He’s been attacked by the far right. But Justin Trudeau is more worried about the ‘casual cynicism’ of the left

Justin Trudeau was attacked from the political left and right during this year’s election campaign but it was the “casual cynicism” of the left that bugged him the most, he tells Susan Delacourt.

Susan Delacourt By Susan DelacourtNational Columnist Wed., Dec. 15, 2021timer4 min. read

Justin Trudeau was attacked from the political left and right during this year’s election campaign. But he says it was the “casual cynicism” of the left that bugged him the most.

“To be honest, what hit me harder, on a really personal level, was not the anger and the anti-everything of the far right, so much as the casual cynicism of the left,” Trudeau said during a lengthy interview on Monday.

The prime minister has referred to this cynicism before, during the leader’s debate in the election campaign, as well as in a meeting with the Star’s editorial board. It’s still on his mind, evidently, as one of the first things he wanted to discuss in a wide-ranging conversation over nearly an hour’s walk around the grounds of Rideau Hall.

“I expect the progressive parties to come and say, ‘you haven’t done enough, you need to do more,’” Trudeau said. “That’s fine. But to have them turn around and say “you did nothing?’”

Though he says he took it personally, he says it’s not a “poor prime minister” lament or a plea for a pat on the back. Trudeau believes the “you did nothing” refrain cuts deeper — it turns people off the idea of government altogether.

“It undercuts everything we’re trying to do,” he says, and its logical conclusion is voter apathy.

“Maybe it’s quibbling. Maybe it’s a subtle difference between doing nothing and doing not enough. But ‘not enough’ seems like a fair argument,” he says. “Yeah, I probably disagree with it because I think we’ve done lots, but (I know) it’s never enough.”

:maybe-later-kiddo:

I asked Trudeau whether he regretted not doing more — or not doing enough — when he had the big majority government from 2015 to 2019. Among people who voted his Liberals into power six years ago, this is an oft-stated criticism; how the promised “real change” didn’t really transform politics or the country after a decade of Conservative rule.

Trudeau admits that the retooling took longer than he expected.

“So much of what we had to do, from 2015 to 2019 was shifting the system that had been … not as active in terms of transforming the country, as I felt a Canadian government needed to be,” he says. “So we had to sort of retrain the public service a number of ways. We had to empower them in ways that they had been disempowered. We had to figure out how to get things to happen on the ground in terms of infrastructure.”

Definitely he would do things differently if he had to do his first term over again, he says. “Sure, there’s things I would love to have done more and pushed hard and certainly with what I know now, if I was back then I might be able to push harder in certain ways and get a few more things done.”

:morshupls:

All year-end interviews with prime ministers include questions about regret and worst moments. Trudeau says he has plenty, especially his trip to Tofino on Sept. 30, the very day his own government had set aside for the first national day of truth and reconciliation.

“You can pick any one of them,” he says when I ask about his worst moment of 2021. “Anytime I inadvertently or through negligence let people down … Tofino was an example of that,” he said. “But you know, I try not to spend too much time beating myself up over it. But I do try to learn from them. And I know that Canadians and the media will be able to keep reminding me of those.”

:shrug-outta-hecks:

He’s more easily able to pinpoint the best moment of 2021. It also happened in September, just a week earlier, in fact — when the prime minister arrived on the airport tarmac in Calgary to greet the return of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, finally released from more than 1,000 days of arbitrary detention in China.

“Meeting the Michaels on the tarmac was a pretty good thing. It was an amazing thing, actually,” he said. “It was, yes, getting them home. But it was also having stood up for the rule of law against a whole bunch of people who said take a shortcut.”

Trudeau hinted that he is still talking to the two Michaels — “fascinating guys,” he said, but clammed up when I asked what the ongoing conversations are about. “They’ve got a lot of healing to do,” he said.

:michaels:

It was notable that in all the talk of 2021’s highs and lows in this interview, Trudeau didn’t even touch on the ugly protests that dogged his campaign and the anti-vaccination crowds. The far-right, as he calls it, isn’t much on his mind. But the “casual cynicism” on the left definitely is.

:thonk: