THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR: Trudeau is blind to his own divisive politics: It never seems to dawn on Liberals that Tories keep getting elected to important offices because many Canadians agree with them.
Well, yes, sure … you certainly could have worked to ensure we were pulling together. But that would have required abandoning the strategy that treats all viewpoints that conflict with Liberal orthodoxy as the work of inferiors, idiots, malcontents or the uninformed. It would have meant suggesting to chief guru Gerald Butts that he stop tweeting raging insults about everyone holding beliefs that aren’t in line with Liberal policy pronouncements. It would have meant accepting that Canadians can hold a wide variety of opinions without being scorned as unCanadian.
It’s astonishing that the Liberal leader could have expressed such a personal dilemma after having devoted great parts of his campaign to denouncing two Canadians he holds in particular contempt: former prime minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Doug Ford. I doubt there’s a day that’s passed since the writ was dropped that Trudeau didn’t heap assault after assault on the pair, some of it justified, much of it the product of Liberal war-room fantasizing. As fellow columnist William Watson pointed out recently, “the hurtful cuts of the Conservative years” actually saw federal spending rise 43 per cent from 2006-7 to 2015-16. Trudeau sees Harper’s determination to respect provincial jurisdiction as “playing regional politics,” yet his is the government that has imposed its will on provincial leaders elected on platforms that oppose his own.
It never seems to dawn on Liberals that Conservatives keep getting elected to important offices because many Canadians agree with them, in whole or in part, and that endlessly demonizing their very existence is, by extension, an argument that the millions of Canadians who share some or part of their views are blockheads. Much as Liberals may dislike the fact, Stephen Harper served more than nine years in office by winning three elections against three different Liberal leaders. His final victory was his biggest, a majority government after five years of minorities. Trudeau, in contrast, has seen his solid 2015 majority erode to the point he’s campaigning frantically just to match Conservative support and somehow rescue a minority. It’s an enormous rebuke for a leader who was hailed on magazine covers across the globe as a breath of hope for the world just four years ago, and yet Trudeau — far from being humbled — spends his time vilifying others.
When unearned moral superiority is the keystone of your platform, and self-image, it’s hard not to be divisive.
