Emergency Dispatch: On the extraordinary self regard of this absolute Muppet

The PM’s ambition was in the driver’s seat until sometime in the last few days, and that ambition came before everything — the good of the Liberal party and the good of Canada very much included.

Alright. So. How’s everyone doing?!

What can we say, friends? We had a plan for today. A nice welcome back dispatch after our two-week holiday (at least that was largely spared by the news gods!). But whatever plans we had for today, Justin Trudeau had other ones. The PM announced this morning that he’ll be stepping down as PM once a new Liberal leader can be chosen. He has sought and received a prorogation of parliament until March 24.

And here we are. So, here’s the plan. Find below our immediate reactions to today’s news. And tonight, at a time still to be determined — it’s a seat-of-pants kind of day, guys, what can we say? — we’ll be doing another The Line Live on YouTube. Stay tuned for more info, but you might as well all click this link now and subscribe to us over there. It’ll let you know once the feed goes live. Again, all details around timing are TBD.

So yeah. Stay tuned for that tonight. For now, here’s our emergency dispatch, and God help us all.

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There was only one major thought that crossed your Line editors' minds when watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's resignation speech on the porch of Rideau Cottage on Monday morning: "Jesus Christ, the absolute self regard of this fucking Muppet."

Yes, that’s harsh. We’re even almost sorry about it. And we’ll touch on the humanity of it all in a moment. But for now, like, gosh. This isn’t good.

We are well aware that much of the media will be replete with mopey paeans to the decade-long service of this prime minister, even as he announces his entirely hypocritical plan to prorogue Parliament until March 24 in order to enable his party to assemble a chaotic and hasty leadership race. You'll get none of that from us here at The Line. Trudeau deserves no such consideration — at least not at the top. From where we sit today, the sheer arrogance of this man, and the party that has enabled him, has just locked the nation into months of parliamentary paralysis in the midst of what is likely to shortly become an economic trade war and a broader international geopolitical realignment.

While we fully expect news of Trudeau's resignation to lead many of our readers to sound the bells, we share none of their relief. The decision he announced on Monday demonstrates a total lack of respect for voters, an utter disregard for the good of the nation, and a profound obliviousness to the realities of the international environment we are about to find ourselves in.

And while we'd like to give Trudeau some credit for demonstrating an ounce of genuine humility in his resignation speech, too much of it was crammed with statements of breathtaking, overweening egotism; he pegged his decision to leave squarely on internal divisions — a fantastic parting "fuck you" to his caucus that abrogates any attempt at accountability for his own policy or leadership failures.

Trudeau repeatedly justified his decision to ask for the house to be prorogued by noting that Parliament had become dysfunctional, the opposition parties had stalled business of the house on process questions, and the government was in need of a "reset."

This blithely ignores a few points, including the fact that part of the reason Parliament has been stuck in a procedural quagmire is because Trudeau's own government has refused to hand over a potentially incriminating dossier that may demonstrate thwacks of taxpayer cash being siphoned off to well-connected businesses and insiders via what the opposition has deemed a "green slush fund."

This is a matter upon which the Commons’ Liberal speaker ruled against his own party. The Liberals could have stopped the pseudo-filibuster by turning over to Parliament the documents that they are required to turn over. They didn’t.

The very foundations of the Westminster parliamentary system are rooted in the concept of confidence: if you can't maintain the confidence of the house, you cannot rule Parliament. Prorogation is a procedural tool intended to govern ordinary logistics. It should never be used to circumvent a matter of confidence — and while it was delicious to watch Trudeau squirm on this point during his resignation speech, defending Stephen Harper's 2008 use of it in order to justify his own, the fact remains that both leaders have now set and affirmed a dangerous norm that undermines one of the foundational democratic concepts of our democracy and how it functions.

When a government finds itself this battered and unpopular, and when a long-serving leader has announced that he’ll step down, while prorogation may be legal, there’s only one politically and even morally right thing to do. There is only one way to “reset” parliament. Only one.

Call an election.

By refusing to do so — at least long enough for his own party to attempt some kind of recovery — Trudeau has set the entire nation up for the worst possible outcome, all for a desperate Hail Mary political gamble that is very unlikely to change the outcome of the next vote, whether it be held in June or September. He may be setting his hastily chosen successor up to take the conn only days before he or she will then be required to present a budget that said replacement did not craft. And then, potentially only days later, lead what’s left of the Liberal party into an election.

