With the bullying controversy a heated one in our schools and with Trudeau referencing Harper’s … let’s call them ‘low-grade tactics’, the message comes through: Political leaders should occupy higher ground. Canadians deserve a better role model as prime minister than a practitioner of gutter politics.
The ad’s release is nicely timed. Trudeau is getting help from an unlikely source. Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer, himself a Conservative, issued a ruling Tuesday which, in effect, repudiated Harper’s gagging of his own MPs. The ruling gave the members more freedom to speak their minds in the run-up to question period. Trudeau sided with the Tory dissenters — a smart move in his first week in the job, a week during which he wasn’t noted for making many others.
Trudeau clearly is gambling on the high road. But given his newness, his potential youth appeal, his politics-of-hope message, he had to come up with something that set him apart from old-school politicians. NDP leader Tom Mulcair, for one, is going after the Conservatives the old-fashioned way: with fire and brimstone.
If the Trudeau ad is to be effective it will need widespread distribution. His campaign has financial resources, though not as much as Harper’s dirt machine. The problem for previous Liberal pilots who also preached the high road was that they didn’t have the war chests they needed to get their message out.
The other thing that Trudeau needs are more concrete measures to reinforce the message that he really does want a new way, that he really does have a vision of a new democracy for Canada. To date he has put forward some democratic reform proposals — nothing substantial enough to constitute the type of overhaul the system needs after decades of deterioration.
In his new ad, Trudeau defends teachers, saying he is proud to have been one. It’s a knock on the Tory ads demeaning his qualifications. Those ads were pretty rich, given that Harper’s background upon becoming Alliance party leader amounted to little more than a few years as an MP (same as Trudeau) and a few years as head of a small right-wing lobby group, the National Citizens Coalition. Though he has a graduate degree in the subject, Harper was never an economist.
The Trudeau team is well aware that previous attempts to bring down Harper on abuse-of-power issues have not been successful. It may be that Canadians, accustomed to seeing unsavoury conduct from their leaders, weren’t yet convinced that the Conservatives were worse than their rivals. But the Conservatives have put up more and more sleaze as they’ve gone along and their new attack ads have been greeted with scorn by most commentators. And in Trudeau, the Conservatives face someone who has much more support to begin with than recent Liberal leaders.
In his ad, Trudeau briefly clicks on one of the Conservative ads used against him, turns it off, turns to the camera and says, “Canadians deserve better.” He certainly could use a switch of the dial. The Conservatives received a big break in timing with all the recent news of terrorism at home and in the U.S. It played to their strength on the security issue. It also tended to overwhelm other developments — such as the Speaker’s ruling.
Scheer’s decision was nuanced. But that it came as a blow to the prime minister was evident in the reaction of government whip Gordon O’Connor, who sped from the Commons after hearing it. “The Speaker’s made his ruling and that’s it,” O’Connor said.
It’s becoming apparent that the Conservatives got more than they bargained for with Scheer in the Speaker’s chair. Being so young — 33 — and being so new, he wasn’t expected to make waves.
But this was the second time he dished out a major rebuke to the governing hierarchy. A year and half ago he castigated the Harper team for tactics employed against Liberal MP Irwin Cotler. The Tories admitted to being behind a calling campaign (that kind of thing again) telling constituents in Cotler’s riding that he was about to resign.
“I am sure that all reasonable people would agree,” ruled Scheer, “that attempting to sow confusion in the minds of voters as to whether or not their member is about to resign is a reprehensible tactic.”
You probably won’t hear Trudeau use words like ‘reprehensible’ to describe his opponents. But he won’t mind at all if the Conservatives tar themselves with that brush.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Lawrence Martin
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