{"id":331371,"date":"2021-08-28T00:19:43","date_gmt":"2021-08-27T21:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/federal-election-2021-justin-trudeau-does-not-do-shakeups-a-fact-check\/"},"modified":"2021-08-28T00:19:43","modified_gmt":"2021-08-27T21:19:43","slug":"federal-election-2021-justin-trudeau-does-not-do-shakeups-a-fact-check","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/federal-election-2021-justin-trudeau-does-not-do-shakeups-a-fact-check\/","title":{"rendered":"#Federal election 2021: ‘Justin Trudeau does not do shakeups’: A fact-check"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Federal election 2021: ‘Justin Trudeau does not do shakeups’: A fact-check<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: He does shakeups, all the time. But there’s no use for one that brings in more people with the same flawed assumptions that have characterized this campaign.\n <\/div>\n
\n Fascinating read from the Toronto Star<\/em> this morning<\/a>, as Liberals try to decide how worried to be. I think that, taken at the average, they reach the app<\/a>ropriate answer: only moderately worried. A lot of possibilities remain for saving Justin Trudeau\u2019s campaign from ignominious and surprising defeat. And even if none of them end up working, well, as Mark Rylance\u2019s character keeps asking in Bridge of Spies<\/em>, would worrying have helped?<\/p>\n

The Star<\/em> piece talks to several candidates about the campaign\u2019s first tough 10 days. Their remarks range from blandly reassuring to darkly comic. I especially like the candidate who says their pitch to voters is, \u201cYou can still both vote for me and hope that there\u2019s someone else as prime minister, if that\u2019s really your goal.\u201d It\u2019s a big tent. Flexibility is good.<\/p>\n

I admit I was surprised to read one comment, however:<\/p>\n

\u201cJustin Trudeau does not do shakeups,\u201d said a senior Liberal official speaking on background. \u201cThat is not in his nature.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Star<\/em> offers few hints about who this official might be, though they do say it\u2019s someone \u201csenior\u201d and the quote comes in a section of the story dealing with \u201cthose running the national Liberal campaign.\u201d Kind of sounds like it\u2019s somebody who might be shaken up, if it were in Justin Trudeau\u2019s nature to do shakeups.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s pause briefly to inquire into the Prime Minister\u2019s nature.<\/p>\n

In 2014, he ejected every senator from the Liberal caucus, reducing the size of that caucus by more than half. The Globe<\/em> called the move<\/a> \u201cTrudeau\u2019s shakeup.\u201d In 2015 Liberal campaign co-chair Dan Gagnier resigned from the campaign<\/a> days before the vote, after he wrote a letter to private-sector clients advising them on how to deal with an eventual Trudeau government.<\/p>\n

Freshly elected and barely past the new year in 2016, Trudeau fired his Clerk of the Privy Council by news<\/a> release while travel<\/a>ing and installed a new one. \u201cPCO shakeup<\/a> leaves some government experts wondering,\u201d the Hill Times<\/em> wrote. The Globe<\/em>\u2018s Robert Fife reported<\/a> that the outgoing Clerk, Janice Charette, \u201chad run afoul of the Prime Minister\u2019s Office when she expressed concerns about the appointment of Mr. Trudeau\u2019s campaign policy adviser, Matthew Mendelsohn, as a deputy clerk of the PCO.\u201d So this shakeup resulted when somebody opposed the other shakeup, you might say.\u00a0 That February shakeup led to a March shakeup<\/a> of next-tier public servants.<\/p>\n

The election of Donald Trump led to what the Star<\/em> called a \u201cTrudeau cabinet shakeup<\/a>\u201d at the beginning of 2017. If anything the term was an understatement: two of the most experienced ministers in cabinet, John McCallum and St\u00e9phane Dion, were ejected to foreign postings, Dion\u2019s so weird\u2014a simultaneous appointment to Berlin and Brussels that the European Union ended up rejecting\u2014that Dion vanished for days from public view before finally accepting the gig. Word leaked later that Dion\u2019s crimes against l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9<\/em> included asking difficult questions to colleagues at cabinet meetings. Can\u2019t have that! Shakeup time!<\/p>\n

