The Liberals head into 2017 with a daunting list of promises to keep — legalizing marijuana, sanding down anti-terrorism legislation, growing the economy — and others, like electoral reform and running “modest” deficits, to weasel out of. Surely Justin Trudeau does not have enough spare time to be leader of the free world. Yet voices both at home and abroad seem intent on appointing him the global standard-bearer for “progressivism” in the fight against the (similarly ill-defined) forces that gave us Brexit, President Donald Trump and a resurgent European far right.
Apparently unchastened by the Great Disappointment that was Paul Martin, the likes of The Economist and Bono have been singing Canada’s praises. In July the magazine cheered Trudeau for his infrastructure spending, for “appointing a diverse cabinet,” for “showing rare compassion to Syrian refugees” and, er, for “looking good while standing next to Barack Obama.”
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“The world needs more Canadas,” Ireland’s most annoying export then burbled in September.
In the Time Before Trump, Obama was thrilled to pump Trudeau’s tires — and in December, when all was woe, that task fell to his vice-president, Joe Biden. “The world’s going to spend a lot of time looking to you, Mr. Prime Minister, as we see more and more challenges to the liberal international order than any time since the end of World War II — you and Angela Merkel,” he intoned at his official dinner in Ottawa last month. “We need you very, very badly.”
Earlier last year, Neera Tanden and Matt Browne of the Center for American Progress nominated Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi as the European saviour of “modern centre-left politics (that) can inspire voters and deliver real change,” and Trudeau his North American counterpart. “We are convinced that Trudeau and Renzi will become paragons of the progressive movement,” they wrote.
Whoopsie. As Aaron Wherry noted in a piece at CBC this week, Renzi has since resigned. And as Merkel is “officially a conservative,” he argued, this leaves “Trudeau as perhaps the last major progressive leader on Earth.”
These days, “progressive” seems to connote most everything Donald Trump is not: open to immigration, compassionate towards refugees, seized with the fight against climate change and committed to multilateralism in all its forms, including free trade. Trudeau and the Liberals are certainly committed to all that in word; in deed, they have made good on a relatively ambitious refugee resettlement target. So Trudeau might make an effective spokesperson for this upbeat mixture of principle, ideology and policy preference that’s currently marketed as progressive. (New Democrats must love that free trade somehow sneaked in there.)
But politicians should be judged on deeds, not words. And on that front, the Liberal record hardly merits anointing Trudeau as a massive departure from Stephen Harper, let alone a bulwark against the global forces of darkness Liberals would tell you Harper represented. Liberal platforms have regularly championed the “centre-left,” after all; Liberal governments, rather less often.
Meanwhile there’s poor Angela Merkel. All she’s done is fight tirelessly to keep the EU together, champion international trade and bet her career on admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees as both a humanitarian and economic undertaking — all the things she’s supposed to be doing to be part of Trudeau’s Progressive Resistance — and she gets written off at CBC because she’s “officially conservative.” It’s preposterous.
Canadian progressives pine for all kinds of things they see in Europe: Denmark’s endless parental leave, Iceland’s gender quotas for boards of directors, Norway’s oil fund, France’s summer-long vacations and 35-hour work week, Germany’s gleaming infrastructure. That all happened in recent decades under nominally liberal, conservative and socialist governments alike. There are plenty of political leaders in Europe, across the political spectrum, who can stand athwart extremism.
It is, I submit, objectively bizarre that so much hope is being projected onto a first-term Canadian prime minister who — if only because he’s a year into his mandate — really hasn’t accomplished all that much.
Foreign progressives seem to love idealizing __canada almost as much as Canadian progressives do. My theory is this has much more to do with Canada’s overall similarity to the United States than with anything particularly special we’ve pulled off ourselves. Many Americans simply see Canada as America perfected — the same basic deal, but with socialized medicine and gun control and other standard First World accoutrements. Europeans, in turn, see in Canada hope for a flawed superpower, and therein hope for the world. No question, we’ve done well — but we’ve been damn lucky, too. There is no salvation here.
Progressive Canadians, meanwhile, just love to blow their own trumpets and obsess over small differences with conservatives. Every breath expended lionizing Trudeau is better spent holding him to account for the different policies and manner of government he promised and has yet to effect. The Economist was terribly disappointed in the Liberals 10 years ago; it would be a break from history if it weren’t again soon.
• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley
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