Tom Mulcair: Justin Trudeau is still a celebrity, but does it matter anymore?

For a fleeting moment on Monday night, it was easy to forget that Justin Trudeau is 20 per cent behind in the polls.
Trudeau and his handlers scored a home run with their decision to have him appear on “The Late Show” with Steven Colbert. Justin Trudeau is one of the most recognizable leaders on the world stage and in this interview, he was playing to one of his strengths: star appeal.
His previous foray onto a stage with American talk show host Hasan Minhaj had turned into a nightmare for Trudeau. He was quizzed on everything from his construction of the Trans-Mountain pipeline to his interference in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin.
That they would take the risk again shows that his team is going for a three-point jump shot at the buzzer: they’ve got nothing more to lose.
This time around, it could not have gone better for Trudeau. Well-prepared, he deftly answered the mostly softball questions from Colbert and sidestepped the problematic ones, like comparing Poilievre to Trump.
He may have provided a clip to his political opponents, however, in trying to show empathy. Yet compared to his frustrating tendency to always defend his record at home, Trudeau was refreshingly candid when he admitted:
“It is a really tough time in Canada right now. People are hurting. People are having trouble paying for groceries, paying for rent, filling up the tank… We’ve lost a little ground over the past decades on building houses, so the housing crisis is a little sharper.”
Attack ads from his opponents using those lines are inevitable but, as the saying goes, “a fault confessed is half redressed.” Maybe this approach will supplant the infuriating ‘we’re going to continue doing what we’ve been doing’ that has been Trudeau’s stock line up here.
Trudeau won a convincing majority in his first election in 2015, defeating both Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the NDP that I then headed.
In the aftermath, we did a thorough job of going through the good moves and, especially, the errors. We looked at organization, messaging, candidates and allocation of resources, all the usual stuff, in the hope of helping the party in future elections.
There was one observation shared internally by all of the senior folks who’d worked so hard on the campaign: we weren’t just running against another politician (and Trudeau is a very good politician), we were running against a celebrity, and we hadn’t realized just how important that was.
Trudeau was born of Canada’s Camelot couple, Pierre and Margaret Trudeau. Canadians seemed to have a special attachment to him. They’d known him his whole life.
Margaret Trudeau agrees with a reporter who complimented Prime Minister Trudeau on his speech in the House, Tuesday, May 7, 1974. Mrs. Trudeau was in the galleries for the speech. Justin, their 2.5-year-old son, found it a bit much and squirmed his way out of the galleries to wait it out with his nurse outside the prime minister’s office (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand)
Trudeau has in fact boasted about his special connection to Canadians even if the polling in the past year shows that much of the charm of that magic spell seems to have worn off.
Not to belabour the point (and there are more differences between them than similarities), but Donald Trump also used his celebrity status as the key to open the door to the Republican Party leadership and ultimately the presidency.
There’s another reason Trudeau’s appearance on American television was so important and successful: Canadians love seeing themselves in a positive light when compared to their American cousins. Trudeau mastered that angle and he consistently referenced the struggle required to build universal Medicare and, now, childcare, pharmacare and dental care. He had no votes to get in the U.S., but a very large number of Canadians were proud of the boasts.
Trudeau was speaking to another audience and his infuriating tendency to speak to Canadians in that condescending tone was gone. He was pitch perfect for the American audience but his real target, Canadians, got a fresh take on his standard lines that have grown so tiresome at home.
If Trudeau the celebrity shines on the television stage, Trudeau the international figure still has major problems of credibility on the world stage.
The United Nations is in the process of a major institutional reset. On Sunday, Trudeau spoke at the Summit of the Future, as part of that process. His speech was empty. The stuff of an earnest high school valedictorian. It was cringeworthy.
Here’s a sample of one of his pearls of wisdom: “We can think beyond what has been, push ourselves to create a system that meets the moment and the opportunities for the future.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets people during the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2024 at the UN headquarters (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Trudeau has treated freeing policy as an afterthought, changing ministers so often there’s never been consistency. It’s not one of his priorities.
Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly’s successive positions on the current crisis in the Middle East have been amateurish and inconsistent, when not downright incomprehensible.
On Trudeau’s watch, we’ve failed our NATO allies on financing, and he’s been unable to leverage Canada’s deep experience and expertise in peacekeeping into any meaningful role in the major conflicts still unfolding.
When Trudeau says that Ukraine should be allowed to use Western weapons deep inside Russia, he’s playing domestic politics at the risk of a disastrous widening of that illegal Russian war. There’s little political payback to a reasoned and independent Canadian foreign policy, but it’s far more important, long term.
Trudeau has refused to believe the consistent numbers from all polling companies showing him so far behind the Conservatives that his Liberal Party could get wiped out in the next election.
If it is indeed true that Trudeau has always been about Trudeau, then the question remains: will he eventually step aside, if not for the sake of his party, then for the sake of his own place in history? Getting wiped off the map isn’t part of his career plan and he could still have a lengthy private sector career ahead of him.
In Trudeau’s telling back home, he’s gotten most things right, despite the litany of bad results he confessed to Colbert. Canadians know better. There is a structural deficit being left to future generations, we’ve failed to meet our international obligations on climate change and there millions of Canadians going to food banks every month.
Poilievre’s facile nostrums about axing the tax will do nothing to help those on the bottom rung of the ladder, they get more back for the carbon tax than they pay in.
Parliament will be more important than ever in this fall session. In addition to the psychodrama of the inevitable confidence votes, Canadians will be watching for any sign of hope.
Hope is something that Poilievre and his angry front bench have trouble providing. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but honey seems to be in very short supply with the Conservatives.
Poilievre’s pitch is so strident that it’s becoming off-putting, as demonstrated by his personal attacks in the House against Singh. We’ll see how that works out in future polling.
Hope is something that Trudeau can no longer provide. He’s about to start his 10th year and Canadians have simply decided to give him his walking papers.
About the only hope for the Liberals is a change of leaders. The fact that the Conservatives and some of their mouthpieces have started slagging Mark Carney about imaginary conflicts of interests is a sign that they fear his possible arrival as Liberal leader.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride through the fall session. Canadians better arm themselves with patience as they try to make up their minds watching our tired, angry and embattled politicians.
Tom Mulcair was the leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017