Book Review – The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau by Stephen Maher

“A prince is despised if he is considered changeable, foolish, weak, mean, and uncertain. A prince should avoid these characteristics. In his actions, he should try to show greatness, courage, seriousness, and strength. In his private dealings with his subjects, he should show that his judgments must be followed, and he should maintain himself with such a reputation that no one can hope either to deceive him or get round him.” – Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince.

 

“I think he is narcissistic.” says one of his former ministers. “I think he truly believes that he is needed by Canada, has done great things to save Canada.” “He really does believe he operates above that sort of mortal existence,” says another former minister. “I mean, he has a combination of superpowers, and to a certain extent what he’s been able to achieve is a function of believing he can do anything.” The quality they (the former ministers) are describing seems to match the Mayo Clinic’s definition of narcissistic personality disorder; “A mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others.” – excerpt from The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau. 

<SB Veda>

Justin Trudeau, one of Canada’s longest-serving prime ministers, is often seen as the scion of a royal dynasty: a prince, if you will. As the son of legendary Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Justin, like G.W. Bush and others, entered politics with an advantage others didn’t have: name recognition. The question that many ask in reflecting on the career of the current Prime Minister of Canada is how on earth did a former high school drama teacher, with far less qualifications and relevant experience than his intellectual father and no significant accomplishments to his name, manage such an audacious climb to the summit of the Liberal Party to form majority government in 2015?

Author and political journalist, Stephen Maher explores Justin Trudeau’s success and his tumultuous time in office in  The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, a well-researched, candid narration of the rise, reign, and controversies surrounding Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister. Maher, an award-winning veteran political journalist for Post Media offers an unflinching analysis of Justin Trudeau’s political career and provides readers with a nuanced portrait of a leader who has both captivated and polarized Canada.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (28 May 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1668024497
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668024492

Maher takes his readers on a journey through Trudeau’s rise to power, referencing with his formative years as the eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The senior Trudeau’s unprecedented popularity, having fought and defeated the separatists in Quebec and patriated the Canadian constitution from the United Kingdom, established himself as an historical figure in the pantheon of Canadian politics.

As one might imagine, Pierre Elliott Trudeau cast a long shadow on his son, Justin. Maher explains how Justin Trudeau learned early from his father’s example of the importance of charisma, developing a distinctive ability to connect with Canadians. Having developed his own form of personal charisma, first being catapulted to the public eye when he gave a stirring eulogy at his father’s funeral in Ottawa, coupled with a carefully cultivated image connecting him with public, helped him ascend to the Liberal leadership.

When Justin Trudeau assumed the leadership of the Liberal Party, the party was state of disarray. Veteran journalist and historian, Peter C. Newman even suggested the party was on the brink of collapse. Against the odds, Trudeau secured an historic victory in the 2015 federal election.

The author highlights Trudeau’s early success, particularly his promise of “sunny ways” (borrowed from another Prime Minister, Wilfred Laurier) and progressive ideals, against the dour and unpopular Conservative predecessors, which resonated strongly with many Canadians at a time when many were searching for hope and inspiration. Still, Maher considers whether Trudeau’s rise to power, while driven by his political image, concealed deeper, unresolved issues that would later manifest.

Maher sees Trudeau as a complex figure. While he has often sought the spotlight, he remains inaccessible from those around him and lacks true empathy, despite promises of caring for the disenfranchised. His leadership has been marked by both impressive achievements and damaging missteps. Despite his success in certain areas such as the reworking of the North America Free Trade Agreement with an isolationist Donald Trump, Trudeau’s handling of his own office and his inability to manage conflicts within his team have caused significant problems. He has alienated people outside his political coalition and, in recent years, has faced protests at public events.

Trudeau’s hubris peaked after the Covid-19 pandemic when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, using and abusing its sweeping powers to arrest and freeze the bank accounts of truckers and others protesting mask and vaccine mandates in February, 2022.  The truckers had formed a convoy and were blocking roads in Ottawa, particularly around 24 Sussex Drive, the residence of the Prime Minister. The measures ruined lives as people were thrown in jail without due process, unable to pay their mortgages due to the locked bank accounts losing them their homes and automobiles, and creating a stain on the records of the demonstrators that is almost impossible to wash off. A federal judge admonished Trudeau on January 23rd, 2024, calling his use of the act “unjustified, illegal, and dangerous.”

