On the night he was elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau said to his fellow Canadians: “Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways. This is what positive politics can do.”
For a while, at least, he delivered. There isn’t a politician in the world who doesn’t look frumpy next to Trudeau, 6ft 2in of floppy haired, Instagram-ready celebrity. If he wasn’t showing off his yoga skills, doing the peacock pose in his shirtsleeves, or jogging shirtless, he was delighting millennials by wearing Star Wars socks to a meeting with the Irish prime minister. One moment he was holding two panda cubs from Toronto Zoo, the next dancing bhangra on a state visit to India.
He engaged in public displays of affection with his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, who the New York Post called “the hottest First Lady in the world”, and seemed the ultimate cool dad to his three young children, Xavier James, Ella-Grace Margaret and Hadrien.
Sophie, meanwhile, came across as a Canadian Gwyneth Paltrow, a former yoga instructor, passionate about health and nutrition after her own struggles with bulimia. She told Vogue: “Time, maturity, therapy, self-knowledge, yoga, meditation and babies — all this eventually brought me to a healing space.”
Politically, Trudeau was regarded as a political superman, who had led the Liberal Party from the wilderness. When he took over as leader in 2012, his once-dominant party held just 34 of the 338 seats in the Canadian parliament, and was struggling to find candidates. In 2015 the Liberals swept to power with a majority of 184, winning seats across Canada. Trudeau’s personal appeal, and his ability to persuade all kinds of new candidates to his party, were credited with the victory.
Today, however, his reputation as Canada’s Mr Clean has been shredded. He and his closest aides stand accused of trying to influence the legal process on behalf of a major Canadian construction firm. Trudeau has already lost two members of his cabinet, as well as his closest political friend and adviser. And still questions are being asked about the extent to which the prime minister may have abused the power of his office. Until recently it seemed he was coasting to victory in the national elections to be held in October. Now his popularity is eroding and his opponents smell blood.
Until recently, it seemed Trudeau was coasting to another election victory - new opponents smell blood
The charge against Trudeau and his circle is that they tried to pressure the former justice minister to drop a case against one of Canada’s largest engineering companies. SNC-Lavalin, which is based in Quebec, Trudeau’s political fiefdom, has been accused of paying £75 million in bribes between 2001 and 2011 to the family of the former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in return for construction contracts.
If the case goes to a full trial and the firm and its executives are found guilty, SNC-Lavalin could be banned from bidding for government contracts in Canada and overseas for a decade. It would be disastrous for a company which employs 50,000 people around the world, including 9,000 in Canada. Just last year, SNC-Lavalin won a huge contract to build Montreal’s new public transport system. If successfully prosecuted, it might have to give that up.
SNC-Lavalin’s supporters have been pressing the Justice Department to reach an out-of-court settlement with the firm. But prosecutors have said that is impossible given the nature of the allegations.
Enter Jody Wilson-Raybould, Trudeau’s justice minister until January. She alleges that Trudeau’s advisers, including the finance minister, pressured her to overrule her prosecutors and cut a deal with SNC-Lavalin. In testimony before parliament, she called their campaign “consistent and sustained”, and included “veiled threats” that she was taking on the prime minister. She suspected that her refusal to comply led to her being moved from Justice to Veterans’ Affairs in a cabinet reshuffle. Trudeau has said any conversations his advisers had with Wilson-Raybould were completely legal. He said in his defence: “There are disagreements in perspective on this but I can reassure Canadians that we were doing our job and in a way that respects and defends our institutions.” His party is mostly unified behind him.
But this week, he was slammed again when Jane Philpott, one of his most capable cabinet ministers, resigned in support of Wilson-Raybould. Philpott had held successive roles as minister of health and then indigenous services and, most recently, as president of the treasury board. She said in her resignation statement: “Sadly, I have lost confidence in how the government has dealt with this matter and in how it has responded to the issues raised.”
To lose two women from his cabinet has been damaging for Trudeau, who says that he is a feminist
To lose two women from his cabinet has been a major blow for Trudeau, who claims to be a feminist. Making it worse is that Wilson-Raybould is a leader of the We Wai Kai Nation, one of Canada’s indigenous peoples. Trudeau fancies himself as such a champion of Canada’s native tribes that he even has a tribal tattoo of a raven on his left bicep.
The main suspicion about Trudeau has always been that he is too good to be true. He is Canada’s version of John F Kennedy. His father, Pierre, led Canada in successive administrations from the late Sixties to the early Eighties — his former girlfriend, Barbra Streisand, called him a blend of “Marlon Brando and Napoleon”.
When Pierre was 51, he married the 22-year-old Margaret. They had three sons, Justin the eldest. Margaret, though, tired of life in Ottawa, and was often to be found in New York at Studio 54. She had various affairs, including with at least one Rolling Stone. Later she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has since dedicated herself to mental health issues.
Justin was born on Christmas Day. When he was just four months old he was toasted by the visiting US president, Richard Nixon: “To the future prime minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau.” He has credited the many foreign trips he took with his father as the basis for his understanding of statecraft but he was never his father’s intellectual equal.
In his twenties he worked as a bouncer in bars, smoked pot, taught snowboarding and eventually French and maths in a Vancouver boarding school. At his father’s funeral he delivered a memorable eulogy and laid his head on the coffin, saying “Je t’aime, Papa.”
Finally, in his mid-thirties, he picked up the Trudeau political baton, winning a seat in a working-class district of Montreal. He was a natural on the stump, swigging beer straight from the bottle and revelling in the company of voters.
Until now, the worst that has been said of him is that he is a shallow showboater, guilty of humdrum political hypocrisy. In 2017 he was found to have violated conflict-of-interest rules when he accepted an invitation to the Aga Khan’s private island in the Bahamas. When Saudi Arabia was under scrutiny for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last autumn, Trudeau suggested he might cancel a $15 billion arms deal with the Saudis. The deal remains in place. Despite seeming the epitome of the nice Canadian, it turns out that he likes an arms deal and a free holiday as much as the next hack.
So far it seems the Wilson-Raybould scandal might damage Trudeau but not sink him. Key allies such as his minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, have defended him. There is no suggestion that he broke any laws but his image as a break from the old, corruption-stained Liberal Party may be permanently tarnished. Those “sunny ways” looked shrouded in dark clouds.
