphane Dion with Christophe Freeland in the global affairs portfolio. Freeland was a regular on CNN talk shows during her days as a journalist. She had better connections in Washington than anyone else in Trudeau's government. Trudeau was determined to charm the new guy as much as possible. We're Canadians, he told his stunned advisors on election night. We can get along with anyone.

Telford and Butts made frequent trips to Washington to make nice with such Trump advisors as Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and others. But what enabled the Canadians to get the main elements of NAFTA carried forward into a new deal was a basic insight. They understood the stakes were so high that they couldn't depend on a few personal relationships at the top. One of Trudeau's smartest appointments was to name David McNaughton, a consultant and lead Ontario political organizer for Trudeau, as his ambassador to Washington. McNaughton, a consultant and lead Ontario political organizer for Trudeau, as his ambassador to Washington. McNaughton and Freeland's office designed a massive continent-wide program of constant contact between Canadian officials at multiple levels

and absolutely anyone in the U.S. who could be made aware of the value of the bilateral trading relationship. The Canadians included every federal cabinet minister, but also provincial premiers, big city mayors, figures from every party, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, Harbour's interim successor Ronna Ambrose, and others. Their travel itineraries took them to every corner of the U.S. They dropped in on members of Congress, state governors, the U.S. They dropped in on members of Congress, state governors, chambers of commerce, local TV stations. The effort lasted for two years. It generated a pro-Canada lobby the likes of which America had never seen. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Trudeau had picked five other big intractable problems and applied the same level of ingenuity and concentrated effort

to them. At least he picked one. But to reduce Trump to NAFTA would understate the way his election shook Trudeau. His election inflicted a cultural trauma on the liberals. Trump was the opposite of a feminist. He thought climate change was a hoax. He had an odd fondness for dictators in South Korea, Syria, and elsewhere. In many areas, he was a chaos agent, a faintly ridiculous random event generator. But on one file that was key to Trudeau's values, and Katie Telford's, he was relentless. He set the stage for the Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision by applying a strict pro-life litmus test to his Supreme Court appointees, and to Canadian Liberals who viewed themselves as natural allies of progressive Democrats, the way Trump ended Hillary Rodham Clinton's political career felt much too personal.

The Liberals started seeing little Trumps everywhere. Provincial Liberal governments in Ontario and Quebec went down to historic defeats in 2018, with the lowest share of the popular vote either party had ever won. Out went Kathleen Wynne and Philippe Couillard. In their place were Doug Ford and François Legault, perfect louts in Trudeau's eyes. In Alberta, Trudeau's relations with NDP Premier Rachel Notley had been tense, but at least they agreed on climate policy. In 2019, Notley lost to Jason Kenney, an old liberal nemesis from the Harper days,

who was on the record calling Trudeau an empty trust fund millionaire with the political depth of a finger bowl. Trudeau entered active politics in an age when the post-Cold War consensus in favor of multilateralism, collective action, free trade, and loosely patrolled borders was occasionally under fire but still relatively intact. A central assumption of his political rhetoric from 2012 to 2015 was that the Canadian government would find friends everywhere it went, the United States, Europe, friends everywhere it went. The United States, Europe, China, Alberta. Now a new generation of flinty men had risen, not just to question the old consensus, but to disdain it with impunity. This was the Liberals' mood in the spring of 2018, when they gathered in Halifax for another

national convention. Clinton was finished, Couillard and Wynne would be soon, and while the SNC-Lavalin fiasco was still almost a year away, already Trudeau's re-election seemed less of a sure thing. A highlight of the convention was an on-stage conversation between Gerald Butts and David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama's two winning presidential campaigns. The pairing was catnip for liberals who like to believe they are doing the Democrats' work out here in the colonies. For much of the session, the two men reminisced about progressive policy victories, Obamacare, the Canada Child Benefit, and spoke with real feeling about the burden politics puts on

families and personal relationships. But more than Butts, Axelrod brought urgent counsel for a progressive government that, unlike Hillary Clinton, hadn't yet lost. Suit up for battle. There are dark forces in our politics now, and sometimes they arrive in stealthy ways, Axelrod said. You have to be prepared to push back. You have to be prepared to push back. Trudeau was still proud of his 2015 decision to campaign without attack ads. Now, Butts was asking the visiting strategist, what, after all, is an attack ad? Axelrod said it was perfectly fine for governments seeking re-election to tell voters about the cost of voting for the other side.

