Weekend reads: Trudeau goes south

Having lost the Canadian public, the Prime Minister makes his case in America

Justin Trudeau took many in the Canadian press by surprise on Friday, sitting down for a one-on-one with CNN anchor Jake Tapper. The Canadian prime minister previously cancelled his year-end interviews with domestic press, and aside from entertaining brief questions at a historic resignation press conference, has been largely MIA.

Trudeau is unlikely to find sympathetic journalists in this country right now; the tide has very much turned, and nobody wants to go down with the ship. But America is a different story. And so, while in Washington for President Jimmy Carter’s memorial service, Trudeau took the opportunity to do some friendly press.

The Prime Minister’s interview with Jake Tapper is ostensibly a response to President Elect Donald Trump’s bizarre musings about Canada becoming a 51st state. But one suspects it is really about Trudeau’s diminished global standing, and the loss of fawning press coverage in particular.

To understand the significance of the Tapper interview, we have to go back two days to the release of an episode of The Daily podcast from The New York Times, which was billed as “a guide to the collapse of a prime minister who was once a progressive icon.” The Wednesday episode features the paper’s newish, Toronto-based Canadian bureau chief Matina Stevis-Gridneff, and charts the arc of Trudeau’s meteoric rise and “stunning downfall.” While it’s true that his resignation arrives at a moment of backlash against progressive policies worldwide, Stevis-Gridneff takes pains to say that “if you’ve been following Canadian politics, you would know this was a really long time coming, and, for many Canadians, well overdue.”

The Daily episode gets some important things wrong. There is, for instance, no mention of the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which our Federal Court ruled illegal. (You can listen to my interview with Canadian constitutional law expert Ryan Alford here.) This is a stunning omission, especially given that in 2022, The New York Times Editorial Board referred to the trucker protests as a “test of democracy,” noting that “by the standards of mass protests around the world, the ‘Freedom Convoy’ snarling Downtown Ottawa ranks as a nuisance.” The Editorial Board went on to state: “We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support.”

It’s also significant that there’s no mention made of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which was a major turning point in Trudeau’s declining support, including among progressives. (You can listen to me discuss that scandal with veteran Canadian political journalists Paul Wells, author of Justin Trudeau on the Ropes, here, and Stephen Maher, author The Prince here.) The ArriveCAN app scandal also should have featured in The Daily’s discussion, as it demonstrates the extent of the financial chaos and institutional dysfunction that’s taken hold in Ottawa — which, in my experience talking to Canadians, has fueled much of the grassroots anger against Trudeau.

We should note, too, that in painting Pierre Poilievre as an “ideological cousin” of Trump, Stevis-Gridneff ignores anti-Trump sentiment in many Conservative circles in the country.

In addition, while Stevis-Gridneff correctly states that Poilievre is critical of current immigration policies but you’d never hear him express anti-immigrant sentiment, she fails to mention that Polievre’s commitment to immigration extends well beyond that — and that the issue is personal for him, as his wife arrived in Canada as a refugee. Stevis-Gridneff also notes that Poilievre “endorses traditional family values” and “believes in the nuclear family,” without elaborating, leaving the impression he could be anti-gay. But in reality, Poilievre’s deputy leader Melissa Lantsman is married to a woman. And Poilievre’s own father is in a same-sex partnership. As Rahim Mohamed has written at The Line, “no major federal party leader has ever had a family that looks more like Canada.”

Such missteps are par for the course for the international press. The inner workings of Canadian politics are rarely a priority for outlets outside the country. And anyway, we can’t really expect international reporters to understand the minutiae of our political scene at the same level that our national press does.

Still, all of that being said, The Daily episode took Canadians’ displeasure with concrete policy outcomes seriously — and that cannot have gone over well with the Trudeau camp. Hence the decision to go and see Jake Tapper. (And MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, in a second interview that aired today.)

The majority of Trudeau’s 10-minute sit-down with Tapper covers other issues: the devastating fires in Los Angeles, the late President Jimmy Carter’s legacy, President Elect Donald Trump’s comments about Canada becoming a 51st state, as well as his tariff threats. Only the last three and a half minutes are dedicated to the real matter at hand, which is Trudeau attempting to salvage his global image.

Tapper doesn’t make it too hard for Trudeau: He starts by framing Trudeau’s resignation in the context of the global electorate’s disapproval of how “left wing” parties handle the economy, particularly when it comes to inflation and immigration, and pointing out that the American “left wing” party just lost an election over this as well. (The Liberals are supposed to be a centrist party, and are definitely perceived as one by actual Canadian leftists, but okay.)

When the matter of Trudeau’s own unpopularity is raised, the Prime Minister’s response is telling. “There are a lot of feelings involved,” he says, moving on to argue that our economy is actually “doing very well.” (The Economist begs to differ, recently noting that Canada is now poorer than Alabama.) Trudeau then argues that many Canadians are focused on the fact that lettuce is $8 a head. (Surely Tapper has access to the statistic that we have two million monthly visits to food banks in Canada. Perhaps he could have mentioned it at this juncture?) Unimpeded by facts that challenge his narrative, Trudeau ploughs on to outline his winning policies, from childcare and dental care to, surprisingly, the carbon tax. Trudeau concludes that when you get “an intersection of both right wing policy — right wing attacks — and social media, you end up with a lot of misinformation, disinformation.”

To recap, then: The policies that his countrymen have rejected are, in fact, wise and good for everyone — we all just don’t recognize it because we’re overly emotional, overly concerned about middling issues like food prices, and too much under the sway of malevolent right wing actors who spread false information online.

As it turns out, this argument perfectly illustrates why the Canadian public got so fed up with Trudeau in the first place, but Tapper doesn’t seem aware of the irony. And so, we’re left with the spectacle of Trudeau making his case on American TV, to zero pushback. But then, that’s likely why he went south in the first place.