On the day that Chrystia Freeland detonated the remains of Justin Trudeau’s premiership, it was noted that, at the emergency caucus meeting held that night, Freeland and Trudeau hugged. The prime minister likes hugs. He likes being hugged.
In her memoirs, Jody Wilson-Raybould, confirmed that even after Trudeau had fired her as attorney general for refusing to take his political direction in prosecuting SNC-Lavalin, there were hugs.
It was at a meeting on March 18, 2019 that she told him to his face, “I wish that I had never met you.” Of course the meeting began with a hug.
“As always, the PM hugged me,” she recalled. “This time I felt my skin crawl.”
He was always drawing close, too close. At first it seemed a bit much, but perhaps tolerable. Recall Wilson-Raybould’s 2015 swearing-in at Rideau Hall, her and the PM, hands on faces, gazing deeply upon each other. Even before that, Trudeau released a photo of him offering her the job, leaning forward, eyes locked, touching her hand.
Eventually, his hugs made her skin crawl. And so it was with the country.
In 2012, when Trudeau announced his run for the Liberal leadership, he spoke from his kitchen, wearing a T-shirt, offering a certain intimacy.
“When was the last time you had a leader you actually trusted?” Justin said. “And not just the nebulous ‘trust to govern competently,’ but actually trusted, the way you trust a friend to pick up your kids from school, or a neighbour to keep your extra front door key? Real trust?”
He offered to be our best friend. To pick up the kids after school. Over time, as Freeland and Wilson-Raybould would learn, that friendship was fake. Canadians gave him the front door key and he used it let himself in, hanging about, hectoring us and not taking the hint to leave.
It was the hectoring that grew most tiresome. For a determined secularist, he was brimming over with fire and brimstone for those not as enlightened as he. The constant virtue-signalling, the glib moral superiority, the disdain for other points of view — that was all a feature, not a bug. He knew better and didn’t hesitate in telling us so.
Those who opposed legal cannabis were hopelessly old-fashioned, not quite up to date with “because it’s 2015” thinking. Nevermind that the promenades of our great cities now reek of urine and pot.
Those who opposed medical-care-by-lethal-injection were dismissed as conjuring up slippery slopes and willing to let others suffer pain for their principles. The slippery slope turned out to be a cliff, but no matter, Trudeau was still at the edge, pushing the disabled, the distraught, the poor and the lonely to the edge.
Those who lacked his enthusiasm for China’s admirable dictatorship were wrong until the People’s Republic started kidnapping our people.
Those who opposed his carbon tax were irresponsible and reckless, until he himself decided to suspend it for (putative) electoral advantage.
Those who worried about surging immigration were racist. Those who opposed him on almost any issue were dismissed as racist, even though the man himself had a fancy for racist costumery.
He lectured the country, the churches — even the pope — on Indigenous affairs. He wore his Indigenous policy on his sleeve; actually had it tattooed on his arm. Then he went surfing on the Indigenous holiday he himself had created.
The country itself did not quite measure up, as Trudeau ceaselessly found fault with its history.
Everything revolved around him, and the population was being drawn into an ever-tighter embrace, the better for his superior character to rub off on us. It began as strange and ended as creepy. The nation’s skin began to crawl.
“He could effortlessly capture attention anywhere he went; he reveled in it, and consistently sought more,” wrote Stephen Maher, author of the Trudeau biography, The Prince. “It was, for instance, why he wore blackface on so many occasions that he could later not recall them all. He liked to dress up, be the centre of attention.”
And so he remained. Despite having lost the popular vote in both in 2019 and 2021, there was no humbling, no trimming, no reconsidering of whether the country would be better if it simply was more like him. Or the world for that matter. What was the Bollywood tour of India other than Trudeau’s confidence that he knew how to be a better Indian than his hosts?
The budget would balance itself, monetary policy would sort itself out, all from simply being in his presence. “Canada was back” on the world stage simply because he landed the lead role.
When things began to go wrong, it could not be his fault. His caucus did not appreciate him sufficiently, the nation lacked gratitude. His moral preening had long become mere posing and he alone did not notice.
Canadians have decided they don’t need a best friend in Ottawa; they will pick up their own kids. They don’t need a hug. They need Trudeau to go, and return the key.
National Post