The Paul Wells Show - Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: The Boxing Match

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

In this excerpt from his audiobook, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, Paul Wells looks back to the beginning of Trudeau's political career. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes is published by Sutherland House. This audiobook was recorded in studio at the National Arts Centre. You can find the full thing wherever you get audiobooks.

Hi, it's Paul Wells. If you miss hearing me on this podcast, I've got some good news for you. Over the summer, I'm going to share a couple of excerpts with you from my audiobook, read by me. The book is called Justin Trudeau on the Ropes. It's an essay about how Trudeau has reacted to a volatile world and shaped the country over his eight years in power. You can download the entire thing wherever you get audiobooks. Enjoy this excerpt. In March 2012, Justin Trudeau was 41, a freshly re-elected Member of Parliament for a third-place party in the depths of despair.

He was tall and confident, with piercing eyes, a magical family name, and too much time on his hands. With 34 MPs and a dwindling cohort of Senators, the Liberal Parliamentary Caucus, recently shattered by the worst of three consecutive defeats at the hands of Stephen Harper's Conservatives, was the smallest it had been in Canada's history. Surely at this moment the Liberals needed their best talent in crucial roles. Yet the party's interim leader, Bob Ray, had appointed Trudeau his critic for youth, post-secondary education, and amateur sport. Since Parliament never debates youth, post-secondary education, or amateur sport, on most sitting days, Trudeau's attendance was strictly optional. Mostly he wandered the country giving motivational speeches and fundraising.

Sometimes he'd do a charity event. At the 2010 What a Girl Wants fundraiser for the Canadian Liver Foundation at the Chateau Laurier Hotel, Trudeau executed a saucy faux striptease. The tie was the only thing to come off. And somebody paid $1,600 for his company at lunch. That March, the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation had organized an event called Fight for the Cure, at which people from the professional classes would sell tickets and box with one another awkwardly.

It took Trudeau weeks to find a conservative who would face him. Finally, a beefy, conservative-appointed senator named Patrick Brazzo answered the call. The two men climbed into a makeshift ring in a packed ballroom at the East End Hampton Inn on March 31st. The whole thing, ridiculously, inevitably, was broadcast live on national television. Brazzo's arms were bigger than Trudeau's legs, and in the days before the match, Brazzo's conservative caucus colleagues had passed their time on Twitter, gleefully celebrating his victory ahead of time. In the event, it took Trudeau about seven minutes to pummel Brazzo so nearly senseless that the referee stopped the fight. Five weeks later, Trudeau's photo was on the cover of

Maclean's, illustrating an article that said, look, maybe this guy should be the next leader of what had been until Harper, the winningest political party in Western civilization. 49 weeks after that, by God, he was. And the next time Canadians got a chance to vote on the matter, the Liberals, with Trudeau as leader, snapped a three-election losing streak and returned to power, where they remain, after a fashion, to this day. This path to power isn't open to people of normal upbringing. If next week Jonathan Wilkinson,

the bookish and detail-oriented Minister of Natural Resources in Justin Trudeau's cabinet, decides he wants to take the next step in his political ascent, a charity boxing match will not help him. It will do Anita Anand no good to enter a pie eating contest, or for Chrystia Freeland to appear on So You Think You Can Dance. Although now that I mention it, I find myself wondering whether she's considered the possibility. This is because, unlike all his predecessors

and any potential successor, Trudeau has trafficked all his life in the currency of attention. Go ahead and look at him. People have been staring at him all his life. And whatever you think while you look, whether your reaction is awe or disappointment

or the purest contempt, all I can tell you is you're not the first. Somebody else had the same reaction long before you came along. Somebody else will have it after you leave. Attention is the medium through which he moves. It is his luminiferous ether. He told an interviewer in 2002 that he was like someone who was raised by wolves or the person that cultivated an extremely large pumpkin. But even that didn't quite capture the strangeness of his situation, because at least the person with the pumpkin grew a pumpkin, whereas all Trudeau did was pop out of the womb. On Christmas Day, 1971, the first child of a radiant Vancouver hippie, newly married to a weirdly compelling prime minister whose political honeymoon was not yet over. Which means he's not even like other political sons. There were no headlines

