The Liberal party and I have always been close. Inseparable, really. At age 21 in 1968, and freshly eligible to vote, I cast my first ballot for one Pierre Elliott Trudeau, new Liberal leader and MP for Mount Royal. It was immensely satisfying.
The night before, I’d been on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street as the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade grew violent and Trudeau, who was there, stood defiantly as separatist hurled missiles his way. Throughout the campaign, I’d worn my Trudeau button proudly, joining enthralled crowds at appearances.
As a young teacher in those pre-journalism days, I’d even gratefully accepted a small packet of Trudeau’s hair from a student named Anna.
(Yes, hair. The day before his televised debate, he had had his hair cut by Anna’s father, a barber. She had swept it up, packaging samples of it. I should be ashamed to admit this, but I still have it.)
Since then, I have voted Liberal consistently, for reasons both political and principled, although there may also be a genetic factor. My grandmother once sat with Lady Laurier at an opening of Parliament, and I suspect my mother may have sprinkled Liberal dust on my infant pablum. My husband jokes that my mother would have voted against Mother Teresa if she’d run as a Conservative.
But the affiliation was more than mere tribalism.
In our family, liberalism was a life force: you live well in this world when you believe in equality, accept responsibilities and pay attention to the needs of others. Most of us thought Canada’s Liberal party best spoke that language. (So did the NDP, we thought, but without the experienced practicality of the Libs.)
Consider Lester B. Pearson, possibly the country’s most consequential prime minister. In five short years, he introduced national medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, a student-loan program, new immigration protocols — and a new maple-leaf flag, the Order of Canada and Centennial Year celebrations that reverberated for years afterward. With leaders like Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, how could I not vote Liberal?
But that was then. Today, much to my astonishment, I simply can’t do it. With Justin Trudeau hanging around, pretending catastrophic byelection losses are calls to “work harder,†my Liberal option has evaporated.
In 2015, misgivings about Trudeau the Younger faded in the rosy mist of his promises. I was thrilled to learn what was in store: 2015 would be our last first-past-the-post election; the Prime Minister’s Office would no longer be the country’s “eminence grise;†a new day of transparency and “Real Change,†the Liberal campaign promise, was coming.
No government fulfills all its promises, but the Liberals under Trudeau have set a new low bar for disappointment. And sadly, it even extends now beyond policy and politics to the personal.
There exists a palpable and viscerally negative reaction to Trudeau the man — to the mechanical smile with its rictus insincerity, to the annoying speech tics, to the socks. The socks! It sounds shamefully superficial, but the ridiculous socks scream phoniness. His obsession with appearance, from clothes to haircuts (or carefully cultivated lack thereof when Covid was king) suggests someone given to image rather than substance.
Then there are the pro forma banalities that have become his stock in trade. From Trudeau’s mouth, the faux earnestness of “we’ve got your back†surely has to rank as the emptiest promise in the history of clichés.
I’m agonizing over my next federal vote. Like most Liberals, I know it won’t be for the Poilievre Conservatives, for whom mean-spirited divisiveness and simplistic sloganeering are the order of the day. But it absolutely will not be for the Trudeau gang, either.
Most of the lifelong Liberals I know passionately want Trudeau gone and are adamant about not voting Liberal if he’s still around. And they’re not alone. As we’ve seen recently, safe seats are now history.
Piloted by the stubborn vanity and unearned arrogance of one man and his enablers, the unsinkable HMS Liberal seems headed for the iceberg.
And its passengers are jumping ship.
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