Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should not have been in a position to tell Chrystia Freeland on Friday, three days before she was to deliver a fiscal update, that he no longer wanted her to be finance minister, but that he did want her to stay on in a different cabinet post — only to find out Monday morning that she was resigning from cabinet altogether.
A source told The Globe and Mail Trudeau offered Freeland the unenviable job of managing Canada-U.S. relations. That’s not just a demotion; it’s a nightmare.
That’s monstrous political malpractice, of a sort Trudeau and his leading advisers have demonstrated before, if perhaps not quite this spectacularly or at a moment of such geopolitical peril. Indeed, it’s precisely what Trudeau did to Jody Wilson-Raybould: The demotion he offered his then attorney general and justice minister was to Indigenous services, which is at least an actual government department, though he apparently neglected to consider that as an Indigenous Canadian, Wilson-Raybould might not be keen to be in charge of the Indian Act.
Freeland’s proposed demotion, to dealing with the Trump administration full time, came two weeks after Trudeau didn’t bring her along to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, despite her chairing the reconstituted Cabinet Committee on Canada-U.S. Relations. (That’s the one that disbanded when Joe Biden became president, because all our problems were presumably over.)
Trudeau’s inability to learn from mistakes, to get basic things right, to respect his cabinet (which was a campaign promise) and caucus — not to mention simply togovern — is precisely why the Liberal cabinet and caucus should have forced him out ages ago. Or failing that, at the end of this past October.
Remember the end of October? Everyone was asking, could Trudeau survive the caucus revolt? There was an airing of grievances! More than 20 MPs — 20! More than! — reportedly signed a document urging the PM to resign, although reports also suggest Trudeau may never even have seen their names. By my count, only two Liberals, both backbenchers, publicly called for Trudeau to step down. More spoke up to defend him. That’s frankly pathetic.
Some Liberals were reportedly consternated by the fact there was no “mechanism” for them to force Trudeau out. Had the caucus voted to enact provisions of the Reform Act, they could have triggered a leadership review via secret ballot — as the Conservatives did with Erin O’Toole after the 2021 election.
This was always ridiculous. If you want your leader gone, you just make it happen — any way you can. You organize, scheme, bite ankles, stick knives in backs, commit horrible betrayals, speak on-record to the media (more often than this gang spoke off the record), resign en masse. Maybe you call up some veterans of the Chrétien-Martin wars for advice; no doubt most of them want Trudeau gone yesterday as well.
You just make his life miserable; you humiliate him; you make his position untenable … you know, like Freeland just did pretty much all on her own on Monday morning (with an assist from ex-housing minister Sean Fraser who resigned less colourfully right around the same time). Nobody on Monday was saying the Liberals can’t get rid of Trudeau. They were saying how urgently it needs to happen, by hook or by crook. Many were wondering how could they have let this drag on so long.
I suspect it’s simply because most MPs think of themselves as fundamentally subservient to Dear Leader — more than to their constituents, more than to their party, more than to their country. That’s hardly a novel observation, but the Liberals’ hesitance to mutiny even as Captain Trudeau rams the ship into the iceberg, over and over again, might be the wildest demonstration of the problem yet.
It’s probably worse with as big a personality as Trudeau. He signed your nomination papers; he feted your victory with a double-handshake and a steely look straight into your eyes; his surname is Trudeau, for God’s sake! But MPs in all parties need to be studying this astonishing meltdown and considering how best their caucuses should think of their leaders in future.
The NDP would naturally be first in line: As amazed as many are that Trudeau has managed to hang on to the Liberal leadership, Jagmeet Singh seems to think his MPs’ job is little more than propping up this crumbling sandcastle of a government, while slagging it off at every turn. Trudeau owns an extremely valuable sports car, inherited from his father. Unlike Singh with his Maserati, the prime minister at least has the good sense not to be seen driving around Parliament Hill in it.
So far, anyway.
National Post
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