Political forecasters across Canada are predicting a heavy rain of metal as the pennies start to drop for the rapidly disillusioned voters who cast a ballot for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015.
Well-intentioned Canadians who trusted the Trudeau Liberals to govern the country are waking up to the reality that they have been lied to and taken for fools.
The conveyance of this hard-hitting message has been the recent SNC-Lavalin scandal that has all but consumed news headlines. The prime minister is accused of firing his former attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, for her refusal to politically interfere in the criminal prosecution of the engineering firm which funds the Liberals’ campaigns.
The scope of this scandal has laid bare that adherence to the rule of law, a more equitable seat at the table for women, and standing up for the middle class over the elites are merely rhetorical weapons, not serious principles held immutable by Trudeau.
Every day, the SNC-Lavalin maelstrom is revealing to Canadians that these ideals apply to Trudeau’s mantra only when there are votes to be won, and not to the all-important business of governing the country.
Trudeau’s changing narrative on his alleged mistreatment of Wilson-Raybould, which has slowly progressed from outright denial to conceding “an erosion of trust,” is far from a genuine attempt to reconcile her account of events. It is the sight Canadians have become accustomed to: the great spoofer trying to remember what platitudinal concoction he dished out last.
It seems that even Liberal partisans are realizing that delegating Trudeau as the vehicle for meaningful change and good governance in this country has proven to be the equivalent of putting diesel into a gasoline car: it will go for a while, but breakdown is certain.
On issues purported to be central to the Trudeau government—such as the middle class, women’s issues, and the relationship with Indigenous peoples—Canadians have seen the movement of side-to-side dithering, rather than forward momentum.
This has all come to roost with the SNC-Lavalin affair, in which two of the prime minister’s strongest female cabinet ministers—Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott—have abandoned the ship of government over allegations that corporate cronies had been inserted at the helm.
The denouncers of “brand Trudeau” have always suspected that the trust fund prime minister hadn’t the slightest intention of seriously tackling the social justice qualms that rested at the root of his campaign.
Eyebrows were raised from his first days in office when he so callously prefaced his cabinet appointments with the announcement that they would be gender-balanced, placing a big question mark over whether the 15 women he paraded out during his cabinet reveal were there merely out of tokenism.
It is clear now, that Trudeau would be nothing more than a bad feminist impersonator, never really thinking about how he would strive to give women in this country a fairer shake.
The SNC-Lavalin affair has all the markings to be that inevitable breakdown that comes from dieseling up your gasoline engine. But, beyond launching the government into chaos, the SNC scandal has exposed the superficial virtues of Trudeau that Canadians have become highly accustomed to. Unmasked is a sort of Hallmark-style politics, in which rhetoric, activity, medium, and message are morphed into one.
The political brand of Trudeau can be surmised in what American comedian Stephen Colbert terms “truthiness”—stuff that feels like it should be true.
A well-polished line committing to the virtues of feminism, an affirmative nod to the importance of the judiciary, a tearful acknowledgment of the work to be done on relations with Indigenous peoples, and rolled-up sleeves to get to work for the middle class.
In Liberal Ottawa, truthiness outshines the truth every time.
For the Canadians who voted Liberal in 2015, there really is a great betrayal going on here, and it is incumbent on Canadians to recognize its severity. Only an election can fix this now.
