Yesterday’s blog about the Boston marathon incident and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau drew some very interesting comments. One thoughtful reader suggested that we might have been overly enthusiastic about Justin’s honesty. The reader drew a line between honesty and naïveté. And if Justin were Prime Minister, there is no question that some of what he said in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview was enough to make an old political apparatchik cringe.
But Justin Trudeau is not Prime Minister. Hopefully in just over two years, he will be ready to be Prime Minister. His father never had that luxury of time to prepare himself for the job. Pierre Trudeau made his mistakes as he went. He is no role model for his son in how to handle the news media or in how to measure his statements.
The truth be known, Pierre Trudeau went from phenomenon to bust in just one term as Prime Minister. During that first term from 1968 to 1972, Pierre was arrogant, uncaring, flip, rude and caused constant migraines for the people trying to keep him in office. It was in 1972 that the voters told him, quite empathically, that he was not as smart as he thought he was.
The realization that his arrogance had almost cost the party the 1972 election forced Pierre to become more political. And it was the belief in his leadership that caused people such as Keith Davey to start to work much harder on his behalf. We never did restore the Trudeaumania of 1968 and that was fine. We thought that people should support him for what he was and what he represented. Trudeaumania was a media invention that got him elected in ’68 for all the wrong reasons.
And there is no danger of that with Justin Trudeau. Justin represents something very different. He is more like John Kennedy or Barack Obama than his father. It is a generational thing. He represents hope and change. For a while, he can be a bit naïve. He is actually a straight arrow type and he will eventually get that tendency to honesty under better control. He certainly has enough people telling him how.
In watching Justin over the past three years, we have seen dramatic improvement and changes in a very determined person. His objective is still more than two years away but it becomes more obvious every day that he will be our next Prime Minister.
The person who commented on the blog suggested that Justin and his advisors should study that CBC interview carefully and learn from it. You can count on that.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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