In October Canadian voters, against all the odds and all initial polling, elected Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party to a majority government. Not only did the youthful Trudeau (45 years old) revive the near moribund Liberals (once considered the country’s ‘natural ruling party’) but he led them in an assault against the most stubborn redoubt of neo-conservatism in the Western world. The contrast between the passionate and engaging Trudeau and the cold and cynical calculations of Conservative boss Stephen Harper could not have been more stark. Harper has presided over Canadian political life for a decade with an authoritarian neo-liberalism based on ruthless austerity at home and a belligerent foreign policy stance on everything from climate change denial to a blank cheque for Israeli expansionism. As he grew more desperate during the campaign, Harper cynically played the race card, privileging ‘old stock’ Canadians and promising an Islamaphobic police phoneline to report ‘barbaric cultural practices’. But Canadians had had enough of Harper’s divisiveness and his vote sank to less than a third of the electorate – the ‘red meat’ Conservative base.
Justin is the son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister for almost a decade and a half starting in the late 1960s. His programme commitments are modest, as befits the centrist Liberals, although his championing of reviving the public sphere, ending ‘first-past-the-post’ elections and greater taxes on the one per cent, allowed him to outflank the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) as the progressive alternative to Harper. The NDP took a Blairite turn, vainly presenting itself as a responsible ‘government-in-waiting’ (low taxes and balanced budgets) and forfeiting the mantle of populist outrage over Harperism.