Six months later, in mid-2017, Trudeau split the Indigenous Affairs department into two departments, a major effort rarely undertaken by any government, in a \u201clarger-than-expected\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 cabinet shuffle. Here he is explaining<\/a> what the CBC called that \u201cshakeup.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast forward to January 2019 and the shakiest shakeup of all the shakeups. Trudeau moved Jody Wilson-Raybould from Justice and, ahem, Attorney General<\/a> to Veterans Affairs. CTV called the shuffle<\/a> a \u201cshakeup\u201d and noted that the PM had explained he needed to move Seamus O\u2019Regan into Indigenous Services because clean drinking water on reserves was something that needed to be \u201cdone right.\u201d The Globe<\/em> soon started reporting on other possible motives for the shuffle, and within weeks, in what the CBC called a \u201cmajor shakeup<\/a> to the highest reaches of the Prime Minister\u2019s Office,\u201d Gerald Butts became a free agent.<\/p>\n

Onward to 2020. Trudeau fired his finance minister and \u201caccepted\u201d the deputy minister\u2019s \u201cresignation\u201d in the middle of a historic fiscal crisis. Here\u2019s Bloomberg<\/a> on that \u201cshake-up\u201d (Bloomberg prefers the edgy hyphenated spelling).\u00a0 The new deputy minister was Michael Sabia, whose arrival at<\/a> and departure from<\/a> the Canada Infrastructure Bank had occasioned two shakeups in a row.<\/p>\n

Three days before the start of the current election campaign, which is being run for the Liberals<\/a> by Azam Ishmael\u2014the party\u2019s 2019 campaign director, Jeremy Broadhurst, is nowhere to be found in the org charts; bit of a shakeup, that\u2014Trudeau announced what the Hill Times<\/em> called<\/a> a \u201cmajor shakeup\u201d in the senior ranks of the public service.<\/p>\n

This corner offers no general opinion on the utility or otherwise of shakeups. If you need to make a change, you make a change. If it works, it was a good idea. In the case at hand, I see no point in replacing people with new people who were raised in, and participate in, the deeply flawed assumptions that have characterized this campaign. I\u2019m just more surprised than I probably should be at how it\u2019s possible to rise to a \u201csenior role\u201d \u201crunning the national Liberal campaign\u201d and have no idea<\/em> what the \u201cnature\u201d of Justin Trudeau is. The good news for that person is, such determined misapprehension is likelier to cement a role in the circle closest to this PM than to endanger it.<\/p>\n

One more thing. What Justin Trudeau is trying to do this year is actually without precedent in his lifetime.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s trying to use an unforced election at a moment of his choosing to grow from a minority government to a majority government. Minority governments calling elections on their own schedule, purely because the Prime Minister likes his chances, are actually not common in Canadian federal politics. Since Trudeau was born in 1970, only two prime ministers have tried it: Stephen Harper in 2008 and Justin Trudeau two weeks ago. It didn\u2019t work for Harper in 2008. He ignored his own fixed-election-date law, was badly sideswiped by a global fiscal crisis, and was lucky to hang on with another minority government. We\u2019ll see how Trudeau does.<\/p>\n

Every other minority-Parliament prime minister in Trudeau\u2019s lifetime has governed until he lost a confidence vote in the Commons: Pierre Trudeau in 1974, Joe Clark in 1979, Paul Martin in 2005, Harper in 2011. Clark and Martin lost the elections that followed. But the elder Trudeau and Harper won, in part because they were able to present themselves as dutiful defenders of continuity whose work was being interrupted by opportunists. \u201cI was right<\/em> in the middle of something,\u201d both prime ministers said in effect, \u201cand these jerks on the other side of the aisle got in the way of that. Send them a message. Send me back with reinforcements.\u201d (In Pierre Trudeau\u2019s case in 1974, that stance was a fib: he had designed the 1974 budget to be unacceptable to both Conservatives and New Democrats. But their votes against the budget made them, at least, partners in the timing of the election. The responsibility wasn\u2019t his alone.)<\/p>\n

Liberals have been dreaming, publicly, since May of 2020\u2014two months into this terrible global health crisis\u2014about how exciting it would be to run for re-election as the stewards of a bright new future. \u201cJustin Trudeau seems to really grasp the immensity of the moment, how important it is for his political legacy, and we\u2019ll have a plan that will be exciting to put to Canadians at the next election,\u201d one Liberal told Le Devoir<\/em> way back then. No shakeup can fix judgment like that.
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n