Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau
Prime Minister of Canada
Rideau Cottage
1 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A1
My Dear Prime Minister,
Please forgive me for taking so long to come to your aid with my counsel. It is, as always, gratuitous, gratis, and worth every penny of it.
I speak for your legions of true believers when I say we still have your back. You and your cabinet – the Best and Brightest, as all Canadians know – have been going through an uncommonly rough patch. You’ve been accused of allowing Chinese spies to roam the country (or at least to nibble at the electoral system); you’ve been yelled at in the House, insulted and badgered, week after week, to call a public inquiry; your point man, a former governor general no less, bailed on you. The opposition, which had demanded you fire him, turned on a dime and blamed you for making the poor soul suffer until he quit. It’s no wonder that you needed to slip away from the hurly burly of Ottawa for a weekend of R and R with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine.
When you got home, you learned that the Correctional Service of Canada had decided to make life more comfortable for Paul Bernardo by moving him from maximum to medium security. Paul Bernardo? Unbelievable! Your pal at Queen’s Park, Doug Ford, reacted the way I suspect 90 per cent of Canadians hoped you would react. Said the Premier: “(Bernardo) should rot in a maximum-security prison for the rest of his miserable existence.”
The leader of the opposition, one Pierre Poilievre, is demanding that you resign. My sources tell me that this Poilievre person has an ulterior motive: he wants your job. Imagine that! He wants to return the county to the Harperian Golden Age of Enlightenment. It can’t happen.
Except it could. Some polls (not all) show the Conservatives with enough support to form a government, even a majority one. However improbable, it might not hurt, Sir, to take a few defensive steps. Here are my suggestions:
First, find people who have the ability to “see around corners,” and surround yourself with them. In other words, with people who have the power of anticipation, the knack of spotting issues before they turn dangerous, so that they can be disarmed before they sneak up and bash you over the head. Foreign interference is an obvious example.
Second, build some rigour into your communications at the top level by finding and blowing up blockages that prevent important (in the case of Bernardo) or secret (as with foreign interference) information from reaching your desk. It is absurd that messages get stalled for months while bureaucrats and political staffers chew over what to do about them. The public gets the impression that your B and B team couldn’t run a stable in a one-horse town.
Third, take the advice of former PM Joe Clark in this space last week. Tone down the partisanship in Parliament. Stop using Question Period to score cheap political points – on both sides of the House. Use it as it was intended, to provide information about government actions to parliamentarians and, in the process, to the public, and to enable everyone to see the different positions that parties advance on the issues of the day.
Last, Prime Minister, why don’t you introduce a course for all incoming MPs on Parliament and democracy, on how to use and how not to abuse the institution? Just a thought.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments atgeoffstevens40@gmail.com