A year ago, Justin Trudeau sat in the witness box at the Rouleau inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act.
He didn’t appear nervous or fidgety. No, he looked very calm, extremely confident, and spoke with a clarity of firmness that most had not seen before, certainly not since he became prime minister in 2015. As his testimony into the February 2022 trucker’s protest played out, most observers seemed to agree he’d finally, after years of looking awkward, found his voice.
There was a sense that if this was the new and improved Trudeau, the Liberals were on the right track towards a fourth consecutive election victory. Trudeau boosters rejoiced. “Never doubt a fighter,” they said. “Remember what happened to those predictions of failure when he put on the gloves and proceeded to pummel and rout Senator Patrick Brazeau?” they’d say. This was going to be the same.
But today, we find ourselves far from that 2012 boxing ring. This year, it’s been one disaster after another. Trudeau’s team looks desperate, scrambling to find their footing, double digits behind the Poilievre Conservatives in every poll for weeks now. The cabinet shuffle at the end of July was supposed to bring things back on the right track after a bad spring. It didn’t - all it did was make Liberals restless about who got dropped, shuffled, bumped up to Cabinet, and who didn’t.
The backward slide for the Liberals has continued through high grocery prices, housing announcements, the India story, caucus divisions on the Israel-Gaza war, and now the backflip on carbon tax. “Events my dear boy, events” as the late British PM Harold Macmillan was reported to have said about how governments get knocked off course. In Trudeau’s case, if he was trying to design a disaster, he couldn’t have done so any better.
For Pierre Poilievre, strategy through all this should have been simple - just stand there and let the universe unfold as it should. But of course, that wouldn’t be PP. His lasting image for the summer will be standing in that British Columbia apple orchard chomping on product, spitting seeds, and making a hapless, ill-prepared reporter look pretty bad. You could feel the dollars rolling into the CPC bank accounts in that moment. Of course, there would have been even more dollars if the victim had been a CBC reporter, but you can’t win ‘em all.
So where are we? Lots of whispers, and not just by reporters, about “walks in the snow” and about which contenders for the crown are positioning themselves for an early contest. Some have had their hands slapped for being just a little too obvious. Others are quietly preparing.
Is the die cast? It’s complicated.
But maybe, just maybe, less so after the last week. I really liked Lawrence Martin’s take in The Globe on the Liberal’s latest gamble to try and stop the bleeding. Lawrence has been around the block a few times in both Washington and Ottawa. He’s got game. Okay it's mainly golf, but he’s pretty good at politics too:
Why doesn’t Justin Trudeau understand that Canadians want change?
Lawrence provided a link to Percy Downe’s National Newswatch piece on his party’s problems.
Abbas Rana at the Hill went one step further. He went out and talked to the Senator:
With plunging polls and ongoing chatter, Trudeau could finalize future plans by February, says Liberal stalwart and Senator Percy Downe
There are so many ways to look at this.
As part of our trifecta on the topic, check out a different take from everyone’s favourite Parliament Hill columnist, Susan Delacourt:
Justin Trudeau was fixing a problem. Now his solution is a weapon for Pierre Poilievre
One last note on this, don’t miss Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson for this weekend’s Good Talk - Bruce brings some new data on how Canadians really feel about the prime minister. The program is available on SiriusXM satellite radio and on your favourite podcast platform. According to Apple’s rankings, Good Talk is consistently the most downloaded Canadian political podcast out there. You can find a link to the YouTube version NationalNewswatch.com.
November is Financial Literacy Month
Financial literacy is an essential life skill and an important part of overall financial well-being. Canada’s banks support several programs to help Canadians strengthen their financial knowledge, skills and confidence, including the Canadian Bankers Association's free seminar programs, Your Money Seniors and Your Money Students.
Now maybe it’s my age but there are times my memory fades a bit.
Who was that national party leader who was telling folks that Bitcoin was the place to be? Wonder if he still feels that way? Wonder what he tells people who followed his advice? Ahh, here we go, remember this.
Sam Bankman-Fried Is Found Guilty of 7 Counts of Fraud and Conspiracy
Now, to politics south of the border for a moment.
