I never knew too much about Justin Trudeau—who is now in the race for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada—other than the fact that his father’s stint in the Prime Minister’s office inspired my own father’s lifelong conservatism.
“Pierre Trudeau was the first and only Liberal I’ve ever voted for,” my father would say. My inclination was to paint all Liberal Party members with the brush of its late leader Stéphane Dion—whose infamous cry of “Do you think itʼs easy to make priorities?” fit right in with the Conservatives’ ‘Stéphane Dion is not a leader’ advertisements. This led me to expect a humiliating defeat in Trudeau’s March 2012 boxing match against Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau. The upset raised the possibility, that, behind Trudeauʼs flowing brown hair and smoldering eyes, may lie reserves of true strength. I didn’t think about it for too long, though, because he is, after all, part of an increasingly irrelevant third party.
Since Trudeau entered the leadership race, many have noted the similarities he shares with Barack Obama. Trudeau is young, handsome, charismatic, and has a real chance of bringing optimism and enthusiasm back into Canadian politics. But the similarities don’t end there. Like Obama, Trudeau was in Parliament for less than four years before beginning to campaign for higher office. And like Obama, Trudeau’s pre-political experiences reveal him to be a lightweight. Before serving in Parliament, Trudeau was more or less a permanent student, flitting from one intellectual obsession to another. He studied literature at McGill, education at UBC, engineering at the University of Montreal, and then, finally, returned to McGill University to begin a degree in environmental geography. This last degree was ultimately abandoned in favour of his 2007 parliamentary run. Some may look at Trudeau and see a Renaissance Man. Others may view him as unable to begin something and stick with it.
Recent articles in the National Post and the Toronto Sun have revealed that Trudeau is seeking to hire Mitch Stewart, a top campaign strategist for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 election bids, to join his leadership campaign. To quote the National Post, Trudeau is seeking to exploit “the U.S.-style tactics and U.S.-style strategy used in the recent U.S. campaign” to ease his way to the leadership.
Does Trudeau really think this is going to help him? Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, lest we forget, hinged entirely upon tearing down Mitt Romney’s character, shifting the focus of the election away from his own record, and appealing to the Democratic base through wedge issues. Obama abandoned any pretense of being a centrist, Clinton-esque, pro-business Democrat through his misleading attacks on Bain Capital and patronizing tone towards the successful (“if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”).
The Liberal Party has always been a big-tent organization, appealing to broad swathes of the Canadian population. It has never strayed too far left of Canada’s political centre.
Now, more than ever, its viability depends on portraying itself as a ‘middle-of-the-road’ alternative between a ‘far right’ Conservative Party and a ‘far left’ New Democratic Party (NDP). If Justin Trudeau were to adopt the divisive and polarizing campaign tactics of the United States Democratic Party (and, to be fair, its Republican Party as well), the Liberal Party will enter NDP territory and complete its fade into obscurity.
Justin Trudeau seems like a nice guy, even if his pre-political experience suggests he would be an ineffective Prime Minister. But for the sake of a middle-of-the-road, ‘left-of-center’ Canadian political faction, however, I do hope he eschews the divisive and polarizing rhetoric of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
