Justin Trudeau is leading his best life in New York right now, completely detached from the disaster unfolding at home. As his government faces a vote of non-confidence on Wednesday, Trudeau has spent the last few days campaigning for Canadian votes in the city that never sleeps.
A strange thing about Canadian politics is that what a prime minister says on foreign soil often has more impact at home than what is said at home.
These days, Trudeau simply isn’t resonating with voters in Canada, his popularity is at an all-time low and people are tuning him out. When he’s on the world stage, though, it takes a different turn which is why Trudeau’s UN speech was mostly focused on domestic issues like $10-a-day child care.
If you happened to have insomnia and watched Trudeau’s appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, then you were treated to the same domestic pitch. Colbert, who is as liberal as they come and whose show could easily be called “watch as I ridicule conservatives” was slavish in his interview with Trudeau.
“Your Conservative Party leader, your opponent there, has been called ‘Canada’s Trump’ and I’m sorry about that,” Colbert said.
In fact, no one in Canada who isn’t on the Liberal payroll or working for the Toronto Star calls Pierre Poilievre Canada’s Trump. This was obviously something provided to Colbert’s producers by Trudeau’s team and while Trudeau didn’t jump on it, he didn’t correct the record, either.
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After all, his party has spent a lot of time and effort trying to connect Poilievre and Trump without much luck.
Just like he did at his speech at the UN, Trudeau focused on domestic issues, especially ones he knew would play well with Colbert’s liberal viewers in Canada and the United States. This interview wasn’t about putting Canada on the world stage, it was about trying to wake up former Liberal supporters in Canada to try to boost Trudeau’s political fortunes at home.
So, too, was his news conference held in New York City.
Trudeau actually attacked Poilievre as being an enemy of a free press over complaints his party and office made regarding a report that aired on CTV National News the other night. The report clipped Poilievre in a way that took three distinct statements he made, but spliced them together to make it sound like his non-confidence motion was all about defeating the government over their dental care program.
The report was so bad that CTV has apologized on air and on social media multiple times. Doctoring a report like that is nothing short of journalistic malpractice and no one should be shocked if people are fired over this.
Yet to Trudeau, complaining about this is an attack on a free press.
“Politicians who deliberately undermine the hard work of professional journalists are not standing up for democracy,” Trudeau said.
He also described anyone who would question journalists as being authoritarian in nature and anti-democratic. Perhaps Trudeau doesn’t remember questioning and challenging me when I’ve put tough questions to him or doesn’t realize that his own party’s deputy house leader, Mark Gerretsen, regularly scraps with me and other journalists he doesn’t agree with.
In my case it’s not because I’ve gotten something wrong, like CTV did, it’s pure politics. For Trudeau, questioning the media is abhorrent, unless he or his party are the ones doing it.
Trudeau is trying anything he can to try to reconnect with voters or scare them away from Poilievre. It was a year ago today that Leger reported a 12-point gap between Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives and Trudeau’s Liberals.
In the time since, the Conservative lead has only grown, Liberal support has shrunk and Trudeau’s political fortunes have faltered. No wonder he is so desperate to find any way he can back to relevancy.
We can all detect the stink of Trudeau’s desperation even though he’s in New York, and we are up here in the Great White North.