To Die by the Sword

Jon Thompson is an award-winning journalist from Thunder Bay and writes for Ricochet Media

Editorial by Jon Thompson

Two days before the 2015 federal election, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau marched into a pit of pandemonium at the Thunder Bay airport that looked less like local partisans and more like The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Hundreds of screaming people clamoured for selfies with this dreamboat who would rescue Canada from Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s stuffy preference to play by himself.

Why? “Better is always possible.”

Whatever that meant. It’s difficult to remember when taking selfies was new and exciting. It’s equally hard to remember that being true of Justin Trudeau.

It feels naïve, looking back on how his captivating handsomeness made the whole world spin, or how his hand-me-downs from Barack Obama’s “hope and change” campaign felt only slightly like a Canadian knockoff of American TV. The inclusivity felt real. In a moment when everyone’s potential felt unheeded, Harper’s own ads showed him working alone. He went stale as a party of one.

Trudeau’s first cabinet announcement was among Canada’s best public relations exercises ever. All regions represented, all ages and races. Everyone seemed ideal for the job. Half of the ministers were women and when reporters asked Trudeau why, he cracked, “Because it’s 2015.” It might not have changed history’s arc to ask what that meant, but no one did.

Trudeau’s decisions had underlying logic—it was just below him to explain it. Only a troll would demand we pull over every hour to check if the wheels are still round. But by not showing the work, by making us assume the moral compass bearing, he robbed us of the only real input Canadians have in federal politics: approving or disapproving the language our leaders use to describe our shared reality.

Journalist Martin Lukacs spent years sneaking into the prime minister’s private appearances for his 2019 book, The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent. Lukacs found Trudeau said entirely different things to different audiences, trending toward greater sincerity when speaking to the business class. It was all sleight-of-hand. Liberal slogans were all so forgettable that Canadians lost track of anything his government could take credit for doing. They instead held Trudeau up as a moral agent synonymous with Canadian interests, even though the public had no transparent way to healthily feed that trust. If we didn’t trust him, that was our fault—and maybe we’re suspect.

The Trudeau-as-a-feminist myth should have been a shot across the bow. Women kept leaving his cabinet for moral reasons, and “he’s a good guy” versus “no, he isn’t” in politics is a long-term fight against gravity. Instead, it didn’t even move the needle in 2019 when he said he’d lost count of how many times he’d performed in blackface.

The chain finally broke in 2022, while Trudeau was unconstitutionally imposing the Emergencies Act on the Trucker Convoy in Ottawa. On French TV, he posited whether we should “tolerate” these demonstrators because “they are extremists who don’t believe in science. They are often misogynists, also often racists.”

No matter how much polls disapprove of your detractors, there are some things you just can’t say while you’re wielding state power. One of those things is not “tolerating” people who express certain views, while alleging they hold other views so radical that they’re illegal. You could hear Trudeau’s own sword run through him. The critical editorials piled up, the corporate money shifted allegiance. It took years to bleed out, but that was the moment when his flaw proved fatal. His “sunny ways” were another party of one.

Out in the cold streets where transports blocked Parliament Hill, Pierre Poilievre was reborn as exactly what Trudeau had been. The Conservative leader refined it to a series of rhyming jingles, but it’s identical: there’s a logic he calls “common sense.” It cannot be questioned and doesn’t require explanation.

Poilievre is legion stronger at narrowcasting the medium as the message. If you’re not familiar with the tone he uses on different platforms, you’d be inclined not to believe he said these things. Saying some things to some people and other things elsewhere was firing on all pistons until U.S. president Donald Trump made a foreign enemy out of the whole slogan kit that was carrying the Conservative Party. Poilievre either had to become accountable for the language he was using to define our shared reality, or die by the sword.

He doubled down. His “Canada First” nationalist slogan is a hand-me-down from wartime that feels strong to some and terrifying to others. By the time you read this, Poilievre’s promise to Warder the Border (or whatever) will face off against the best Liberals can sell banker Mark Carney’s romantic attachment to a global order that may no longer exist.

It’s borderline superstitious how we’re allowing Canada’s future to ride on the vibes of these focus-group slogans. But even if that’s our only role in democracy, Canadians should not become so governable as to spare our leaders the burden of explaining themselves.

The sword it will protect them from is their own.