Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press via AP
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, greets supporters while campaigning in Montreal, Quebec, October 3, 2019.
A few days after images of a younger Justin Trudeau, daubed black and clad in orientalist costume, began careening across the internet, the Canadian polling agency Abacus Data released a survey that included voter response to the scandal. Of those who were aware of the incident at the time of the questionnaire, a scant 24 percent of respondents said that it “Truly offended, and changed my view of Mr. Trudeau for the worse”; 42 percent felt that the statement “Didn’t bother me really” reflected their views; while 34 percent chose “Didn’t like it, but he apologized properly and I can move on.”
Aside from the rather shocking notion that nearly half of Canadians felt that the prime minister repeatedly engaging in an unambiguously racist act was nothing to be concerned about, there was another dynamic reflected in the Abacus poll. Of those “truly offended,” most were already likely to vote for the Conservative Party. On the other hand, most of those who either accepted the apology or were not bothered at all intended to vote Liberal.
In other words, if you asked a Canadian how they felt about the scandal at the time, you could make a fairly good guess whether they leaned Grit or Tory by their answer. The poll not only reflected how a Canadian might feel about the country’s leader having repeatedly engaged in racist acts, but to what extent Liberal voters are willing to overlook blatant hypocrisy and a betrayal of values to ensure the party stays in power.
One might think that some other contender would be running away with the October 21 election, given the Liberals’ broken promises and a streak of scandals, including Trudeau’s political crisis–sparking dismissal of former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who balked at suggestions from the prime minister’s surrogates that she intervene in a criminal prosecution involving SNC-Lavalin, a multinational engineering firm. Even with several federal political parties to choose from—with the New Democratic Party (NDP) forming the political left, the Liberals forming the center, and the current iteration of the Conservative Party forming the right—Canada has always effectively functioned as a two-party democracy; either the Liberals form government, or a conservative party does.
Nowhere is the tolerance for prime-ministerial hypocrisy and lack of follow-through on Canada’s vaunted, supposedly forward-thinking values more evident than on the environment. As recently as September, 90 percent of Canadians agreed that it is either “urgent” or “important” that we take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (half of all respondents, by the way, fall on the “urgent” side). A Focaldata poll found that climate change is the top concern for Canadians, with 42 percent strongly agreeing that, unless emissions fall dramatically in the next few years, global warming will become “extremely dangerous.” Sounds sensible, considering the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has supplied plenty of evidence.
How’s that whole situation shaking out? During the last election campaign in 2015, the Liberals emphasized the urgent need for an evidence-based approach to policy, and hammered the last Conservative government led by Stephen Harper for silencing scientists whose research conflicted with the Tories’ partisan goals. “We will provide national leadership and join with the provinces and territories to take action on climate change,” reads a 2015 Liberal platform document. “We will fulfill our G20 commitment and phase out subsidies for the fossil fuel industry over the medium-term.”
That leadership has yet to materialize.
While Environment Minister Catherine McKenna touts the Liberals’ net-zero emissions pledge (to reduce Canada’s emissions by 80 percent, effectively making Canada carbon-neutral), the country remains 200 years behind its Paris climate targets. While McKenna posed for pictures with young women and girls during the September climate strikes, Canada remains the largest per capita greenhouse gas polluter among G20 nations. While Trudeau sat down with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, his government continues to push forward the effort to complete the Trans Mountain oil pipeline—a pipeline Canada bought from Kinder Morgan for CA$4.5 billion plus incidentals—with the intention of building through First Nations territories, lands that were never ceded to Canada.
Canada’s relationships with Indigenous peoples is another egregious problem, one most Canadians agree that the government needs to work on, especially in light of the “Final Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women” (the outcome of a yearslong national inquiry following an alarming Royal Canadian Mounted Police report in 2014). The previous Conservative government was hammered for its refusal to launch an inquiry into the disappearances and deaths, and for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s dismissive comments on the matter.
And yet, under the Liberal government, funding gaps in education for First Nations children persist. Many of those First Nations communities lack potable water (many lost access in the first place due to environmentally racist infrastructure programs Canadians supported and paid for), and Indigenous children continue to be ripped from their parents’ arms and placed into the so-called “care” of the state, continuing this country’s ugly history of cultural genocide.
