Stephen Maher on Trudeau's Leadership Crisis and What Comes Next

A special episode of the What Happened Next podcast with Nathan Whitlock

My guest on this episode of What Happened Next is Stephen Maher.

Stephen has been writing about Canadian politics for decades as a columnist and investigative reporter at Postmedia news, iPolitics and Maclean’s. His work has won numerous awards, including the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism, a National Newspaper Award, two Canadian Association of Journalism Awards and a Canadian Hillman Prize. He has also been nominated for several National Magazine Awards. He is the author of a handful of thriller novels, which we talk about briefly in this episode.

Stephen's most recent book is The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, published in May of 2024 by Simon & Schuster. The Globe and Mail called the book a “thoroughly researched and fair-minded accounting of Justin Trudeau accomplishments and failings.”

Steven and I talk about the very recent and ongoing chaos surrounding Trudeau and his government, the particular stresses of researching and writing a biography of an acting political figure whose fortunes could change at any moment, and the book he is currently working on about another Canadian icon with a very tarnished brand, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

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Nathan Whitlock

This is a bit of a first in terms of this podcast, in that you are the first guest I am speaking to who is on a boat on the water. That suggests to me that Canadian political journalism is more financially rewarding that I previously suspected.

Stephen Maher

You would come to the wrong conclusion, if that's what you think. It's quite an old boat.

Whitlock

I want to talk to you about some Trudeau stuff. The first question I have is maybe the trickiest. Right now, who do you think is the most concerned that Justin Trudeau might step down before the next election—Pierre Poilievre or the makers and sellers of Fuck Trudeau flags?

Maher

[Laughing] Or Chief of Staff, Katie Telford?

Whitlock

Yeah, that's another.

Maher

It's been interesting for the last little while on social media. You see all these conservative activist and thought leaders saying, well, we don't need a Liberal leadership race, we need an election. The idea of Canada going to an election right now with Justin Trudeau as the leader of the Liberal party seems to me like it would be excellent for the Conservative Party of Canada, but not very good for voters who should have two or more reasonable choices on the ballot. And he is a political spent force.

Whitlock

It definitely seems that. I also want establish the date we're recording this, which is December 19, 2024. I only do that because, by the time people hear this conversation, events may have shifted quite a bit. I mean, even in the next 24 hours, things may shift. I'm curious in terms of your your work, how busy have you been in the past week. Are you getting constant media calls?

Maher

Yeah, a fair bit. I did three media hits yesterday. I'm trying to write another book, so this has been chewing up some time. But it's part of the job, you know, to try to explain and promote your last book.

Whitlock

And you're also working on a new book. Have you got a whole set up on the boat? Are you have you got, like, a little writing office right there?

Maher

Yeah, I do. These old sailboats always have what they call a navigation table from back in the days when people used paper charts and compasses and slide rules and so on. And so I've got a laptop.

Whitlock

To what extent were you able to foresee the events of the past week. Was this all a shock to you? Or were you like, yeah, that that fits with what I was what I was hearing, or what I was starting to suspect.

Maher

I was always wondering how long Freeland would stick it out. I rememberwhen Jody Wilson Raybould announced that she was resigning, I tweeted, “Freeland still there, isn't she?” There was a sense, going back to that point, that Freeland was a sort of guarantor, if you will. Trudeau has been critiqued his whole career as a lightweight who's over his head, and you would think, well, even if that's true, he's got Chrystia in there, who is not a lightweight. So you had this sense that she was in the public mind and in the bubble, that she was somebody who who lent gravitas to the whole operation. And I was aware that if she ever withdrew that gravitas, that Trudeau would be in deep trouble. He appears not to have been aware of that.

Whitlock

It's a very different situation, but there's a bit of an analogy to the first Trump administration and him having these very notable Chiefs of Staff, having generals and so forth in his administration, and people doing the same thing, of well, he's a nut case, but he's got these legitimate people in powerful positions. Then those people started to fall away and say terrible things, and now appears that like Trump is in the same way of like, No, it was me all along, I was the one in charge.

Maher

The difference now is that Trump can point to his relationship with American voters and take legitimacy from that, whereas Trudeau, at the moment, is less popular in Canada than Donald Trump. That’s at the root of his legitimacy crisis—the vast majority of Canadians want him to leave, including people who generally like him and were happy to vote for him in the past. So that's why this is such a crisis for Trudeau. If Trudeau still had an approval rating of 50 percent, as he did when Trump took office the first time, he could say, well, that's too bad. I wish Chrystia all the best in whatever follows, and here's my new finance minister.

Whitlock

In the book, you call Trudeau a cottage guest who came for a weekend and is still with us as Labor Day approaches. You also say that governments that have been in power too long start to tell themselves falsehoods. We've seen that play out a number of times. So I'm wondering, from your perspective, as someone who's written and thought so much about Trudeau himself, are we looking at just another government that's been around too long, the rot has set in, people have just gotten too comfortable? Or is there something particular in Trudeau character that would make him want to stay despite all of these signs that really it's time to go?

Maher

He's an extraordinarily confident human being. I have a quote from a former cabinet minister who said that if we all had that kind of confidence, imagine what we we could achieve in our lives. That confidence is what allowed him to become, as a former high school teacher without a particularly distinguished resume, leader of the Liberal party and prime minister of Canada. It’s what allowed him to to beat up Patrick Brazeau, to stand up to Stephen Harper in debates and Tom Mulcair—you know, more formidable men than than him. And to face down Donald Trump effectively. He has an extraordinary belief in himself. And now that belief is completely at odds with reality. He still appears to believe, or did, until this week, that he could turn everything around. And the problem, now, is that if he still believes it, he's the only one.