The Prince explores the peaks and valleys of Trudeau’s government, showing the people, the conflicts, and the political struggles both within his party and from the opposition. Ultimately, Maher’s book explains why this once-popular leader, who seemed poised to leave an affirmative legacy, is now facing abysmal approval ratings and the possibility of a political collapse.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau (right) Canada’s second longest serving prime minister with son, Justin Trudeau (right). At the time, nether could know that the pair would form a political dynastyIn that sense, the book does not shy away from the challenges and scandals that have tainted Trudeau’s time in office. Maher delves into numerous controversies, including the infamous SNC-Lavalin affair, the ongoing issues with Indigenous rights, and the various ethical breaches that have marred Trudeau’s leadership. The author examines how these scandals have complicated his image and eroded his support, especially among his most ardent followers. Maher also raises questions about the contrast between Trudeau’s public persona of progressive change and the reality of political compromises and pragmatism.

The confrontation with Jodi Wilson-Raybould, his hand-picked Minister of Justice and Attorney General, the first indigenous person – that too, a woman – to be given that cabinet post exemplifies Trudeau’s hypocrisy. While claiming to be a champion of women’s rights (apportioning half his cabinet to women) and minorities, in pressurizing Wilson-Raybould to interfere in the prosecution of the mammoth Montreal-based engineering company, SNC Lavelin, charged with corruption and bribery, represented him as a bully. Wilson-Raybould was removed from her position and shuffled to the Veterans Affairs portfolio and then she resigned. Jane Philpott, though a physician but another inexperienced politician who was elevated to the important Health portfolio, resigned her cabinet post in protest.

The revelations during Trudeau’s first re-election campaign that Trudeau had engaged in blackface as a young man, demonstrated a lack of understanding of the feelings of people of colour, particularly black people, which he confessed was wrong but had then been covered by “layers of privilege,” blinding him to the impropriety.

Maher identifies the point during which Trudeau’s success began to wane: the resignation of his longtime advisor, Gerald Butts. Butts had been an astute and well-reasoned consigliere to Trudeau, and helped immensely in his dealing with Donald Trump when it seemed that the new President would tear-up NAFTA and saddle Canada with crippling tariffs. However, Butts became the sacrificial lamb of the SNC Lavelin affair, and his removal crippled the Prime Minister’s Office. He would no longer have the sage counsel of his closest advisors, and would have to rely to a greater extent on his own judgment, which Maher depicts as being prone to irrationality.

Infamously, during Trudeau’s first visit to India, which was supposed to be about negotiating with the government of Narendra Modi to reduce tariffs on Canadian lentils, turned out to be a massive photo-shoot, involving Trudeau’s dressing up in wedding attire and posing in front of various monuments. He was ridiculed in the Indian press.

If that wasn’t bad enough, pictures of Jaspal Atwal, alongside Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau attending an official Canadian consular function in Mumbai during the trip went viral. Atwal had been a Khalistani terrorist and member of the banned Sikh Youth Federation (banned both in India and Canada) who had attempted to assassinate Punjab minister, Malkiat Singh Sidhu  was accused but acquitted on a technicality of the brutal attempted murder of prominent Sikh Canadian lawyer, Ujjal Dosanjh (an opponent of the Khalistanis) who would later go on to be the first Premier of a province, namely British Columbia of South Asian descent and Liberal party cabinet minister under Prime Minister Paul Martin. The attack left Ujjal with a broken hand and skull, requiring 80 stitches.

Initially, it was called a mistake, and the MP who had organized the event and approved the guest list – a known Khalistani sympathizer, Randeep Sarai –  fell on his sword for Trudeau. The matter seemed ended. Then, Canada’s National Security Advisor Daniel Jean leaked to reporter John Ivison of The National Post that the whole thing was orchestrated by Indian intelligence to make Trudeau ‘look bad.’ His rationale was that it was India who approved Atwal’s visa. taken him off of their blacklist. This was at a time when the Modi government was allowing Khalistanis who had renounced violence to visit Punjab to see the how the state had progressed by staying within the Indian union. Even the alleged Air India Flight 182 bombing financier, Ripudaman Singh Malik was permitted back into the country for a visit. Moreover, India was not responsible for Atwal being put on the guest list to an invitation-only event organized by a Canadian MP at which he would have access to the Prime Minister’s wife.

Justin Trudeau and family on the steps of the Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar on February 19, 2018 during Trudeau’s first official visit to India

One Trudeau staffer is quoted in the book as saying that Modi “actively tried to f..ck” Trudea. The same staffer is quoted in the same paragraph as saying that, “Nav (Brampton MP Navdeep Bains whom Trudeau appointed in his first round of cabinet picks and who helped Trudeau win the leadership) is extremely important to us.” Reportedly, Navdeep Bains was considered to be one of the aggressive Khalistani sympathizers within the Canadian government. Bains has been groomed by the pro-Khalistani radical outfit World Sikh Organisation (WSO), which is accused of radicalizing the Sikh community and making efforts to divide it. He was eventually forced to resign over corruption in a land deal involving another Sikh MP.

