It's been quite awhile since I did a longform piece for the blog. Six months, in fact. But now that summer is on its way out, and our friends in Ottawa are scheduled to go back to school, I decided to hit up the home page again —and talk about some repairs that need to be made in the House...
. . .
The tenants are restless and threatening eviction
The Liberals' poll numbers went from middling but competitive this spring, even outperforming in a series of by-elections, to all of a sudden a total pit over the summer. And it is causing your Miss Fuddle Duddle to panic to the point of borderline suicidality. While the unexpected plummet isn't necessarily a permanent doldrum, there are some important things that need to be fixed in order to climb out of the basement.
Priority number one: doing something (and then letting people know about it) to balance out the housing market that has benefited some while pricing out the bulk of young up-and-comers and new arrivals looking for a homestead.
And if the Liberals don't do that, then they're headed for eviction themselves.
I don't want this to happen. I am in fact terrified that this will happen.
I want to believe, however, that they do recognize the necessity and are going to move on it. Justin Trudeau did some renovations of his own this summer, and remodeled his cabinet. The handyman in charge of the housing file is a strapping young Maritimer by the name of Sean Fraser, who seems to be a go-getter and recognizes the imminent need.
Whether the reno job of the general real estate market shows enough progress in the span of less than two years, however, remains to be seen.
If there's anything hopeful to hang onto, however: it's that they are still putting the finishing touches on a new set of blueprints, to be unveiled this fall, and that they invited some expert repair guys to give some advice on how to actually do the job. For what it's worth, their junior sidekick in Parliament, Jagmeet Singh, is keen to impress upon the Liberals what he would like to see get done.
And hopefully that lays a good foundation and some "good bones" to build back better.
FUBAR to fabulous? (Well, maybe not)
The other "gut" reno that needs to be talked about is the incomprehensible fakeover of the otherwise detestible Pierre the Putz Poilievre. Now I have had several back-and-forth dialogues with folks who say that he, himself, is not the source of his own appeal (or whatever you might call it), but clearly, whatever his "team" is doing to give him the phony appearance of a Potemkin family man with Bill Clinton "feel your pain" empathy is effective, to some extent.
A poll out this week will claim to show that, beyond voting intentions obviously favouring the CPC (at this moment), his personal approval ratings are in the net positives, for the first time since he rode the convoy all the way through to become the latest rat king of the Con Artist Party.
How could this be happening? This man is on record in the chamber as implying that the prime minister was a pedophile. He brought coffee and pastries to unlawful insurrectionists who are soon to go on trial, and became the star of their psycho circus. He used a racist slur on the floor of Parliament. Now all of a sudden he's peachy keen, he's father of the year, he's a nice guy and he "gets" the "ordinary people"?
How could people forget?
I will say first and foremost that the Liberals are in dire need of an upgrade (massive overhaul, really) of their messaging apparatus, because to say it's not working is an understatement. (It's AWOL.)
But I will say also that within these same recent back-and-forth dialogues, I have been told that right now is "not the time" for people to be reminded of just how awful Skippy really is (because they'll just forget again in a couple of years) — but that they will be, and not a moment too soon.
Home is where the heart... was
But perhaps the saddest news to come out of the Liberal woes this summer was the announcement that after eighteen years of marriage, Justin and Sophie Trudeau have decided to separate. Tongues wagged and the couple's most vicious haters expressed all kinds of schadenfreude and conspiracy theories, but it doesn't seem to have deterred them from maintaining a different kind of close relationship — as the old saying goes, to stay together for the kids.
My friend Simon wrote endearingly of them in a recent post, and how tragic and disturbing the environment in which they tried their best to keep a positive outlook and a sense of semblance as a family. But at some point the pressures just got to be too great, which makes it all the more heartbreaking. Sophie has spoken about trying to shield her children from the viciousness of the convoy crew. In back and forth dialogues, friends of mine who follow her on social media have expressed concern that she, herself, was being bullied online, that her own posts were growing increasingly worrisome over her mental health and that some of the responses had veered into sexual harassment.
