Jen Gerson: Liberals, you'd be fools

Justin Trudeau is his own personal Jesus H. Christ. He's not going to get better from here

Justin Trudeau at a housing announcement in Edmonton. Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

By: Jen Gerson

Watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau give an extended interview to Alberta's Ryan Jespersen is the first time I've ever felt visceral concern about the man leading this country. 

I genuinely don't mean this in any mean or partisan sense. What I mean is that this interview raised serious concerns about Trudeau's headspace, his judgment, and whether or not this man in particular should be leading the country right now. 

The interview wasn't a disaster: Trudeau brought up fair points that deserve more consideration in Alberta, and I will discuss them here. 

But on the whole, what I see here is a man who has wildly inflated his own policy achievements while in office. What I see is a man who cannot accept responsibility for his shortcomings, nor for the real decline in both state capacity and quality of life now affecting Canadians. What I see is a man who won't take accountability for his own unpopularity. 

And, most concerning, what I see is a man who thinks of himself as a messianic figure; a man blind to his own partisan ideology and bad behaviour, but hyper attuned to the same in others. A man who divides the world between black hats and white, and cannot admit the possibility of a legitimate alternative viewpoint — and can, in fact, only explain the very existence of such viewpoints by resorting to the belief that all of his critics have been fooled. Fooled. A word he uses over and over and over again, without realizing the contempt this word betrays of his own feelings toward his audience. 

This is a prime minister who cannot see the beam in his own eye; who exemplifies the trait — best summed up by National Post columnist Chris Selley and cited often here at The Line — that Liberals are the sort of people who are sincerely convinced they would never do the sorts of things they routinely do, or are in fact currently doing.  

Let's start with the quotes. 

Trudeau starts out by noting that right-wing politicians create wedge issues. "A lot of what the right is doing is about stoking up anger without offering any solutions." And insisting that right-wing politicians have "realized it's easy to instrumentalize anger and outrage to get people to vote in a way that is not necessarily in their best interests." 

The last two elections called, Mr. Trudeau. They would like to discuss guns, abortion, vaccine mandates, and pretty much every single other ballot question the Liberals have abused to squeak out minority victories by maximizing vote efficiency in crucial central Canadian ridings. 

Of course, it doesn't count when Liberals court disinformation, or stoke irrational fear about their opponents, because when they do it, they have Canadians' best interests at heart. They’re the good people, you see.

For when you're on the side of the angels, on a mission to preserve democracy itself from the manipulative wiles of right-wing politicians out to fool people from holding wrong opinions, what means are not justified?

I would also point out that in the same way that it would be insulting and inappropriate for me to delegitimize Trudeau's authority by arguing that he obtained two weak majorities by fooling Canadians via manufactured outrage on wedge issues, so too is he required to show some deference to the will of the voters of Alberta. One does not have to agree with everything Premier Danielle Smith does or says or proposes to demonstrate respect for the fact that she is the elected leader of the province, a role she secured in a free and fair election. But, alas.

Trudeau and Jespersen went on to discuss energy policy, and this is worth breaking down a bit. Firstly, Trudeau talked about federal government investment in the TransMountain pipeline, as well as investments in alternative industries, including hydrogen and Dow Chemicals. Trudeau's critics are correct to point out that the federal government stepped into save TransMountain — to derisk that project — only because it had been risked by his own policies and rhetoric. This is not entirely wrong, but it’s also not fair. It fails to give him credit for ultimately purchasing the project, a move that secured him no love within his largely central Canadian and pro-environment base. Trudeau was correct to do these things, and he did them despite the fact that making these investments could only hurt him politically. 

For the sake of fairness, let's give him this point. 

But Trudeau then goes on a diatribe against Albertan politicians and industries that was both breathtakingly condescending and contradictory. 

"Right-wing ideology is getting in the way of Alberta's success right now," he notes, along with promises for great jobs in Alberta's future if it "gets out of its ideological opposition to doing things that are good for workers, good for the planet, [but] maybe not good for classical oil sands companies." 

Before noting, confusingly, that many of those classical oil sand companies are, in fact, decarbonizing and investing in renewables. 

Followed by: "I don't think the oil industry has had the backs of the oil sands workers." 

This is just an amazing series of statements. It's a veritable parade of vanity.

Let's start from the top. 

Claiming that right-wing ideology is "getting in the way of Alberta's success" is a pretty astonishing claim when we consider the measurable wealth of the province. Alberta — a province that has elected (at least nominally) Conservative governments for, roughly, the last 49 of 53 years — has the highest per-capita GDP in the nation. We have the highest wages and, traditionally, some of the lowest unemployment rates. 

Alberta has many problems. "Lack of success" is not among them. If anything, Alberta’s problem is that it is trapped by its success.

Trudeau is convinced that ideology is blinding us poor benighted Albertans from making real innovative strides — without seeming to be aware that this province has the highest per capita labour productivity in the country, by far. 

Our prime minister is quick to pin our ills on ideology, but seems oblivious to the possibility that his own ideology might be impacting his assessment of both this province's economy and its politics. Any consideration, for example, of why those classical oil sands companies are decarbonizing, investing in renewables, and, yes, even arguing in favour of carbon taxes? Where do those strange facts fit into this ideological schema? Why is Alberta — vile paragon of right-wing ideology —leading the country in investment in renewables? 

For what it's worth, I agree that oil sands companies don't exist for the benefit of their workers. They exist to generate profit and value to their shareholders. 

What I don't understand is why this would make the sector unique. How is that different, or more morally fraught, than the actions and intentions of literally every other corporation and industrial sector in a capitalist system? Like, just to name some totally random examples, engineering companies in Quebec or car manufacturers in Ontario.