This is madness. It's peak chaos. And one that clearly demonstrates the contempt that this leader and his party have for both voters as individuals, and the good of the nation as a whole.

Zoom out of this sad, internecine drama just one step and what the rest of us are now stuck with is months, maybe many months, of political infighting and parliamentary paralysis in the midst of a probable trade war and one of the most important global re-alignments in a generation.

And for what?

We ask you, Liberals — no, we demand of you — for what?

For a fractional bump in the polls? All of this to keep the Bad Man who has maintained a steady 20-plus-point lead on you out of power? All of this risk, effort, and political capital is to be expended in the service of the noble aim of ... circumventing the will of the electorate for a few more months? The Liberals cannot credibly claim to be stalwart defenders of our institutions or democracy if they abuse those institutions in order to undermine democracy. Part of what it means to be a democracy is to respect the voter's right to make decisions you don't agree with.

The extraordinary conceit of a party imagining itself to be so utterly important that the rest of the country must be put on pause for months so that it can work out its own petty, internal bullshit, continues to genuinely appall us. Who do these people actually think they are?

None of us at The Line is surprised by this outcome. The behaviour is utterly par for the course of this government, but our lack of surprise in no way mitigates our anger. Once again this party continues to demonstrate that it cannot grasp that it is not more important than the people it purports to represent.

It isn't.

The Liberal Party as a brand, and as an institution, is simply not that important. The nation can survive without it. And after the last year's cacophony of poor choices, it absolutely should. We can never let this happen again. The last few weeks have sealed it; it has morally disqualified this party from holding power for a generation. We don't care who your next leader is. You all own this.

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Now that we got that off of our chests. A few quick thoughts about what the PM actually said during his remarks this morning.

But first, what we aren't going to do: we aren't going to rush to try and write a What Trudeau's Legacy Will Be piece. For two reasons. The first is simply that that is going to be in large part the judgment of history. Someone is going to write a book on Trudeau that will become the first must-read tome of understanding his time in office. That's going to take five or 10 years. We're not going to rush that process on a Monday afternoon. It will happen. In time. We will allow for that time.

But, also, umm, the guy hasn't actually resigned yet.

This is kind of an important point we really feel like we need to underline here. We both spent some time watching the TV news coverage and this was something that was pretty thoroughly glossed over in the rush to offer sombre and kind reflections on Trudeau’s service to the nation. It ain’t done. Justin Trudeau is the prime minister of Canada. He is our head of government. He leads the Liberal Party of Canada. He is the highest elected executive authority in this country. He was all those things yesterday, he's all those things today, and he's going to be all those things for the foreseeable future. We really don't have any clarity yet on when he will cease to be any of those things.

Which is weird, by the way. The PM has said the Liberal party will be having meetings. The Liberal party itself has confirmed it’ll have more to say this week. Guys? A little urgency, please?! There are 40 million people now sitting around waiting to see what the Liberal party bosses figure out, and it’s dispiriting but in no way surprising to learn that this is something they hadn’t really given much thought to until now.

More on that in a moment!

Trudeau hasn’t actually left yet and that's a big part of why we don't feel any urge to do the thoughtful, kind reflections on the man's legacy. He's still writing it. And as we noted above, we think he's doing a bad thing today, as prime minister. We understand the strategy of why he's doing it, but we are going to insist on holding off any glowing words of goodwill for the man until he stops actively hurting the country.

The speech Trudeau gave is about the speech we expected him to give. That includes the obvious remarks touching on his legacy and the things that he's proud of, but also the blindspots that crippled his premiership. And those blindspots continue to afflict him, and this country.

Take the PM's repeated comments about his "ambition" for Canada, and, in contrast, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre's lack of it. The CPC leader, the PM said, has a small vision that isn't what Canada needs. Your Line editors blinked a bit at that one. Because the PM is so close to getting it, but also so far away, even now.

Justin Trudeau has ambition. In spades. He's never lacked for that. But what has hobbled his government for years, since at least 2019 and arguably before, is execution. Your editors sometimes joke about the PM's two billion trees problem. This man never lacked ambition, nor hesitated to articulate that ambition. And then, especially in the back-half of Trudeau's time in office, he’d just stand around waiting for that ambition to deliverologize itself. We’re going to plant two billion trees!