Is RFK Jr. a serious candidate for the US presidency, or is he just what a lot of observers portray him as … a bit of a conspiratorial nut? The son of the beloved New York senator who was assassinated when he ran for the presidency in 1968, RFK Jr. gave up trying for the 2024 Democratic nomination and is now running as an independent. The still very influential Kennedy family has mostly disowned his ambitions, and both major parties claim he won’t have any impact on the election result. But not everyone sees it that way.
Don’t jump to any conclusions until you check out this piece in Politico by Brittany Gibson and Jessica Piper:
RFK Jr.’s donor data reveals his 2024 threat
Just how desperate do you have to be to walk away from a house deal?
Well, these are desperate times for some people who jumped into the housing market with big deposits on soon-to-be-constructed homes. These days more and more of those buyers are abandoning their deposits because of interest rates and dropping values. Clarrie Feinstein is a business reporter with the Toronto Star:
Toronto-area buyers are walking away from deposits on new homes — some losing as much as $300,000
It's hard to believe today, but there was a time when it was unclear whether smoking was good for you or bad for you.
The medical community would deliver piles of research studies clearly showing that you could die from smoking, while the tobacco companies would produce their studies claiming the opposite. For years, this presented a never-ending challenge for television reporters who had to say something in their on-camera closers. Usually, they’d point to some new study expected within months to try to extricate themselves from the dilemma. I know how hard it was because I did a few of those thumbsucker closers myself.
The same often goes for political reporting – rarely is anything truly settled. One side argues one point of view while the other, usually across the aisle, argues the other. And reporters are left trying to craft a responsible closing sentence or two. After a while, trying to find the right thing to say just gets frustrating.
Enter John Drewry. He was a CBC reporter, one of the greats, a veteran of the RCAF in the Second World War, incredibly handsome, always with a lineup of admirers. When I introduced my mother to him in the late 1970s in the Parliamentary restaurant she swooned. My mother. Swooned. At my office colleague.
When us newbies arrived in the Ottawa TV bureau of the CBC in the seventies - myself, Mark Phillips, John Blackstone, Mike Duffy (yup all men!) - it was John Drewry who taught us the ropes. One day we asked John how he handled those stories, the ones where there is no tidy answer.
No problem for John. He called up an item he’d done a few years before and we sat in an edit suite to watch it replayed. The story rolled out showing a Conservative MP arguing a particular point and a Liberal cabinet minister responding with an opposite set of “facts”. This went back and forth a few times when finally it was time for the closer, up popped the distinguished former Lancaster bomber tail gunner, his hair carefully coiffed, his tie neatly knotted, and his moustache looking very Clark Gable.
In the distinctive Drewry voice that millions had become so used to over so many years, he uttered this conclusion to the story with no conclusion:
“Who knows? Who really knows? John Drewry, CBC News, Ottawa.”
I thought of that this week as reporters tried to make sense Alberta’s proposal to get out of the CPP and start the province’s own pension plan. Lots of conflicting claims – I don’t expect you to read all this, but just look at the blizzard of charts with “facts” versus “facts” in this CBC piece. I sure know what John Drewry would do with it:
Freeland tells Premier Smith leaving CPP would be 'historic, costly, irreversible mistake'
A last note on my old colleague. John Drewry. Sadly, he left us in 2002 but clearly not forgotten.
For the next segment, I offer a link to an 18-minute YouTube video you may find helpful in understanding one of the dominant stories of the past month.
It’s produced by The Balfour Project, a group based in Britain dedicated to equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The video details the 31-year period between 1917 and 1948 that directly relates to what we are witnessing today. Not everyone will agree with what you see here, but some prominent Israelis and Palestinians have said it can lead to a better understanding of why we are witnessing what we are witnessing in Israel and Gaza today:
Britain in Palestine 1917-1948
Okay, now something completely different.
Nothing about carbon taxes, nothing about US politics, nothing about wars, nothing about pensions or houses …. this one is about sheep. One not far from our place in northeast Scotland as it turns out. Thanks to the BBC for this:
Rescu-ewe me?: The challenges of reaching Britain's loneliest sheep
