Hey America: enough about Trudeau already

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This article was published 05/08/2017 (3176 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One has brown hair, the other orange. One is effortlessly bilingual, the other horrifies editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. One openly calls himself a feminist, the other grabs female genitals.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes for a tempting contrast with U.S. President Donald Trump. He seems like the picture of serene and right-thinking liberal mindedness compared with all of the United States’ most cartoonishly boorish elements.

As a Canadian, I’m not surprised that the American news media and the internet are saturated by swooning profiles. The Rolling Stone cover story “Why Can’t He Be Our President” was only the most recent example. Shortly after Trudeau was elected, Vogue fawned: “The New Young Face of Canadian Politics” — despite the fact that he was neither new nor particularly young. 

Business Insider noted that he looked like a “Disney prince.” US Weekly: “Canada’s New Prime Minister is Super Hot.” He even inspired the quintessential BuzzFeed piece: “Literally Just 27 Really Hot Photos of Justin Trudeau.”

CNN’s headline sums up the trend: “Justin Trudeau, ‘the anti-Trump,’ shows U.S. Canada’s progressive, diverse face,” which was a particularly impressive take, considering Trudeau is a white man and the son of a previous Canadian prime minister — making him pretty close to the embodiment of a nascent hereditary political establishment in Canada.

Please stop.

Although Trudeau has proved to be a powerful public relations coup for my country, the political erotica now streaming from the southern border is embarrassing, shallow and largely misses the mark. Trudeau is not the blue-eyed lefty Jesus, and the global affection for him — and for the progressive politics that he and this country seem to represent — presents a puerile and distorted vision of Canada and its political culture.

Canada is, indeed, the land of progressive benefits and left-leaning victories. We take no small pride in our universal health care, maternity leave and strict gun control. More controversially, we are expanding safe injection sites and access to doctor-assisted suicide.

But all of the things that make Canada such a liberal exemplar predate Trudeau by generations.

Take universal health care, for example. The fight for the system Canadians have today began in Saskatchewan in the 1960s; it was virulently opposed by doctors’ groups at the time and expanded, over decades, to become a federal priority. Even today, it’s a mishmash by province, and the strains of the system are evident in months- to years-long waits for low-priority treatments such as back surgeries and hip replacements. 

On the flashier issues that have garnered Trudeau the international limelight, his record is actually pretty spotty. Take Canada’s vaunted refugee program; Trudeau has made great show of glad handing refugees at airports and tweeting encouraging bromides.

More than one-third of the 40,081 refugees who have been resettled in Canada since Trudeau took office have been privately sponsored, brought over by thousands of acts of private charity. And sponsoring a refugee family isn’t cheap; sponsors need to front the cost for a full year of income and resettlement. Further, this private program was scaled back for 2017 thanks to a backlog of applications and administrative hurdles.

By comparison, Trudeau’s expanded government-sponsored refugee targets — announced at a pivotal point in the last election campaign — proved to be hasty, with the government missing its own timelines and housing refugees in last-ditch hotels.This is not a model of technocratic competence.

Canadians maintain an uncritical faith in international institutions such as the United Nations, and one of our prevailing national mythologies is that peacekeeping remains one of our greatest contributions to the world. Canadians — unlike Americans, ahem — are considered “honest brokers” in international conflicts. 

Shortly after he was elected, Trudeau made much show of his recommitment to the United Nations, and, in particular, to its flawed peacekeeping program.

Our government has recently pledged to increase military spending — after the next election — and although the Liberals enjoy much smug bragging about Canada’s ostensibly peace-loving role the world, our actual commitments have proved, yet again, to be largely symbolic. According to the latest data from the United Nations, Canada contributes 20 troops, 58 police officers and 10 military experts to peacekeeping efforts for a total of 88 personnel. This is somewhat short of earlier Liberal pledges to commit 600 troops and 150 police officers to such efforts. Canada has about 68,000 active personnel in the military. By comparison, the United States has almost 1.3 million.

And Canada’s continued failure on First Nations issues warrants a library unto itself. Trudeau promised an impossible-to-deliver veto to Indigenous people over energy projects. Although the prime minister deserves credit for trying to involve First Nation communities and restore the credibility of national regulators in the face of vigorous protests over pipeline projects, that veto quickly fell to the wayside after he approved the controversial domestic Trans Mountain line between Alberta and British Columbia.

He established a commission to examine this country’s history of missing and murdered Indigenous women — a commission that now appears to be collapsing amid calls by First Nations people for mass resignations.

The most stinging truth about Trudeau is that he hasn’t done much at all. He came into power an avatar of youthful Canadian optimism and has squandered one of the most extraordinary honeymoon periods any politician has had in recent memory. The best that can be said of his accomplishments is that he has tripled his promised deficits, promised deferred tax increases on the wealthy and almost legalized marijuana — although it will be up to the provinces to sort out that mess.

Trudeau promised Camelot and delivered, well, Ottawa.

Jen Gerson is a correspondent for the Washington Post.