Matt Gurney: Our allies think Trudeau is finished. They're waiting for the next PM

Final thoughts on my latest jaunt to Halifax.

By: Matt Gurney

As promised in recent weeks, I'm here today to offer up my third and final column related to my visit this year to the annual Halifax International Security Forum. This column is going to be a bit weird — it'll be written more in the style in one of our weekend dispatches, since my plan is to just cover off a variety of interesting observations that probably don't warrant a full column, but I still think warrant mention.

So let's start with this one: whoo boy, life comes at you fast. Because when we all met in Halifax last month, the Syrian civil war was still apparently at a deadlock and Bashar Al-Assad remained president of the country, just like he had been for 24 years. I honestly don't recall if Syria came up at all during the event. The Middle East certainly did (more on that below), but if there was anything specific to Syria, I missed it. (I'm not being writerly there — I may honestly just have missed it, as the event is pretty packed and I can't attend every part of it.)

In any case, it wasn't a front-and-centre issue, and here we are, barely three weeks later. Assad is house hunting in Moscow, the deposed regime's jails are being opened, revealing astonishing horrors within, and it remains to be seen whether the country is going to split up and who'll end up running which parts of it. I really want to hope that those prisons will stay empty. I know enough about civil wars to know, though, that after the CNN crews get their footage of the new bosses kindly letting everyone out of these houses of horror, the prisons often just receive fresh residents once the new regime figures out who they deem inconvenient. I know it sounds trite, but on this front, I can only hope for the best.

I led with Syria simply as an exercise in humility, and also as a word of warning to my fellow Canadians. No one is smart enough to be aware of all the challenges the world faces today. No one can possibly guess where things are going. And that's why I'm going to keep urging Canadians, as I have for a great many years to noticeably unimpressive results, to take their own security seriously. I don't pretend that we should be some imperial policeman. I don't fault the government for not seeing the fall of Assad coming. The point isn't to be hyper-prepared for any possible contingency. But we need the intelligence and security services, the military and the broader civil society institutions, and general state capacity in our government, to be pretty well prepared for crises of some kind. A general background level of preparedness will give us a head start in responding to whatever fresh hell life throws at us next.

Canada does not currently have that level of overall readiness. This really worries me. Because no one saw the fall of Assad coming three weeks ago. What's going to surprise us three weeks from now?

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With that aside, I want to talk a bit about the Forum itself this year. Specifically, the mood. It was interesting.

This was my third consecutive year attending. Two years ago, the mood was pretty cheerful, actually. COVID-19 was in the rearview mirror, Ukraine's recent summer offensive had been a success beyond all (well, most) expectations, and Donald Trump was fighting off a series of legal challenges, or trying to. Last year, the mood was shocked and downbeat. Ukraine's latest offensive had failed to make any appreciable gains and Israel had just, the month before, suffered the catastrophic October 7 attacks.

This year, I'd describe the mood as ... well, it's hard to explain in a word. Glum doesn't quite capture it. Resigned doesn't quite capture it, either, though that's probably the closest I can get in a single word. Maybe I'll have to just throw a few words at you and you can try and figure out for yourself how they'd all mix in a blender: we'll take glum and resigned, and toss in "determined" and "wary." And maybe a spoonful of “disillusioned.”

With Mr. Trump re-elected, Ukraine knows it will likely have to settle for some kind of peace deal. Canada and the European allies are processing the realization that not only is Mr. Trump no fluke, but that American foreign and defence policy are likely going to re-orient themselves on a more transactional, America-first perspective. I don't think anyone was panicking about it. But there was certainly an air of maybe disappointed acceptance? Not just regarding Mr. Trump. I don't want to suggest that the Forum is a bunch of Never Trumpers. But it is certainly made up of a lot of people who were pretty wedded to a certain concept of an international order, and a Western alliance that is, to put it mildly, no longer assured. That world order isn’t necessarily finished, but I think it was obvious to all that it was going to change, potentially a lot, and not necessarily in predictable or productive ways.

So yeah, the reality of Mr. Trump's re-election hung over everything, but ... on the other hand ...

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… it was remarkable to me how we got through a three-day event and almost no one talked about Mr. Trump. I'm not saying this as a criticism. But it was clear to me pretty early in the proceedings that the president-elect was a keenly perceived "fact on the ground" that no one wanted to directly address. There was a weird Beetlejuice thing going on, as if to speak his name was to summon his presence.

I think some of this, especially from uniformed American military personal, simply reflects their need to avoid commenting on political matters. There was a brief moment of levity when a four-star U.S. Navy admiral tried to tactfully answer a question about some of what Mr. Trump has proposed and ended up spending 30 or 40 seconds umm-ing and aww-ing before eventually just dissolving into self-conscious laughter and giving up. A sympathetic crowd gave him a little applause, recognizing that he'd tried. Among those not in uniform, the American politicians there — there was a small Congressional delegation — were obviously careful to avoid saying anything that would draw the president-elect's ire or attention, or to further complicate the obviously already difficult process of a political transfer of power between one presidential administration to a successor administration from the other party.

One other moment stuck out. It was not during an official part of the proceedings, and was honestly just something I overheard during a conversation while I was snacking during a break. I'm going to not give any hint of this individual's identity, beyond noting that they were a United States military officer, in uniform, and of a fairly senior rank. They were asked if they were enjoying the Forum and the city. They agreed that they were, and then joked that they'd taken some time to see the sights of Halifax because "This may be where I come to claim asylum."

