It’s hard to know where to start with the Toronto Star’s baffling editorial in Saturday’s edition. In print, it had the headline, “Time to lead, prime minister.” The online headline version was more blunt: “Justin Trudeau needs to show he has the qualities to lead.”
“Huh,” I thought when my eyes first came upon that headline. “Some editorialist is sure gonna be angry when they see what lame headline some page editor slapped on their editorial!” Because surely, after almost four years with Trudeau as prime minister, the Star’s crack team of editorial writers isn’t still thoughtfully pondering the man and his record, comparing the highs to the lows, before concluding that somehow, they don’t have quite enough information to make up their minds? There’s no way the Star’s editorial board would essentially argue that it’s just too soon to tell what kind of prime minister Trudeau would be, as he approaches the end of his first mandate? It had to be a bad headline.
It was not, in fact, a bad headline.
The editorial itself is mostly unobjectionable. The editorialists note that the Liberals are heading into the fall election with the benefit of a strong economy, and also note that polls show the Liberals are “barely running even” with the Conservatives. (That’s arguably too generous — both the CBC’s Canada Poll Tracker and 338Canada.com poll aggregators show the Liberals well behind the Conservatives, in both popular vote projections and estimated seat counts. Still, the Liberals remain in a competitive second position.) The Star’s editorialists note, correctly, that the problem for the Liberals is their leader. Justin Trudeau’s personal popularity has utterly collapsed. They even get why Trudeau’s popularity has tanked more or less right, at least in my view: a series of very public and very avoidable major errors in judgment, including the entire SNC-Lavalin fiasco, comments the PM made during the Mark Norman affair and, most recently, his strangely discombobulated response to accusations that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide of Indigenous people.
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See Also:
(2) Canada’s confused efforts to stand up to China need fixing
(3) Numbers show Trudeau’s climate promises are fake news
(4) Day 210 — Act up for Canada’s hostages in China
(5) Chinese and Liberal $$$$fests go together like egg roll and plum sauce
Watch:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.
“As a drama teacher, Trudeau no doubt believes all the world’s a stage. It isn’t.”
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/blizzard-trudeau-messes-up-on-world-stage