Thread: Trudeau's turn from cool to laughing stock

Terry Glavin on how Justin Trudeau's lament for the dictator Fidel Castro confirmed every lampoon of the prime minister's foreign-policy vacuity
Terry Glavin
November 27, 2016

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Ever since his election as Canada's prime minister last October, Justin Trudeau has revelled in global tributes, raves and swoons. He's the Disney prince with the trippy dance moves, the groovy Haida tattoo and the gender-balanced cabinet. He's the last best hope for globalization, the star attraction at the Pride Parades, the hero of the Paris Climate Summit, the guy everyone wants a selfie with.

Trudeau made himself synonymous with Canada. He made Canada cool again. It was fun while it lasted.

By the early hours of Saturday morning, Havana time, Trudeau was an international laughing stock. Canada's "brand," so carefully constructed in Vogue photo essays and Economist magazine cover features, seemed to suddenly implode into a bonspiel of the vanities, with humiliating headlines streaming from the Washington Post to the Guardian, and from Huffington Post to USA Today.

It was Trudeau's maudlin panegyric on the death of Fidel Castro that kicked it off, and there is a strangely operatic quality to the sequence of events that brings us to this juncture. When Trudeau made his public debut in fashionable society 16 years ago, with his "Je t'aime, papa!" encomium at the gala funeral of his father Pierre in Montreal, Fidel Castro himself was there among the celebrities, as an honorary pallbearer, lending a kind of radical frisson to the event. Now it's all come full circle.

Times have changed, and the Trudeau family's bonds with the Castro family, first cultivated while Pierre Trudeau was prime minister and carefully nurtured during the years that followed, now seem somehow unhygienic. Greasy, even. Definitely not cool.

"It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba's longest serving President," Trudeau's statement begins, going on to celebrate Castro as a "larger than life" personality who served his people. He was "a legendary revolutionary and orator" whose people loved him, and who worked wonders for Cuban education and health care.

A "controversial figure," sure, but: "I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raúl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba. On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader."

And so, from far-off Antananarivo, Madagascar, where he was attending the 80-government gathering of the Francophonie, Trudeau's lament for the last of the Cold War dictators ended up confirming every wicked caricature of his own vacuity and every lampoon of the Trudeau government's foreign-policy lack of seriousness.

Twitter lit up with hilarious mockeries under the hashtag #trudeaueulogies. Florida senator Marco Rubio wanted to know whether Trudeau's statement came from a parody account. The impeccably liberal Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, called Trudeau's praise of Castro "a sad statement for the leader of a democracy to make."

Whether or not Trudeau saw any of this coming, he didn't appear to notice that he was delivering a speech to the Francophonie delegates in Madagascar that emphasized justice for lesbian, gay and transgender people, while from the other side of his mouth he was praising the legacy of a caudillo who spent the first decade of his rule rounding up gay people for "re-education" in labour camps. Homosexuals were irredeemably bourgeois "maricones" and agents of imperialism, Castro once explained.

To be perfectly fair, Trudeau did allow that...

http://www.macleans.ca/news/trudeaus...aughing-stock/