David Frum makes a very similar point in The Atlantic, so you're in good company.
Man, you were not kidding about
"very similar:"But there were always two cracks visible in the face Trudeau presented to the world... The first flaw: When frustrated or disappointed, he loses his cool. As one person on the receiving end of his ill temper put it to me, “He yells when he does not get his way, then gloats when he does.” The second? Trudeau does not always accurately think through the ultimate consequences of his actions...
Over the four years since he came to power in November 2015, Trudeau has offset his personal weaknesses by relying heavily on shrewder advisers. But since February, a serious and growing scandal has cost him the service of trusted aides. The head of the civil service has been forced to resign. Trudeau has been left more and more to his own judgment...
Canada’s politics are perhaps the least polarized in the Western world. The Liberals successfully appeal to business-minded voters; the Conservatives effectively compete for ethnic minorities. In an unpolarized polity, personality hugely matters. Justin Trudeau marketed himself as a radically different kind of politician: artless, open, transparent, feminist. For him to be seen browbeating an indigenous woman to protect politically wired insiders from facing the legal consequences of their wrongdoing—the reaction to that, in the words of a cover story in Maclean’s by the high eminence of Canadian political commentary, Paul Wells, is to emblazon him as “The Imposter.”
So let me add to what Frum said by
citing Paul Wells, who I respect a lot:
As my moral betters in the newspaper columns never tire of repeating, by many standards the SNC-Lavalin mess is quite modest. It seems probable that no money changed hands improperly in 2018 and no law was broken... So why did the Liberals take such a hammering in the polls as it played out?
The answer, I think, is that each time, they reveal unlovely truths about this Prime Minister.
First, a constitutional inability to tell the truth quickly...
Second, a tendency to parry questions of substance with appeals to partisan advantage...
Finally, all three of these scandalettes have laid bare a stubbornly ramshackle approach to running what has sometimes been a serious country... On SNC, what emerges from all the testimony is the impression that a dozen kids from the McGill debating team snuck into the abandoned ruins of Ottawa and started pretending to be the government of Canada.
My first reaction from abroad to this SNC news was "wow, my god, this is like a Canadian Watergate." The facts of the matter, as Liberal partisans on twitter have repeated, makes it not sound so much like Watergate, but rather Trump's weird reactions to being accused that borders on obstruction of justice. It reminds me why I have a revulsion to the Canadian liberals to the first place - because they're the Canadian establishment, and said establishment does not worry about fighting dirty.
Not enough Canadians realize there are two institutions that run everyday affairs: the deputy ministers in all the federal ministries and the Prime Minister's Office, the northern White House in all but name. The current "top bureaucrat" Wernick debased himself by suggesting to JWR that the PM's priorities is political image. Trudeau's number 2, Gerry Butts, bailed from the PMO following the scandal. All of this makes me wonder how stable the Canadian federal executive was under Trudeau in the first place.