What a horrible thing to have to live through when all you want is to help people who may be struggling with their own psychological woes, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic and amid the converging disasters of a financial crunch, a seemingly endless war, and climate catastrophe that is only going to get worse.
Sophie deserved better, and Justin does too. The silver lining is that the separation was amicable and they will remain close, and that Justin no longer has the weight of his marital strife on his mind as he prepares to head back to work for what is undoubtedly going to be the most challenging headwinds he has faced over the course of his whole career. Sophie is back to posting on social media, but seems to be taking it slow — and probably has more leeway to use the block button, now that she's not an official functionary of government.
The other silver lining is that Justin still is in good spirits, and knows how to trigger the cons.
A haunted house of demons and ghosts
The housing market, the House of Commons, and the Trudeau family domestic life aren't the only houses facing cracks in the façade. So too, is the official residence that Justin Trudeau grew up in, where Pierre Trudeau lived as prime minister, and where Margaret Trudeau once termed "the crown jewel of Canada's penitentiary system." The house on 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa is often compared to 10 Downing Street in London or the White House in Washington D.C., in that it is considered the official residence of the head of government and shorthand for the office itself.
But Justin Trudeau has never lived there while prime minister, because a bizarre quirk of Canadian culture has ensured that it remains unlivable. Canadians are humble to a fault, expect their leaders to be as well, and find the idea of their prime ministers spending money to repair the official residence to be a selfish indulgence. They do not tend to hold such items as "heritage buildings" in high regard, sentimentality or a hallmark of the landscape.
This prime minister in particular is often thought vulnerable to accusations and depictions that he is an out-of-touch elitist who lives extravagantly on the public dime. Never mind that it is conservatives who do that with wild abandon, and face almost no repercussions from their pet press or cognitively dissonant voter base. That same parsimonious conservative press begrudges Justin Trudeau the amenities that the leader of a modern, Western, G7 nation ought to have, because they have partnered with the conservatives to push a framing that these are "his" luxuries, rather than amenities for any occupant of the office.
So 24 Sussex has been rendered permanently uninhabitable, and continues to sit in a sad state of limbo. The prime minister's plane dates to the 1980s and is probably held together with so much duct tape that Red Green would be saying it's time to get a new one. No such "Air Force One" is permitted for a "proper" Canadian PM, especially this one, who is expected to live in a tent city or a trailer park because he's "somebody" and needs to be brought down a peg.
And all the more so now because Canada (like other countries) is in the midst of a post-COVID housing crunch and because the populist prick living in luxuriant Stornoway has the nerve to lean into this absurd framing just to score votes among the irrational and ill-informed.
Tall poppy syndrome is pathological in the Canadian psyche. It destroyed a marriage and continues to deprive a humanitarian leader of a proper home befitting the office he represents. No matter, say angry people responding to push polls and the pet press that juices their unfounded opinions borne of jealousy. If he wants to live in a nice house, they say, then he can by all means do so as a private citizen, and we'll evict him from office so that he can go house hunting elsewhere out of his own damn pockets.
But they won't say boo about Pierre Poilievre building himself a pigeon coop made of gold.
It's been said that Justin Trudeau himself bears no personal attachment to the home he grew up in. That may be true, at least while it still stands. And Canadians themselves at the moment may be expressing ambivalence or outright hostility to him and to his government.
But will that still be the case if one or both are gone?
I would rather not find out!
When all else fails, break glass
I'm just going to say it one more time. Because I have said it innumerable times on the Twitter-X app, and in back-and-forth dialogues with pen pals I have met through the Twitter-X app, some who I have grown very close with and consider to be friends even though we have not met in person.
Justin Trudeau, please, fix whatever needs to be fixed as a priority to be fixed.
Because as the old song says: I can't live, if living is without you.
And if the worst should happen... then I'm on my way, I'm on my way...
Home sweet home.
