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Vol. 23, No. 4, 2024
 
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justin trudeau
OUR "DIRTY JOHN" PRIME MINISTER


by
LIZ HODGSON

________________________________________________________________

For more of Liz, visit her fashion/brenda website.

In Pride and Prejudice, the nefarious George Wickham enthralled the coquettish ladies of Meryton, including the otherwise discerning Lizzy Bennet. Wickham wasn’t Jane Austen’s only solicitous charmer slowly revealed to be a blackhearted lothario. There was also Willoughby, the dashing but poisonous hunk in Sense and Sensibility who does poor Marianne Dashwood dirt. 

Duplicitous sweet talkers sweeping love-blind women off their feet, a category of the ‘woman in peril’ genre, is a tale as old as time. As a TV addict, I’ve always enjoyed these female-victimization rituals. The high-water mark is a BBC Austen adaptation, but for lowbrow tastes, there’s the guilty pleasure of a Lifetime “Movie of the Week,” tailor-made for suburban stay-at-home moms, their daughters and yours truly. A middlebrow option is Dirty John, the LA Times feature turned podcast turned Bravo miniseries.

You can trace this plotline back to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Instead of an apple as the object of temptation, it’s a sugary donut with an arsenic filling. It also describes the messianic rise and abject decline of Canada’s head of government, Justin Trudeau. 

Forget ‘woman in peril.’ Ours is a country in peril.

Canada, the oldest democracy in the Americas with 40 million people and boundless resources, lags behind all other advanced G7 economies in productivity and has plummeted from 9th to 33rd in global quality of life rankings. People—especially Zoomers—feel crushed under the weight of a sluggish and authoritarian bureaucracy, now 70 percent more expensive than it was in 2015. A civil service that barely shows up in person twice a week still manages to stifle progress with excessive taxes, debt and regulation, all in a misguided pursuit of ‘fairness’ and changing the weather. The capital gains hike in the last Federal Budget has alarmed top innovators, fearing it will drive talent away and renew the brain drain. Little wonder 70 percent of Canadians agree “Canada is broken,” a sentiment regularly trending on X.

We are the romantic patsies of a woman-in-peril melodrama, paying the price for our naivete. Worse, we’re late in the third act, when the imperiled woman is tied up in the basement, sawing away at the zap straps binding her wrists with a smuggled chard of glass, while the sinister roué is upstairs siphoning away her life savings.

How did we get here?

Cast your minds back to 2015 when Canada harboured a malaise for Stephen Harper we never knew we had. Unadventurous yet reliable, Harper’s steady leadership delivered balanced budgets, secure borders and falling crime rates. All well and good but also . . . snoozers!

From this miasma of ennui rose a heartthrob princeling with David Cassidy hair, six-pack abs, name recognition and eccentric socks. His message was about hope, including but not limited to ‘beating fear with hope,’ as well as change–in particular, “real change.”

This hopey-changey platform beat the yesteryear squaresville candidate hands down. Who wants grey flannel and a high-school-principal haircut when this is on the table?

One glance and Canada’s pupils formed two perfect hearts that bugged out of its eyesockets, cartoon style. We were besotted.

Well, some of us were. True to ‘woman in peril’ form, there were doubters. Often, in the Lifetime/Hallmark universe, it’s the less attractive best friend who asks: “Are you sure you’re not rushing into things?” In the Dirty John version, it’s the victim’s spoiled Orange County ‘mean girl’ daughter who takes one look at her mom’s new boyfriend and says, in not so many words, that dude is suss AF and I’d like to throat punch him. In Pride and Prejudice, it’s Mr. Bennet who observes how Wickham “simpers and smirks and makes love to us all.” 

In the real world, it was 31.91 percent of voters, some of whom were experiencing acute déjà vu. It was, after all, Trudeau’s father—former leader of Cuba this great nation—who also rode to power on a wave of adulation, distributed in higher proportion among women, only to leave behind a sea of broken hearts, regret and self-recriminations. Lone voices worried about his thin resume and mysterious departure from a teaching job at West Point Grey Academy.

