An American three-star general and former national security advisor to President Trump has coined the term “strategic narcissism” to describe the ambitions and the failings undergirding Russia’s unopposed invasion of Ukraine.
Here in strategically invisible Canada, where our foreign policy is played entirely for domestic consumption, H.R. McMaster’s telling phrase has tactical adaptability for explaining the recent solipsistic antics of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
As we all embarrassedly witnessed, the prime minister’s handling of the “occupation” of Ottawa by a few hundred protesting knights of the road with big rigs—not to be confused with the real occupation of Ukraine by almost 200,000 Kremlin troops—gave the appearance of a man who arrives at the highest office in the land each morning in a convoy of clown cars. The most charitable reading suggested a man deeply out of his depth.
His rationalization for forcing on Canadians the never-before-deployed Emergencies Act, then abruptly withdrawing it with a farcical “Crisis? What crisis?” flourish 36 hours later, was patently false. It was so obviously fraudulent only certain dupes and stooges in the Canadian media could be relied on to buy it.
Even the liberal New York Times, never mind the rock-ribbed Republican Wall Street Journal, laughed up its cross-border sleeve at the gullibility of northern journalistic confreres swallowing it all. It’s easy to see why.
The PM claimed only the federal Emergencies Act afforded the necessary powers to free the parliamentary precinct and downtown Ottawa from the overwhelming force of truck-driving siege meisters. The premise was that neither municipal nor provincial laws gave sufficient authorization to pepper spray protesters in the eyes, use baton-wielding police to drive the miscreants off, seize their vehicles, and finally attack their bank accounts, chattels, mortgages, investments, etc.
Only days before, however, Ottawa’s own chief of police lost his job because, it was claimed, he failed to exercise municipal powers available to him to stop the truckers’ protest. The prime minister’s claim and the city’s claim about the police chief’s ouster could not both be true.
If the chief failed to exercise his powers, then he must have had the powers to begin with. If the powers were as non-existent as the prime minister claimed, the chief could not have lost his job for failing to exercise what he didn’t have. (Note to Ottawa ambulance chasers who take on the chief’s wrongful dismissal suit: Add Justin Trudeau to the witness list.)
Earlier minor skirmishes in Toronto and at Windsor’s Ambassador Bridge made it clear that Ontario law gave ample power for clearing operations. They were boots-on-the-ground proof that the prime minister, let us be polite, made the whole Emergencies Act thing up.
H.R. McMaster’s coinage of “strategic narcissism” helps us understand why. It explains Trudeau’s reluctance-cum-failure to simply go out on the first day of the truckers’ protest, meet with the gathering lads and lassies, and say: “Lookit guys and gals (sorry, that’s how scions of wealthy Westmount families think working class people talk), them goldurn mandates are droppin’ across our great and glorious land. We figure she’ll be done by mid-March, or ‘round abouts. Head on home to your homesteads (Westmount scions think all rural folk in Canada live on a homestead, and all truck drivers are rural folk) and we’ll get ‘er done.”
Listen, Margaret Thatcher, using bureaucratic back channels, communicated with the Irish Republican Army to make peace. Justin Trudeau, even using Westmount scion speak, could have communicated quick reconciliation to Canadian truckers.
The prime minister’s own dissident MPs blame his addiction to low-ball wedge politics for his provocatively contrary approach. But there’s a deeper answer to Justin Trudeau’s shallowness. Without getting armchair Freudian, he is a man who, until recently, was strikingly physically handsome but had done nothing in life, indeed barely held a job, before inheriting his father’s old job.
Maybe the conditions of his life, and his manifold actions in power, indicate a need to power past that Hamlet’s ghost of a prime ministerial father who, in the immortal words of Christina McCall, haunts us still.
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