That's not to say that politics of destruction are the way to go, he said. But it would have been derelict for us in 2012 not to make sure that people understood what the choices were. Justin Trudeau watched the exchange between Butts and Axelrod from the front row of the Halifax Conference Hall. The American had brought a precious gift, permission. Obama ran the first time on hope, the second time on contrast. Trudeau would do the same. I do not engage in personal attacks, but I will be very, very sharp on distinctions around policy, he said 16 months later at Rideau Hall when he launched the 2019 campaign. Two successive ethics commissioners had found Trudeau in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act that Stephen Harper had passed in 2006. He had abandoned his electoral reform

project, bought a pipeline, kicked two of his strongest women cabinet ministers out of the Liberal caucus, his vacation on the Aga Khan's private island, and his interminable family trip to India, which saw the Trudeau's repeatedly dressing in outfits most adult professionals in India don't wear to work, made people start to wonder whether he was simply a flake. He had legalized cannabis and doctor-assisted dying, brought in some sturdy social policy, underperformed consistently as a debater and public speaker. He was a mixed bag. His main opponent was Andrew Scheer,

a 40-year-old near-unknown who had been Speaker of the House of Commons, and therefore forbidden from stating his opinions for most of the time he'd been in Parliament. Scheer had needed 13 rounds of automated ballot counting to defeat his main opponent, Maxime Bernier, for the Conservative leadership. Bernier left to form his own party and setime Bernier, for the Conservative leadership. Bernier left to form his own party and set about working as hard as he could to split the right of Liberal vote. So Scheer had only a shaky mandate to lead his party and a tenuous grasp on the broader Conservative electorate. The Liberal campaign war room set about turning Scheer's candidate slate

into a liability by reposting embarrassing old tweets from conservative candidates. Then, in the campaign's second week, an astonishing thing happened. Time magazine reported that as a teacher at Vancouver's exclusive West Point Grey Academy in 2001, Trudeau showed up for an Arabian Nights gala wearing dark makeup over his face and hands. scala, wearing dark makeup over his face and hands. Time published a photo. It was ludicrous. Within a day, two more photos from other incidents appeared. Once when he was in junior college, another from his McGill University years. All told, Trudeau had spent perhaps 15 years keeping dark makeup handy for social occasions. After the news hit, the Prime Minister of Canada walked to the back of his campaign plane and apologized to the news cameras. I shouldn't have done that.

I should have known better, and I didn't. I'm really sorry. He apologized again the next day in Winnipeg. Darkening your face, regardless of the context of the circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface, he said. And then nothing happened. The polls were unsteady for a few days. Nanos measured a big increase in the number of respondents who weren't sure or didn't know how they'd vote. Then they were sure again, and the Liberals and Conservatives were essentially tied. That's how they ended the election, with sheerest Conservatives beating Trudeau's Liberals by 1.2 percentage points in the national popular vote, and the Liberals winning 36 more seats than the Conservatives. Trudeau had won re-election. In some ways, that's all that ever matters.

He had made it through scandal and self-inflicted humiliation to win a second term. Little of his dignity or early promise survived the fight, but he was still standing. Scheer, in contrast, announced his resignation as conservative leader seven weeks later. This audiobook was directed by Kevin Sexton, who's also the producer of The Paul Wells Show. Stuart Cox is executive producer for Antica Productions. This audiobook was recorded in studio at the National Arts Centre. You can get the full audiobook wherever you get your audiobooks.

The Paul Wells Show will be back in the fall.