In the Olympics, the difference between gold, silver and bronze is often measured in fractions of seconds, centimetres and kilograms. This is the way this week’s federal by-election in the Montreal riding of Lasalle-Emard-Verdun played out. If it had been a horse race, it would have been a photo finish with the BQ beating the Liberals by a nose and the NDP by two.
But in Canadian politics, there are no silver or bronze medals for second and third place. It’s winner takes all, no matter how close the vote. In this case, the three leading candidates split 80 per cent of the vote into almost three even pieces, with just a few hundred ballots making the difference between the winner and the losers, with the result that less than a third of all the people who voted got the result they wanted and everyone else was disappointed.
That’s the system Justin Trudeau once said he was going to reform, declaring there would never be another election under the old first-past-the-post rules. But it never came to pass. He and his party backed away from that commitment in what was to be just one of a series of failures of his government to exhibit the leadership the country expected.
Part of Trudeau’s problem is his name. Without it, he wouldn’t be the occupant of the highest office in the land. With it come expectations established decades ago by his father of someone willing to take a position, however unpopular, and see it through, unafraid of a fight, whether with Quebec, Alberta or Washington.
Not so with the current Trudeau. The son of the person and the leader of the party that gave Canada its Charter of Rights and Freedoms was surely going to protect the rights of Anglos in Quebec. But he never stepped up to the plate, presumably to avoid giving nationalists the fight with Ottawa they are spoiling for in the hopes of reigniting separatist passions. Despite all his pussy-footing around on the issue, this week’s success of the Bloc in a long-standing Liberal riding indicates the rise of nationalist sentiment in Quebec, a reflection on the federal stage of recent gains by the PQ at the provincial level.
Similarly, he seemed committed to doing something meaningful about climate change but ended up buying a multi-billion-dollar pipeline, sending a very mixed signal about where he stands on the issue that has dogged his ability to provide credible leadership on this file ever since.
Now, in a country where most people understand the benefits of paying taxes in terms of roads, schools, libraries, social justice and national defence, among many other ways our collective efforts promote a relatively civilized way of life here in Canada, he is confounded in his efforts to convince Canadians that it is a worthy approach to keeping the planet from overheating.
His uncertainty plagues him, manifesting in the very way he speaks, hesitantly, haltingly, testing the mood of the room with every utterance, careful not to misstep or offend. Of course, it doesn’t help that it has become such a treacherous world for politicians where every comment is recorded and can be exploited instantly in a fund-raising campaign by your opponents.
It’s a bit sad that an undoubtedly well-intentioned person, who quite probably felt a calling to carry on the family business, was susceptible to the pressures of a party flailing in its efforts to put somebody compelling at the helm. But his continuing determination to stay on as leader of the Liberals comes at a cost, not just to him but to his party and, more importantly, the country.
Trudeau himself appears to have become the reason that people who would normally vote Liberal are now choosing not to as a means of sending him a signal that he has go to go. In turn, by the narrowest of margins, this has created a space in which a party committed to splitting Canada has gained another seat in the House of Commons. And who knows what the looming general election might yield.
Makes you wonder what Trudeau might be thinking about electoral reform about now.
Charles Dickson