In response to all these objections, mainstream media had this to say… 

A chorus of moonstruck reporters around the world sang the new PM’s praises. Geraldo Rivera tweeted out: “Congrats to @JustinTrudeau #Canada now has a stud prime minister who’s going to inject passion & energy into nation’s staid, safe policies.” E online declared him “a beautiful, sticky-sweet specimen,” adding, “Call us thirsty, call us cray, we’d write love poems for Justin Trudeau all day.” The Guardian declared him “literally born into the role,” while the Mirror asked, “Is Justin Trudeau the sexiest politician in the world?”

Included in all this Tiger Beat-level adulation was Rolling Stone magazine, which declared itself, like, totally jelly!

The media swoonfest went so overboard that Jo Abi at Mamamia demanded less swooning! “The only thing swoon-worthy about [Justin Trudeau] is his politics. Swoon away over the brilliantly progressive example he is setting for other world leaders.”

Early in Act Two—IE sometime around 2018—red flags began to appear. This was the year of “peoplekind” and the slow-moving trainwreck critics called his “Eat, Pray, Love spiritquest” across India, an excursion that mortified even his handlers. 

Still, at the time, most considered him no more harmless than a nerd waiter you get stuck with at a chain restaurant (Hi, I’m Justin Trudeau and I’ll be your prime minister for the next several months). Hence, in 2019, hoping to inject some of that old 2015 magic into the relationship, Team Trudeau called an election.

What followed was a classic case of the writers raising the stakes by presenting ever more complex obstacles in the heroine’s path. This was the year Trudeau, the soi-disant feminist, kicked Jody Rabould Wilson under the bus over the SNC Lavalin affair. Oh, and there was this…

Despite three separate blackface incidents, along with a groping allegation at the height of #MeToo, the media that had bathed him in fawning lubrications responded by tiptoeing quietly out of the room. 

By 2020, the cringe-fest of 2018 began to look like a warmup. If you’re familiar with the Hero’s Journey, this was “the Ordeal” stage, when the most harrowing challenges arise, leading to a central life-or-death crisis. 

When the Virus threw the world off its axis, few leaders of the free world managed to escape without embarrassing the dignity of their high office. Trudeau upped the ante with a list of scandals too long to list here that began with ArriveCan—AKA “ArriveCan’t”—the Boeing MAX of smartphone application design. Originally budgeted at $80,000, its cost ballooned to $54 million. 

In 2021, on assurances from his advisors that he could restore his 2015 majority, he called a pointless snap election which, at a cost of $600 million, returned the electoral status quo. The only change being a supply and confidence deal with the NDP, which would be in cinematic terms, the equivalent of introducing the villain’s accomplice as a new character.

When the truckers descended on Ottawa, Trudeau had an opportunity to quell widespread anger and broker a compromise. Instead, he called them homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist members of a “small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” In response to a protest of bouncy castles, hot tubs and conga lines, he invoked the Emergencies Act, seized donations and froze donor bank accounts.

More than two years later, the scales completely fallen from our eyes, we see not a Disney princeling but a trust-fund nepo-tyrant, living in the moral equivalent of his father’s basement; jeered at every whistlestop and described by his own brother, Kyle Kemper, as a psychological hot mess.

Now at least 10 points behind the CPC, the desperate hail marys have begun. Housing crisis? He’ll build four million homes by 2031! That’s 1528 a day, 64 homes per hour for the next seven years, without breaks. We’re already 50,000 homes behind schedule. Also, free birth control, because what better way for a WEF global leader to finally realize the Davos dystopian nightmare of a country socially engineering itself into nonexistence? 

With at least a year to go before the next election, the question is… what happens when he leaves office? Sinecure at SNC or Power Corp? Montecito mansion with a Netflix special and podcast? High-status trophy gig at the UN? Maybe he’ll officially join the ranks of the morbidly self-admiring global elite plutocracy—that class unto itself, made up of billionaires, loitering around Davos and convinced they know how we should run our lives. 

Regardless of where he lands, sooner will be better than later.

 

 

 

 

Arts & Opinion, a bi-monthly, is archived in the Library and Archives Canada.
ISSN 1718-2034

 

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