The Toronto Star’s very weird criticism of Justin Trudeau

Matt Gurney

How long does the guy have to be in office before the Star’s ed board concludes that what we’ve all seen is basically what we’re going to get?

It’s hard to know where to start with the Toronto Star’s baffling editorial in Saturday’s edition. In print, it had the headline, “Time to lead, prime minister.” The online headline version was more blunt: “Justin Trudeau needs to show he has the qualities to lead.”

“Huh,” I thought when my eyes first came upon that headline. “Some editorialist is sure gonna be angry when they see what lame headline some page editor slapped on their editorial!” Because surely, after almost four years with Trudeau as prime minister, the Star’s crack team of editorial writers isn’t still thoughtfully pondering the man and his record, comparing the highs to the lows, before concluding that somehow, they don’t have quite enough information to make up their minds? There’s no way the Star’s editorial board would essentially argue that it’s just too soon to tell what kind of prime minister Trudeau would be, as he approaches the end of his first mandate? It had to be a bad headline.

It was not, in fact, a bad headline.

The editorial itself is mostly unobjectionable. The editorialists note that the Liberals are heading into the fall election with the benefit of a strong economy, and also note that polls show the Liberals are “barely running even” with the Conservatives. (That’s arguably too generous — both the CBC’s Canada Poll Tracker and 338Canada.com poll aggregators show the Liberals well behind the Conservatives, in both popular vote projections and estimated seat counts. Still, the Liberals remain in a competitive second position.) The Star’s editorialists note, correctly, that the problem for the Liberals is their leader. Justin Trudeau’s personal popularity has utterly collapsed. They even get why Trudeau’s popularity has tanked more or less right, at least in my view: a series of very public and very avoidable major errors in judgment, including the entire SNC-Lavalin fiasco, comments the PM made during the Mark Norman affair and, most recently, his strangely discombobulated response to accusations that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide of Indigenous people.

The Star’s editorialists note, correctly, that the problem for the Liberals is their leader

“The hard truth is that the prime minister himself has dragged his party down,” the Star’s editorialists said. “His leadership has seemed unsteady, and his judgment uncertain. At this point some are posing the question: is he up to the job, and does he deserve re-election in October?”

Up to this point, it’s a basically fine editorial. But it gets very weird at the ending.

After noting, again, that the Liberals have a decent record to run on as they head toward re-election, the Star’s editorial declares, “The missing piece is the sense that the guy at the top has the maturity and the good sense to lead the government to the next level. It’s time the prime minister demonstrated that he has those qualities.”

full story at https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-gurney-the-toronto-stars-very-weird-criticism-of-justin-trudeau