Canada’s most attention-grabbing personality is the new Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, whom a swooning electorate has just elevated to the highest office in the land. Possessing no relevant business or political experience and no demonstrable leadership qualities apart from name recognition and good looks, he is a dandiprat version of the fatuous nonentity American elected to lead them into a condition of weakness and insolvency. Many in the U.S. are now suffering Obama remorse and reassessing their folly. Eventually Canada, too, may come to its senses, though I wouldn’t bet on it. An Eloi people roistering in a Morlock world does not augur well for their future.
Our misfortune in Canada is that we have — or can have — no one like the Donald striding across the political tarmac. In effect, Trump would have zero chance in a tepid, characterless country like Canada, at any rate, not since the days of our pirouetting, hippie-wannabe PM Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father — but that was during the psychedelic Sixties. Anyone who requires convincing need only browse our national broadcaster, the CBC, with its panels of hacks, retreads, undistinguished pundits, and its slew of unctuous anchors. Broadly speaking, as Margaret Atwood wrote in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Canadians exhibit a “will to lose,” a mournful conviction of the moral superiority of losing, of achieving what she calls a “satisfactory failure.” Hence, Justin Trudeau.
When one considers the competing qualities of burly machismo and pretty-boy simpering, the preference should be a foregone conclusion. Of course, if it comes down to a match between big hair and thinning hair, the outcome will favor the former. (The hairpiece seems to be a journalistic canard.) Such is the only department where the youthful charisma of Trudeau has it over the mature brio of Trump. The issue, however, is not what is on top of one’s head but what is in it — that is, how one sees the world. In this respect, Trump is head and shoulders above Trudeau. How can we compare a man born into wealth and privilege, a trust-fund baby merely inheriting his father’s glamour, whose signal accomplishments involved a stint as a substitute drama teacher and snowboard instructor and two uncompleted university degrees, with a man who turned his father’s business into one of the world’s great financial empires, generating opportunities for untold others? No contest.