on the day Paul Martin Jr. was born to Mr. and Mrs. Paul Martin Sr., or Preston Manning to Ernest and Muriel. So beating up a senator wasn't an attention-getting exercise for Justin Trudeau. It was an attention-using exercise. Brezeau's face wasn't Trudeau's medium of expression. You were. Your expectations were. They still are. Everybody's convinced that this black belt in karate with massive arms is

going to clean up the pretty boy, Trudeau told a reporter before the fight, because he grew up in the mean streets of Maniwaki, and I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth, you know? That's what everyone says, right? So as it stands, I can't lose. Even if I do actually lose, I know I will have gone in and people said, well, there wasn't a chance anyway. I begin with that stupid boxing match because apparently the damn thing is still with us even today, when the stakes for Justin Trudeau and for Canada are incomparably higher than a charity spectacle. I'm told that Trudeau keeps the boxing match in his head as a reference, a model. Every time he's in trouble, he thinks, I've been in trouble before, and they were wrong to count me out. Of course,

Trudeau's not a fool. It is as obvious to him as to you that the business of government is more important and complex than the theater of stunts. But he likes the fight as a metaphor. He was on the ropes. Everyone was watching. Some made an early start of gloating. He won anyway. This is enough like what happened later, in the 2015 and 2019 and 2021 elections, that he mentions it sometimes to friends. Now he's on the ropes again. The new Conservative opposition leader, Pierre Pauliev,

has all but caved in Trudeau's ribcage in the opening round. To Trudeau, it all feels familiar and more reassuring than you probably expect. He's been here before, in the space between what's happening and what you expect. He knows everyone is watching. When were they not? At the end of 2023, Trudeau met an annual appointment and gave a year-end interview to one of his oldest friends, the otherwise retired talk radio host Terry DeMonte. When Pierre Elliott Trudeau died in 2000, Justin Trudeau hid from the crowds and the grief in Terry DeMonte's house. Now Trudeau said, you know me well enough. You know what I believe. Do you actually think I could walk away from this fight right now? Again, Trudeau's no fool. He knows winners eventually lose, and a sports metaphor isn't a talisman against all ills. But if he does actually lose this time,

it'll still be like fight for the cure, because he'll know people said there wasn't a chance anyway. The image of Trudeau leaning against the ropes and taking his wax is apt for another reason, because for all his pedigree and physical grace, the work of politics has never come easily for him. He's more intelligent than a lot of people are willing to believe, and at least as charming as you'd suspect. But he is no great public speaker or gifted debater. His judgment is often terrible. He has not surrounded himself with great talent. In fact, he has discovered a real gift for chasing talent away.

He has announced massive reforms he had no intention of implementing, changed his mind, sometimes simply given up. Events have buffeted him as much as any leader. Perhaps only in the last year has he begun to age in any visible way, to betray in his features and carriage even the slightest deterioration after leading his party for a decade. But the rope-a-dope exacts its costs. Each time you pull yourself back to your feet, you're less spry. Your range of future action narrower. The Liberals swept to power in 2015 after years in the

wilderness, only to discover that the very manner of their ascent made them a different government from the one they had imagined, more cautious and scripted. Trudeau fought back in 2019 from powerful self-inflicted blows, the Aga Khan vacation, the SNC-Lavalin affair, the revelation of his astonishing habit as a young man of compulsive blackfacing for social occasions. But to hang on, he had to sharply adjust his approach to campaign tactics. Deep social divisions that were entrenched in Canada even before the COVID-19 pandemic led Trudeau to become a more starkly polarizing figure, during and since the pandemic, than he ever wanted to be. Hard times wear leaders out. It would have been instructive to watch anyone else,

a luckier Stephen Harper, say, or some imagined, more conventional liberal, navigate the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, a hardening of global attitudes toward China, a coarsening of discourse on social media, a deadly pandemic, a continent-wide storm of wildfires, inflation, two wars. I doubt there was any elegant way to do it. Jason Kenney's career didn't survive the times, nor liberal governments in the two largest provinces. Assessing Trudeau requires keeping an eye on the treacherous ground he's walked. Now he faces his most punishing test

against an unsentimental bruiser named Pierre Poiliev in a moment of multiple global crises. He's come back from tough situations before, but none this tough. I offer no prediction of the outcome, but I can't look away. 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. © transcript Emily Beynon