Why Trudeau is Staying No Matter What

Patrick Gossage • November 5, 2024

Inexplicable times for sad Liberals. An almost universally disliked Prime Minister who is convinced he alone can save Canada from the dangerous Pierre Poilievre and nobody is going to convince him otherwise. Not the pathetic group of 24 anonymous MP’s who penned a letter urging him to resign, not His former campaign director Jeremy Broadhurst or a few cabinet friends who suggested to him it was time. Not anyone in his loyal Cabinet. The Polls show a vast majority of Canadians want him to resign, yet he is still PM.

The reasons for this suicidal loyalty are simple. As former CBC Ottawa Bureau Chief Rob Russo said recently on CBC TV’s Power and Politics: “He made a bunch of nobodies into somebodies.”  Of the 39 current cabinet  ministers the vast majority came out of relative obscurity to the first Trudeau cabinet of  2015, and only Bill Blair and perhaps Steven Guilbeault had major public profiles, Blair as Toronto’s police chief and Guilbeault as a well-known Quebec environmental activist. Chrystia Freeland was a high-profile journalist and editor here and abroad.

The huge Prime Minister's Office of course owe their jobs to Justin and enjoy a power far beyond that of previous PMO’s. Hard to give up. They even appoint the key players, the chiefs of staff in Cabinet Ministers offices. Imagine a Minister who knows the loyalty of his key staffer is divided between the Minister and the PMO! This PMO muscle flexing was unknown in my time at the PMO and its effects on delaying or killing the flow of ideas is serious. 


Lloyd Axworthy a powerful cabinet Minister in the Chretien government bewailed this practice in a recent Toronto Star piece: “Bill Blair at the inquiry into foreign interference inquiry revealed that he was unaware his chief of staff, appointed by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), had been holding a high-priority request from CSIS for his signature for weeks. Blair further admitted he wasn’t troubled by this clear lapse in ministerial responsibility. This shocking revelation underscored how the role of a minister has been undermined in recent years.” We might even assume that the chief of staff was acting after consulting the PMO.


Most of us are unaware of how much power is concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Office. A 2007 study of 22 OECD countries found that Prime Ministers in Canada held more power than in any other country.


Andrew Coyne in a wonderful column recently described the inability of MP's to strongly urge the PM to reign this way: “Here they are too terrified in their desperation to rid themselves of a leader who has taken the party to the brink of annihilation, to so much as say their own names, lest the wrath of His Awful Majesty or his Most Awful Chief of Staff come down upon them.”


The chief referred to is of course Katie Telford a tactician whose early work was largely in Ontario politics. She takes credit for her organizational role in the 2015 election victory and has managed to outlive any previous Chief or Principal secretary to a PM by many years. She runs an office of hundreds who are credited by Ministers of running an effective bottleneck for approvals of new policies or initiatives by Cabinet members that are forced to pass through her bureaucracy. 


She also runs an effective screening of calls to the PM. Few get through to an increasingly isolated introverted PM. There is  story that even former PM jean Chretien could not get through the gatekeepers. Certainly, face to face or telephone calls with MP’s are very rare. 


Her huge “communications” section pumps out floods of daily releases occasionally of important appointments but more often vacuous tomes celebrating days like United Nations Day, Small Business Week, Persons Day or International Day of the Girl. The senior people in this office keep every MP and cabinet Minister “on message”. The PMO ever adjusting mantra focuses on the well worn Trudeau promise to help the “middle class and those working hard to join” it, and “continuing” such endlessly repeated initiatives as child care, housing construction, dental care, school food programs etc. “Investing in Canadians rather than cutting programs as promised by the Conservatives” Is the pitch falling on deaf ears. 


Interestingly the few dissident MP’s who spoke on record all bemoaned the lack of a new “plan” to win back support for the Liberals. A few days ago, one of the daily pitches for money from the Liberals landed in my e-mail, this one from Andrew Bevan, the newly appointed National Campaign Director: “I couldn’t be more excited to join the only team with a real plan to make life more affordable, strengthen our public health care, take bold climate action, and grow the middle class.”  It appears that more of the same is the “plan”!  His first TV ad reflects this.

I’ve pointed out before that we should not shy from looking into Trudeau’s private life to see why there has been so little positive convincing action to show real concern for suffering Canadians in the past year. Why the PMO has been largely reactionary. Truth could be that Trudeau could hardly not be affected by his marriage breakup and the effect it has had on his kids. He is human. 


Pundits have asked why there should not be a change at the top if Canadians have spoken loudly for the need for change. Fresh blood in the PMO seems unlikely, however needed. Trudeau is very loyal to those who brought him to where he is, even if he feels the loss of his more policy oriented Principal Secretary Gerald Butts who was a victim of  the SNC Lavalin affair. 


The largest exempt staff army in Canadian history is unlikely to birth new ideas. They have been appointed by the PMO and are largely young loyal Liberals. They and their Ministers rely increasingly on consultants to produce policy papers. Little chance of breakthrough ideas here. 

So, what do we have going forward. A PM whose “intoxication” with power won’t give it up and a supine Cabinet and caucus afraid to challenge him and a paucity of new thinking or plans to win back Canadians who have already made up their minds about the PM and the Liberals. The captain goes down fighting with his ship. The contrast with the renewal of the democrats in the US is depressing indeed.

Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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