So Justin Trudeau worries, en passant, about the direction of Stephen Harper's Canada. So he regrets how Harper's policies are seen in Quebec, given its distinctive values. So Trudeau thinks if a callous conservatism were to triumph in Canada, he could see Quebec going its own way, and he might go, too.
So what?
Oh, the horror. Social media was agog. Politicians howled. The National filled the early minutes of its puzzling broadcast with a breathless account of the hysterics in Parliament that day.
To divine these musings from Olympus, the Citizen consulted a trio of wise men. It assembled a political theorist, a political philosopher and a political scientist - really, that's how each was identified - apparently persuaded that it needed one of each to decipher the mind and motivations of "the real Justin Trudeau."
Savouring their five minutes of fame, the sages brought Trudeau under their steady gaze, divining every word, syllable and inflection, conducting a kind of pseudo psychoanalysis on the poor guy. It wasn't very flattering.
Self-indulgent! Narcissistic! Immature! Irresponsible! Imprudent! The confessions of an adolescent! The ravings of a dilettante! A lightweight! A poseur! A dramatist!
You can read their critique of Trudeau and wonder just who is self-indulgent here. You might also wonder why these big brains have taken this little homily so seriously.
Hell, you might even say, the joke's on them.
What Trudeau said is pretty innocuous, largely because it is hypothetical. "If, at a certain point, I believe that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper - that we were going against abortion, and we were going against gay marriage, and we were going backwards in 10,000 different ways - maybe I would think about making Quebec a country," he said.
"If," he says. "At a certain point," he says. "Maybe," he says. "I would think," he says. How much more conditional could he be?
Even so, this Canada is not yet taking shape, however distasteful Trudeau and others may find Harper's Conservatives. The prime minister has said that the hard-line conservative agenda - ending gay marriage, reversing abortion on demand, restoring the death penalty - doesn't interest him.
Harper knows there is no stomach for this kind of social re-engineering in Canada, that revisiting any of these issues would send Canadians into the streets. It would cost him his agenda, his credibility and, eventually, his government.
Trudeau presumably knows that, which is why he might have chosen other illustrations of a Conservative dystopia. What may bother him more are the other items on the government's agenda: the abolition of the long-gun registry, the weakening of the CBC and Radio-Canada, the commitment to smaller government, building more jails and buying expensive warplanes.
None of these is a winner in Quebec, which may explain why the Conservatives remain invisible there after six years in power.
To the wise men and their acolytes, Trudeau was staggeringly foolish to say this, and here was another opportunity to kick him around.
But Trudeau wasn't just being hypothetical or rhetorical, he was being himself. Anyone who thinks that he's not devoted to Canada in the marrow of his bones is mistaken. There is no federalist in Quebec today who can speak of Canada with more clarity and passion, in both English and French, than Justin Trudeau.
More likely, Trudeau was being strategic. He knew what he was saying, however qualified, and he knew his audience: Quebecers who share his anxiety.
But, oh, to the cognoscenti, parsing the radio transcript as if it were an ancient text, this Trudeau, he is self-absorbed. And to think, Junior wants to lead the Liberal Party! What presumption!
But here is what you won't read about Trudeau.
He entered politics the hard way. Unlike his illustrious father, who ran for Parliament in a safe seat in English Montreal in 1965, Justin ran in 2008 in Papineau, held by the Bloc Québécois, what he calls the poorest riding in Canada. In an election where his party lost seats in Quebec, he won his own.
In 2011, as the Liberals collapsed in Canada and lost more seats in Quebec, Trudeau won again, against a resurgent NDP. This time he tripled his margin of victory.
Just before the vote last April, when things weren't looking so good for the Liberals, Trudeau's campaign office in inner Montreal was bustling. He said confidently that he would win, and it wasn't braggadocio.
Trudeau has never said that he is destined to lead the party; others have. To the contrary, he worries about the impact of his absences on his young children and his wife, whom he surprised this week with a trip to Paris.
He won't run for the leadership this time. But if he is serious about the future, he will sharpen his game, master an issue, write a book, champion a cause. In five years, he'll be a player.
Just watch him.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Andrew Cohen
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