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Trudeaumania 2.0’s glamour train is rapidly running out of track

Conventional wisdom is that, while bizarre, it is a badge of distinction as Canadians to have the world’s most powerful person suddenly like his adversary, the cultish nuke-hungry autocratic president who imprisons and starves dissenters, more than h
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Conventional wisdom is that, while bizarre, it is a badge of distinction as Canadians to have the world’s most powerful person suddenly like his adversary, the cultish nuke-hungry autocratic president who imprisons and starves dissenters, more than he does his ally, our peaceable and sunny-ways democratic prime minister.

We also can’t figure why, after a love-in of more than a year, Donald Trump blew a gasket when Justin Trudeau repeated the obvious at the G7 summit news conference as the U.S. president was on Air Force One heading for Singapore to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Why was he jumping on us?

Trudeau was true enough at the Quebec gathering: we Canadians are polite, we are friendly. But he was wrong by claiming we won’t get pushed around: we do and will, because we are small fry – and there are no angels in world trade, only lesser devils.

What last week’s events at and following the “G6 plus one” revealed was a larger problem: the conventional diplomacy Trudeau’s government has employed to entrench Canadian business interests in America – umpteen meetings with members of Congress, governors, special interests – is proving to be so yesterday. With this president, we are in an era of reality TV, morning talk-show discourse, ad hominem tweets, servile flattery and fake-it-till-you-make-it relationships.

Trudeau’s statement with Trump in absentia, even if it was old news, was like gossiping to the room about the guest who just left your dinner party early. He would have done better to find the stiff upper lip and deflect the same tired question about the “insulting” and “ridiculous” steel and aluminum tariffs and the retaliatory measures without giving the same tired answer. Nothing is more predictably awful than picking a fight with a bully.

It is no wonder he was pronounced the Judas, the leader with the “special place in hell,” by Trump’s clan – and called meek by the tweeter-in-chief.

Face it: he became prime minister in 2015, in no small measure, because Stephen Harper had overstayed. But what we see each week in the slow-to-shape Trudeau is, in no small measure, a leader running short of time to solve issues ostensibly of his own authoring.

What Trudeau has in front of him in the next year is an extraordinary series of challenges through excessive promises, an undue emphasis on optics and photogenic presence and an image that prefers socks over sage. The stack of issues is sizable: unrest in business with the eternal horizon of deficits and the class warfare on entrepreneurs, mistrust in the environmental movement with his incongruence on resource extraction and incapacity to deliver a climate action plan, disappointed millennials denied proportional representation and impatient First Nations awaiting reconciliation and credible partnerships.

Here he is, entering the home stretch of his first term, in a trade war with America, a pot war with senators, a pipeline war with our premier and a climate change war with an incoming one. There is pharmacare to devise. There is child care to fulfil. And, sorry to say, there is a recession looming before long, perhaps by election day a year this October.

Can he handle all of this? Why would we think so when he hasn’t handled any of it?

Let’s remember, the federal Conservatives were hardly vanquished in 2015. They have 96 of the 338 MPs, and the latest opinion polls suggest they are neck and neck with the Liberals. This, despite two- and three-star reviews for federal leader Andrew Scheer, confident enough to banish rival Maxime Bernier to the backbench last week in making him an ex-cabinet critic.

But Scheer is not Trudeau’s nightmare; the mirror is what haunts. Mystique rarely endures in politics. The jury is out on America for the time being, but in the Canadian context, substance and accomplishment at some point have to arrive. The glamour will fade for Trudeau with his followers if Canada is clobbered in a trade war, suffers international humiliation on climate change or can’t even competently sell cannabis.

It is time to pull up those colourful socks. •

Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.