John Robson: On Trudeau’s Point That Principle Trumps Popularity, I Agree

John Robson: On Trudeau’s Point That Principle Trumps Popularity, I Agree
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference in Vancouver on Feb. 20, 2024. The Canadian Press/Ethan Cairns
John Robson
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Given his poll position, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau led with his chin in saying “My job is not to be popular.” Sneering variants on “Mission accomplished” flew thick and fast. But for once he had an important point. Far too many politicians do what they think will be popular and hope it’s right, and our politics would be dramatically improved if instead they did what they thought was right and hoped it would be popular.

Of course there is another important, indeed constitutionally fundamental sense in which the prime minister’s job is to be popular. Given the frailties of human nature, long and painful experience has taught us the only tolerable kind of polity is one where we the people have a veto on how we are governed, and by whom. Without orderly mechanisms for peacefully retiring leaders who are sufficiently unpopular for sufficiently long, you get Xerxes, Nero, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, etc.

It’s not that the public is always right, of course. Nor is it ever united, however politicians may bloviate about how “Canadians” want this or “deserve” that. As John Locke put it in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” that people differ “in respect of their understandings, I think nobody, who has had any conversation with his neighbours, will question.”

Fair-minded people also realize that some reasonable neighbours persist in rejecting our opinion even after we shout it at them. And others who accept it are appallingly defective in knowledge or reasoning, even prone to conspiracy theories.

It’s the kind of mess that prompted Churchill’s “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Which he did not claim as original but as time-tested wisdom. And the reason it’s better anyway is precisely the slowly reliable “wisdom of crowds” in which the tendency of a great many individuals of often questionable judgment to choose well together among alternatives, in specific action and general philosophy, has been repeatedly vindicated.

The history of free societies, or even perusal of actual party platforms, is often enough to make one weep. (Try digging out an old platform, and wonder what they even thought they were talking about.) Yet the West caroms from blunder to fad and from disaster to catastrophe, generating unparalleled economic and cultural wealth along with much depraved rubbish, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in one war after another from classical Greece onward.

There have also been disasters, to be sure. Rome fell. And some dandies apparently loom. But the record of the rest of the world is almost unbroken, frequently squalid catastrophe. For instance, “re-electing” Vladimir Putin. Or Saddam Hussein.

So the trick is to let men and women of conviction advance proposals boldly, and let voters decide which program to adopt and for how long. Which is also a major reason I favour the “first past the post” electoral system; precisely by exaggerating swings in opinion and encouraging “wedge” politics it lets voters make clear choices and, if they seem mistaken on reflection, try something else. Especially when they get fed up.

It also gives leaders the time they need to be vindicated… or not. So not necessarily popular, but popular if necessary, one might say.

As American philosopher J. Budziszewski once said, people are logical… slowly. And yes, they are also often illogical in haste. But don’t panic. People may be fools, but they are not fools.

So back to Justin Trudeau. I consider him dangerously wrong, as I’ve made clear in these pages, and also unreflective and bellicose. But give him credit: He’s neither amorphous nor inconsistent. He’s relentlessly far left, from fiscal policy to transgenderism to the Middle East. Which beats electing someone “conservative” who then governs from the left, flip-flops, and leaves everything muddled.

What Trudeau actually said, defending his carbon taxes, was: “My job is not to be popular – although it helps – my job is to do the right thing for Canadians a generation from now.” Correct. But our job is to decide whether you’re a bold prophet or a misguided zealot. And at this point it seems most people aren’t buying Trudeau’s insistence that his carbon-tax rebate leaves us all better off. Or his once-plausible “sunny ways.” Or much of anything he’s selling.

Including, I think, neglect of national security, gender radicalism, and sympathy for censorship, including the so-called “Online Harms Bill” C-63, a direct attack on the mechanisms by which democracies blunder from triumph to triumph. But his problem isn’t that he lost a popularity contest. It’s that he deserved to.

It’s how self-government squares the circle. A leader’s job is to be popular because he’s right. And our job is to decide when he’s so persistently and manifestly wrong he must go.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
John Robson
John Robson
Author
John Robson is a documentary filmmaker, National Post columnist, contributing editor to the Dorchester Review, and executive director of the Climate Discussion Nexus. His most recent documentary is “The Environment: A True Story.”