Comes the hour, comes the man, says an old saying in need of a gender rebalance. At great moments in a nation’s life, a great leader rises. Or at least that’s the theory. Sometimes it’s even true. This year? We’re about to find out.
When he ran in 2015, Trudeau was 13 years younger than Harper and 17 years younger than New Democrat Tom Mulcair. Trudeau’s limited experience—either in Parliament or before he ever ran for public office—was a significant campaign issue. The Conservatives warned he was “just not ready.” He won because, for the space of an autumn, he seemed readier than advertised.
Politics can’t be reduced to a resumé-writing contest, as Ignatieff eventually learned. A big idea multiplies a candidate’s or a movement’s impact, as Reform and the Bloc Québécois demonstrated not so long ago. But so far, big ideas are missing in this election year. “Canada is at a turning point,” Stephen Harper says in a YouTube video designed to elicit donations from Conservative supporters.
May has been a party leader longer than her counterparts in the three big parties combined. She’s the Green leader in an era when environmental politics have unprecedented prominence and the Liberals have taken plenty of chances to disappoint. But she was unable to lure even Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott to the Greens after Trudeau kicked them out of the Liberal caucus.
Which brings us to Trudeau. He brings all kinds of assets to the table. First, sheer momentum. Governments that come from opposition into office with a House of Commons majority are usually re-elected at their next outing with at least a minority: think Chrétien, Mulroney, Trudeau père. You’d have to go back to R.B. Bennett, brought low by the Great Depression, for a new majority government that lost office at the next election.
The list is as familiar as the now-permanent debates around each item on it: the glib abandonment of a clear and simple promise to end first-past-the-post elections; the secret vacation to the Aga Khan’s private island; the bungled changes to business taxes; the truly weird trip to India ; the extended government-wide full-court press against the attorney general of Canada to forestall a criminal trial for SNC-Lavalin.
The big idea is that this is the potentially the most consequential election in Canadian history due to the critical mass of alienation a re-election of the LPC will create in the Interior West. That Macleans and probably 70% of cdns don’t know that is a tragedy in the making.
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