Speaking to  TGC, Dosanjh says that because of Trudeau’s close association with Sikhs like Bains, that he considers him to be a Khalistani, “as you’re known by the company you keep,” says Dosanjh.

Veteran CBC Journalist, Terry Milewski, according to Maher, who had covered the Air India bombing and the Sikh community as well as Canada- India relations called the strategy of blaming India for Trudeau’s missteps, “unprofessional’ and “ill-advised”.  The advice Trudeau had been getting was clearly, according to Maher’s book, coming from those with a clear bias against India. One can imagine that, if this anti-India bent continued at the time of the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the former head of the Khalistani Tiger Force – a banned terrorist outfit in India, and someone who may have managed to gain Canadian citizenship bartering with Canadian intelligence for information, given his many crimes even upon entry to Canada, that similar advice may have led Trudeau to pursue the matter in such a public an undiplomatic manner as has come to pass.

While he cuts into Trudeau, Maher present both sides of the Trudeau narrative in a manner that can be considered to be a fair hearing: his is a balanced and nuanced critique. Maher provides insight into Trudeau’s personality—his ambition, his flaws, his growth as a leader—and contrasts this with the challenges of governing a diverse and complicated country with its own tangled history. His thorough analysis of Trudeau’s policy decisions as well as the advice he received, and political missteps offers readers an understanding of why Trudeau remains such a polarizing figure.

Although this book is politically well-researched, when Maher writes about the Hibernia project and its apparent positive impacts in the chapter called “The Last Pipeline,” he over-reaches. As someone how worked for the Canadian government on the mess that the project left in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, I can say that while his numbers may not be incorrect – the overall narrative about the project is misleading. That said, this is a very minor quibble. Most journalists would not have gone so deep on a matter that is so tangential to the overall narrative.

Indian journalists suffer from the same problem. Recently, I recall watching a YouTube video in which a journalist says that the Khalistan sympathy was passed down from father to son as Pierre Elliott Trudeau had not acted on India’s 1982 extradition request for Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind of the Air India Flight 182 bombing. The journalist failed to mention that, at the time, Parmar was not so infamous, and Trudeau senior had every reason to distrust then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had reneged on a deal not to use Canadian nuclear technology for the development of nuclear weapons. Their frosty relationship had nothing to do with Punjab. The elder Trudeau would have likely not known much at all about the presence of Khalistanis on Canadian soil at the time.

Rather, Pierre Trudeau had traveled through the subcontinent as a young man, traversing the Sunderbans in a small skiff, having grown a beard and donned a turban. A family friend once told me tearfully when he met Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau during an official visit to London when Trudeau made a trip to his old haunts at the London School of Economics (LSE) where this family friend was a post-doc, Trudeau had asked him if he was from India. When this person replied in the affirmative, Trudeau commented that he was lucky to have come from a country with the oldest and most fascinating culture in the world. Justin Trudeau has had no such understanding of India as a country. He looks as Indians simply for what he can gain politically from them, which recently means vilifying them publicly.

Maher’s journalistic style makes the prose accessible to the reader:  his ability to integrate political history, personal anecdotes, and the larger societal implications of Trudeau’s leadership gives the book a well-balanced feel. Readers interested in Canadian politics, as well as those curious about the intersection of personality and power, will find much to engage with in The Prince.

While the book, overall, paints a critical picture of Justin Trudeau, it doesn’t dismiss his achievements. Maher acknowledges Trudeau’s significant contributions, such as progress on trade, his stance on climate change, his legalization of cannabis, and his efforts to create a more inclusive government. However, the focus of the work is squarely on Trudeau’s failed potential, irrationality in the face of obvious intelligence, and self-inflicted wounds that have come to define his rocky tenure in power.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, an intellectual, had a guiding principle by which he lived. It was, “reason over passion.” His son Justin seems to live by the opposite credo, letting his emotions guide him to irrational conclusions. His violent tussle on the floor of the House of Commons with NDP MPs in which he elbowed a female member, exemplifies his tendency for impulsive behaviour. Perhaps he may have inherited some traits of his troubled mother whose bipolar disorder has been well documented. In the end, The Prince foreshadows a long fall from grace, which recent events seem to be meting out.