Okay! When?!

A successful government needs ambition. As does a successful PM. But that ambition must be anchored to a realistic understanding of one’s abilities, and one’s government’s abilities, to execute. And the PM didn't seem to ever really grasp that. What Canada needed was smaller plans that were actually doable. Not soaring rhetoric and narrative about ambition and optimism. We needed results. We needed deliverology.

Instead, all we got was the PM's ambition.

And we kept getting that even as reality was pretty clearly writing its verdict in huge block letters on the nearest wall. If the PM left 18 months ago, he could have left his party intact and a successor with plenty of time to establish themselves. But instead, we got the PM's ambition. After devastating byelection losses in June and in early fall of last year, what the PM, the Liberal party and the country needed from the PM was clarity, realization and acceptance. But all we got was his ambition to take on Poilievre in a fight. Even three weeks ago, after Chrystia Freeland drove a stake through the heart of the PM's political career, instead of recognition that it was over, we got his ambition to survive just a little bit longer.

Even today, instead of an election, we get the PM's ambition — his ambition to find some way to arrange a soft landing for his party, and, of course, his legacy. This is why the Liberal party executive is only now getting the ball rolling on a leadership race. The PM’s ambition was in the driver’s seat until sometime in the last few days, and that ambition came before everything — the good of the Liberal party and the good of Canada very much included.

That hasn’t changed with a resignation speech at the front door. We need a vote. What we’re getting is the last hilltop which the PM seeks hold — his last remaining political ambition is to cobble together some process by which the Liberal party itself can avoid an annihilation that will be blamed, mostly rightly, on him. (We reserve heaps of blame for his enablers in the PMO and the gormless weasels in his caucus, but the buck stops with him — always did, and still does.)

It's really just sad at this point — edging into the pathetic — that Trudeau still can't see, even today, that his ambition and belief in himself morphed from an asset into a liability a long time ago. He has left the country in a very dangerous place because he refused to accept what was obvious. We can thank his ambition for that.

There were other parts of the speech we rolled our eyes at. The PM criticized Poilievre for not respecting journalists, only to be prodded by a journalist moments later for having totally sidestepped the question she'd asked. Trudeau bemoaned how polarized and divided our politics has become, which would be laughable if it wasn't so enraging — the man himself has spent most of his time in office viciously wedging his way through two minority wins on the basis of tiny voter margins in just enough ridings. Trudeau and his Liberal party simply have no moral standing to lecture anyone about polarization and division. They aren't the only ones flinging mud, to be certain, but their hands positively are caked with it.

Those kinds of things are the details it's deemed impolite to notice on a day like today, but we have to insist. Because, remember. The guy is still PM.

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One final note in closing. We’ve already said that we aren’t going to be giving a kind eulogy to the PM’s political career today. For all the reasons above. But we do want to offer this.

Today is a sad day.

Really. It is. Not because we’re heartbroken for Trudeau, though we do acknowledge and respect the toll the job has taken on him and his family. We’re sad today because this is just an ugly, pathetic way for Canada to be running.

Trudeau gets a lot of the blame for that, for reasons laid out above. But not all. What’s happening in this country and in our politics is bigger than one man. Trudeau resigning won’t fix all our problems. Some are beyond our borders. Others are domestic but spread across all the parties. Others will be the sole problem of the Conservatives, who’ll bring their own set of problems into office sometime in the near future.

And it’s sad. Canada has all the tools it needs to be great. On paper, can you imagine any other country as blessed as ours? This pathetic place we have come to is something we all need to think about. By all means, assign Trudeau a fair measure of blame for what he did wrong or failed to do right. We have and will. But we’ve got big, big problems. And we need smart, passionate people to solve them. Looking at the shitshow in Ottawa, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would ever dare wade into this mess. But we need them to if we’re ever going to get ourselves back on a more solid foundation.

We hope we do.

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Alright, friends. Hope everyone had a great break. We did. But it’s right back into the fray here at The Line. Stay tuned for details about The Line Live tonight, and remember, subscribe to our YouTube feed here so you don’t miss a minute.

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The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com