It was a joke. It was intended as such. It got the intended response: there was laughter all around.

But, like, golly. You know?

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This next one is going to be very brief, since it's really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of "The world is currently a mess." Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can't speak to what I didn't see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.

A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas's attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I'd like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims' phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.

"I thought I had seen the worst," the doctor told the assembled audience. "But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes."

Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy's comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.

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I alluded to this in my second column from Halifax, published here last week, which focused mostly on the performance of Mélanie Joly, Canada's foreign affairs minister. And we've discussed it since during our dispatches and podcasts. But one of the most important things I realized during the Forum this year is that our allies — all of them, but maybe especially the Americans — have written off the Trudeau government. National Defence minister Bill Blair and Ms. Joly gave remarks and were treated politely and with all official courtesy, but no one I spoke to during the Forum — literally no one — had any expectation that Prime Minister Trudeau would still be in office in the near future — whether or not he’d be around for next year’s Forum (it runs every November) was a crapshoot, depending on when the next election is actually triggered. It was simply accepted as a given that he and his government are done and that everything the government is saying and doing now is probably never going to happen and that, after the clock runs down, the real government will come in and make the real announcements. In the meantime, we’re in an extended period of make-believe government.

Everyone was being very polite about it, but this was overwhelmingly the sense in the room. It honestly reminded me, and readers will forgive me for the grim allusion, of times I've visited terminally ill friends or family. Sometimes the last time I've visited them. There was the same strained dignity and courtesy.

That was when Canadian officials were around, that is. When the conversations were more private, I found myself facing more questions than I was asking, which is a bit of a role reversal. The most common theme of the questions? What is Pierre Poilievre going to do once PM? What will his foreign policies be? What will his defence policies be? Who will be his key ministers? What do I know about them? How are they going to deal with Trump 2.0? And so on.

The above isn't offered as a prediction, and I don't seek to confirm anyone's existing biases. I'm just trying to tell y'all, if the Forum were to open up a political betting market, I don't even like to think how bad Justin Trudeau's odds would have been. Our allies have moved on from him. They'll observe all the niceties in the meantime, but as far as our allies are concerned, Mr. Trudeau is deader than disco.

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While we're on the topic of what our allies are saying about Canada, I'll simply direct readers to a few minutes of video here. I've queued it up to start right at the moment where Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho) is asked his thoughts on Canada's military readiness and commitment to the alliance. I'll say no more, but urge readers to spend a few minutes listening. I heard this a few times during the event. Not always as politely as the senator put it.

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I have to be a bit vague here. Some parts of the Forum agenda are off the record and I have to honour that. But I do want to share simply a funny comment that was made and wasn’t relevant to the actual item on the agenda. I’ll offer up no other detail about who said it or in what context, but the quip itself is something I want to share. I wish I’d thought of it myself. In discussing the state of the world, someone at the event observed that the West is “being evicted from Maslow’s penthouse.”

That’s a play on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is often visually depicted as a pyramid. Basic survival needs constitute the bottom, widest layers, and the layers get narrower as you go up. You start with things like food and water and, as you achieve those things, you can focus on other things — love, material success, education, spiritual and emotional fulfillment, and the like.

So the quip was perfect and very aptly described what I think is the problem the Western alliance now faces. After a few generations of peace, we have become very focused on and invested in furthering our success in the higher levels of the pyramids — the penthouse, in this joke.

But now we’re being evicted by reality, forced to relocate to one of the lower levels — safety, security, basic needs.

It’s a jarring transition, and it’s being forced upon us. An eviction, indeed. Many of our leaders are either in denial or choosing to pretend they are, so they can do things like propose tax rebate cheques in a time when we should be getting this country on a sounder security footing.

I don’t think history will highly rate Mr. Trudeau’s performance in the period of his government that followed the invasion of Ukraine. How much longer that period stretches out is anyone’s guess. He, too, faces eviction.

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I want to end on this. It's more of a personal note than a comment on defence or international affairs. My own path into the media, way back at the start of my career, was unusual. I didn't do the usual path from rookie reporter into a more prominent reporting beat and then maybe a bureau gig and then finally, once seasoned, slide into opinion writing. I was a blogger in university, my writing got noticed by the National Post's then-comment section editor Jon Kay (with a big help from his mother Barbara), and I joined the Post's editorial board as a junior member — a helper, really. I worked my way up from there to, well, to here. To The Line.

I bring this up simply to offer some context: I haven't had to do a lot of the shittiest assignments cub reporters get saddled with: talking to people to get a quote or a bit of film for a TV broadcast as they attempt to process the grief of losing a loved one. I've done some of that stuff, but not much. Thank God.

I bring this up because during this year’s Forum, I found myself wishing, more than once, that I had had more of that experience early in my career. Because I wanted to have more "game face" during some of my chats. With Ukrainians. I was really struggling to look them in the eye. It was a struggle to hear their stories.

Because I'm pretty goddamned convinced we — meaning the West generally — are about to hurl them under a bus.

I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I'm not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine's history, but I have absolutely no doubt who's the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I've had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I've also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.

I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.

But I have concluded that they're screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn't have the heart to tell them that. I don't even know how I'd begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.

During a meal in Halifax, a woman who'd flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn't been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn't remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they'd happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.

And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren't even of sympathy. I wasn't overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I'd get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain't a war zone.

This woman doesn't get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.

History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

And alas, we'll deserve it.

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