It was Justin Trudeau’s father, when he was prime minister, who accurately described MPs as “nobodies” when they are “50 yards from Parliament Hill”.
We can all see the accuracy of Pierre Trudeau’s famous 1969 quip in the current campaign by some Liberal MPs to get his son to resign as Liberal leader.
This before the Liberals get smoked in the next election, particularly if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is still large and in charge.
Regarding a historical footnote, when Pierre Trudeau described MPs as “nobodies” the moment they leave Parliament Hill, he was actually referring to opposition MPs.
But the description was so apt for all MPs that it quickly became part of Canadian political lore.
The simple reality is that for decades of both Liberal and Conservative federal governments, political power has been steadily bled away from MPs and transferred to the PM, his unelected advisers and the Prime Minister’s Office.
Consider the current campaign by some Liberal MPs to get Trudeau to resign, which sounds as if the party itself is having a nervous breakdown.
It has to be one of the weirdest attempted coups in political history, half-hearted, disjointed and poorly organized, with the organizers themselves running to the media to tell them, anonymously, what they’re going to do, before they’re ready to do it.
The entire fiasco sounds less like a coup than a massive therapy session for Liberal MPs, many of whom are in danger of losing the ridings they’ve held since 2015.
Indeed, many of the MPs calling for Trudeau to resign (mostly anonymously) are conflicted about what they’re doing, knowing they owe a huge debt of gratitude to Trudeau for rescuing them from the political wilderness in the 2015 election and keeping them in power for nine years.
But what has also happened since then is that what used to be the Liberal party has become a cult of personality built around Trudeau.
Unlike the Conservatives, for example, who have been leading the Liberals by double digits in the polls for months, the Liberal caucus has no way of forcing an unpopular leader to quit.
While there are other ongoing efforts to pressure Trudeau to resign, backbench Liberal MPs are nowhere near the starting line.