Nowhere was the state’s structural racism and political apathy toward Indigenous people’s concerns more apparent than with Trudeau’s response to a protester from the Grassy Narrows First Nation, who interrupted a Liberal event to demand the government live up to its pledge to build a mercury treatment center. For decades, the Grassy Narrows First Nation of northern Ontario fought to uncover the devastating environmental and human-health effects of a nearby paper mill’s practice of dumping mercury into the nearby English-Wabigoon River. “Thank you for your donation,” said Trudeau, flippantly alluding to the fact that the protester would had to have paid to be at the event.
Wikimedia Commons
Jagmeet Singh, New Democratic Party leader, at the Toronto Pride Parade, 2017
Though he later apologized, this intersection of blatant personalized and structural racism was the apotheosis of his style of governance and that of this generation of Liberal Party parliamentarians. This hasn’t made a dent in his support among Liberals, but given the party’s stance on violating treaties with First Nations to build oil pipelines though their land, all while taking selfies with climate protesters, why would it?
Have Liberals’ betrayals on the environment and to Indigenous peoples affected its likelihood of forming the governing party of the next Parliament? Not at all.
Has the blackface incident cleared a space for the discussion of structural racism in Canada? Nope. It’s already off the radar, thanks in no small part to parliamentarians of color in federal and provincial Liberal caucuses accepting Trudeau’s apology on everyone else’s behalf.
While the NDP has put forward a progressive platform, including action on climate change; a commitment to cancel the Trans Mountain Pipeline if Ottawa fails to secure unanimous backing for the project from Indigenous stakeholders; and a comprehensive Green New Deal plan, support for the party has foundered under party leader Jagmeet Singh, who, as a Sikh, has faced an uphill battle against Canadian prejudices.
With dim electoral prospects that could see the party lose more than half of its current seats, the NDP has effectively been relegated to the protest vote.
Even with the Liberals’ tattered reputation heading into this election, polling data has consistently projected that the Conservatives face longer odds in forming a government. Though Canadian conservatives carry a reputation for being less reactionary than their counterparts in the U.S. and in the U.K., they have been racing to catch up.
After the bruising the Conservative brand took under Harper from 2006 to 2015—especially for the appearance of heartlessness toward refugees fleeing civil war in Syria—Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer has hardly shied away from that legacy. Aside from his inability to fumigate the stench of bigotry and intolerance from the party after being chosen party leader in 2017, Scheer has come under fire for homophobic comments, for prevaricating on abortion rights, and for repeatedly spreading falsehoods on immigration policy.
Wikimedia Commons
Andrew Scheer, the Conservative Party leader, in Vancouver, British Columbia, April 2019
And recently it turned out that he not only fudged his professional résumé, he hid his status as dual Canadian-American citizen, even after having once attacked former Governor General Michaëlle Jean for her dual Canadian-French citizenship (Jean renounced her French citizenship before being sworn in).
So Canadians are left with one bloc of voters who support an aloof opposition party led by a man completely lacking the guile that kept Conservatives in power for almost a decade, and another bloc all too willing to sacrifice the Liberal Party’s stated policy commitments to prevent the Conservatives from recapturing a parliamentary majority.
Worst of all, the issues that materially affect Canadians have barely been registered in this election. Though Canada presents itself to the world as a country that values diversity and inclusion, Canadian immigration policy is abysmal and attitudes toward immigrants have become more hostile. Canadian leaders tout the quality of life in this country, while employment becomes increasingly precarious, rental affordability continues to worsen, and the opportunities for home ownership slip farther out of reach. Hate crimes in cities continue to spike, and far-right extremists not only march in the streets, but descend on Pride celebrations to show LGBT communities just who those streets belong to.
But Canadians are hardly talking about any of this, because the political spectacle—Trudeau’s blackface scandal, Scheer’s resume-padding, and several other candidates’ past actions and affiliations boiling to the surface—has taken over the campaign. If you want to know what Canadians like to think of ourselves, the opinion polls can give you a fairly good reading. But if you want to know the truth about Canada’s values, and what it is Canadians really care about, just look at the choices voters make at the ballot box.
Partisan loyalty to two parties with abominable records has placed the urgent needs of the working class, the environment, and marginalized communities on the backbench. But if anything does get accomplished in this campaign season, with the race between the lesser of two evils too close to call, it’s that Canadians can no longer lie to ourselves—or to the world—about the values this country supposedly holds.