And if the province still seems to champion the oil and gas sector, to festoon its bumper stickers and T-shirts with "I Heart Alberta O&G," is that proof that its people have been fooled? Or, perhaps, is it evidence that a lot of Albertans recognize that the industry has been a better employer than most, contributing to the economy, and allowing an incredible swath of the population to obtain middle-class lives that would have otherwise been out of reach to them? 

A sense of affection, and even loyalty, toward that industry indicates that many Albertans don't share Trudeau's feelings on the subject. (Although those people must be fools by default, and therefore to be disregarded, I suppose.)

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The last point I will make here is that even if there is truth to Trudeau's position — even if Alberta is choosing its fate poorly by electing the wrong people who hold the wrong opinions, even if we are making the wrong choices for the future — who the fuck does Trudeau think he is to imagine that he knows better than us what's best for us?

Alberta has a constitutionally protected right to develop its own natural resources. Ultimately, it is for Albertans — not Trudeau, and not the federal government, and not the Liberals' voting base — to decide whether and how to develop those resources, and how best to spend or save the largesse. 

If our choices are unwise or short sighted (as they often have been) then Albertans will ultimately be the ones to suffer the consequences of our own follies. And, frankly, given the wealth the province has contributed to Confederation to date, the rest of the country has very little moral recourse to complain. 

The last observation I'll offer concerns Trudeau's comments on the state of the media. Jespersen asked Trudeau about it, and tried to pin him down on what role the federal government ought to have in fixing the "crapification" of the news. 

Trudeau's response tells us a lot about what the prime minister thinks, and fundamentally fails to understand, about the collapse of mainstream media. 

"There is, out there, a deliberate undermining of the mainstream media. There are conspiracy theorists, social media drivers doing everything they can to keep people in their little filter bubbles," he said. These nefarious forces were aligning to prevent people from coming to agreement on a common set of facts — without realizing that he had wordlessly slipped in the phrase "his common set of facts." 

I mean, whoo boy. Where the fuck to start with this?

Firstly, claiming that there is some kind of cabal out to deliberately destroy mainstream media is, itself, a conspiracy theory. 

The causes of decline of mainstream media are multitudinous and, frankly, well understood. We're not getting crappified because Pierre Poilievre is taking potshots at reporters during the scrums. The Internet broke the mainstream media's near-monopoly on advertising, which destroyed the business model through which journalism was funded. The economic collapse was compounded by the disintermediating effects of social media and the growth of competitive content platforms that provide an abundance of alternative media and viewpoints. 

We also screwed ourselves, both by our own ordinary failures and errors, and by allowing our industry to become ideologically captured, and increasingly fixated on topics that are divorced from normie society.  

Of course there are bad actors out there trashing mainstream journalism for their own nefarious ends. Trashing the mainstream media is a highly lucrative industry in and of itself — and it always will be. But the decline in trust in media is a long standing trend and as much as many of my colleagues would like to pin that reality on anybody but ourselves, the truth is that this reverses the onus of responsibility. It’s our duty to maintain trust with our audiences, not the other way around.

If the YouTube rantings of Russell Brand or the tweets of Elon Musk or the fundraising emails of Poilievre were all it took to break trust with generational media brands, then that failure is ours, and ours alone. 

Trudeau then let the mask slip by praising Jespersen and his independent platform as both "news" and a site of tough questioning. 

I mean no disrespect to Jespersen at all when I write this (love 'ya bud!) but his show is no more "news" than we are news here at The Line. Jespersen is a talk-show host and, through him, Trudeau is very much speaking to the converted. If the prime minister believes that this interview represents tough questioning, it's no wonder that he imagines all criticism to be the illegitimate result of bad faith disinformation. His scale of intellectual toughness is simply not calibrated to reality. 

I'm not even trashing Jespersen, here. (Ryan! Really! I’m not!) The interview was solid and, clearly, very valuable to me! But if Trudeau were trying to maximize the impact of an interview in Alberta, it's bizarre that he chose to go with Jespersen. I'm honestly not sure what audience he's trying to reach with this interview: 905ers who want to hear him chastise right-wing Albertans? The remaining Quebec base? Or a few thousand self-hating Alberta Liberals?

The smart approach when entering hostile territory would have been to go with a hostile interviewer who could stand in for a more typically conservative Albertan viewer. I would actually have loved to hear Danielle Smith, herself a former radio host, interview Trudeau. At a minimum, I fail to understand why he thinks he is getting more out of speaking to Albertans via Jespersen for an hour than he would get by at least talking to Smith directly while he was here. That, too, demonstrates disrespect and contempt for the many Albertans who voted her premier. 

My last note is to any federal Liberals who would deign to read my heretical ramblings (presuming there are any of you who still listen to anything other than the gentle whisperings from the hollow wind tunnel of the collective Liberal rectum).

*Cut to camera. Break the fourth wall.*

Guys. Come on, now. 

The prime minister's psychological failings are terminally compounding thanks to too many years in office, and too little dissent within the ranks. Justin Trudeau is his own personal Jesus H. Christ. He can't even recognize his own limitations or failures, much less correct course. 

He's not going to fix this. He's not going to get better from here. He can't. 

He can only explain his own collapsing poll numbers by maniacally courting friendly talk shows in a desperate bid to convince the world that everybody else is wrong; that Canadians must accept his version of reality and right, lest democracy be doomed. This is an extension of the delusion that the Liberal government's policy and execution and actions and intentions are all super grand, and that its only real problem is poor communications. 

You know that's not true. In your hearts, you know it. 

You'd be fools. 

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