It was fairly clear that when Gerald Butts was his principal secretary and senior advisor, that he was well-advised during that period, and after the departure of Mr. Butts, the operation never seemed to be as strategic. Not that Gerald Butts is, you know, perfect in every case, but there was a sense of that there was somebody involved with strong strategic sense and narrative-building experience and skills. After Mr. Butts leaves, they always seem to be lurching from crisis to crisis—managing some of them very successfully. The pandemic, I think, Trudeau gets good marks for that, relying mostly on the advice of public servants, but his financial people got a lot of money out the door very quickly and kept the economy from collapsing. He was able to rally people at different levels of government, across partisan lines, to deal effectively with Trump, and then dealt with the convoy. So you have these sort of three crises in a row: Covid, Trump—Trump and COVID are overlapping crises—and the convoy, all of which he manages, to some extent, successfully. In terms of non-crisis moments, from that period on, you don't see a government that's planning carefully and setting goals and accomplishing them and making careful political moves.

Whitlock

It's interesting that you list Covid as one of the situations that he gets decent marks for. I would tend to agree. It could have been so much worse, and he sort of kept things going. But there is also this alternate version where Covid was kind of where things really broke in terms of the act of opposition to him. Not the political opposition, but the popular opposition. I feel like the Fuck Trudeau flags really came from Covid, the convoy really came from Covid. I almost don't blame him personally for how that happened, but it feels like that helped him in that he kept things afloat. But it also was the moment when things really turned dark in terms of people's feelings about him.

Maher

I think he made one big mistake in my view, and in view of the Commission of Inquiry that looked into his handling of the convoy in Ottawa. As the convoy settled into Ottawa, he said, we can't accept these people with unacceptable views. He was seeking to make political progress, or, you know, score political points by saying these are bad people, or the kind of people that we should be suspicious of, and that aggravated those people. They were ready to be aggravated. Covid and online disinformation had created this cohort of Canadians—some somewhere around 10 percent of Canadians—who basically believe all kinds of nonsense about World Economic Forum and vaccines and so on. However, the people who went to protest the mask mandates and those kinds of things, they also had a legitimate perspective, and they were exercising their Charter rights.

I was surprised when I was researching the book to see that some of these people were truly shocked that the prime minister would attack them for doing that. Even as they were criticizing him, they did not think that he would attack them in that way. And then we saw, in the subsequent election, he was ultimately forced to use those same divisions to win a close election. That really did divide people, and he's had to live with that ever since. That enmity stems from that, and you cannot say that all of it is unjustified, even though, the conspiracy theories are unfortunate. We do have, particularly in southwestern Ontario and the prairies, a libertarian political culture, and these people always found public health measures more aggravating than eastern Canadians did, or more urban Canadians. And they are Canadians, and he is their leader, and he ultimately made enemies of them.

Whitlock

You can understand anyone being frustrated in that moment to have to be very diplomatic, but I would agree that the political instincts failed.

Maher

He was buffeted by events, and so I'm not sure that there would have been some path to get through that would have left him looking good. It was extremely difficult. So, I don't want to let on that there was some easy way to to do all that, to be fair to him. But it’s one of the reasons why you can't be prime minister forever, right? You’ve accumulated enemies. You have done things that people don't like, and at a certain point, there's enough of those people and they're upset enough that you become a distraction. You get to be in the way. And when that happens, it's like one of those things that people say when they resign from jobs. I don't think I did anything wrong, but I've become a distraction to the organization I'm trying to lead, and I have to get out of the way. That's where Justin Trudeau has been, but for quite some time, and he is not saying that. He's saying, I want to fight. I want to lead. I so I feel very frustrated with him. You get frustrated with somebody when you're writing a book about them, because you spend more time thinking about them than is necessary. But at this point I really think like, Okay, well, is your continued presence in Canadian politics helping or not? And it seems pretty clear, for quite some time now, that he is not helping.

Whitlock

I want to talk about the book for a minute. Was this something you had been thinking of, or kind of musing on for a while? Or did Simon & Schuster come to you and say you are the right person to write this book? And that was the moment you kind of jumped in? How did that happen?

Maher

It was Simon & Schuster's idea. They thought there was a market for a book on Trudeau, and they went looking for a writer. I joked that I don't know how many people they talked to before they got to me.

Whitlock

The epigraph that you use in the book is from Machiavelli, which is obviously where the title derives from. And part of the quote that you have is, “Only an exalted prince can grasp the nature of the people, and only a lesser man can perceive the nature of a prince.” In that framing, Trudeau is the exalted prince, and you are the lesser man, I guess. Obviously there's some tongue in cheek element there. But were you a little bit reluctant at first to take it on, or were you ready to jump in?

Maher

Well, that is sort of tongue in cheek, but that's Machiavelli framing himself against the great Lorenzo or the Medicis, who he was writing about. It's something that I wish I'd been a little bit more explicit about in the book. I'm not comparing Justin Trudeau to a successful Machiavellian leader. So that is meant to be tongue in cheek, but in some ways Justin Trudeau is an extraordinarily successful human being, right? Whatever the ultimate verdict of history will be, he's led the country for a long time, and with some success.

Whitlock

I run a book publishing program at at Humber Polytechnic. And one of the things we talk about in terms of acquiring books, commissioning books, putting books together, is timing. And especially when the book is about an active political figure, timing becomes very, very tricky. While you were working on the book was that clock kind of hanging over you, that things could change any minute now with this man's career, and suddenly my book looks very different, or becomes dead in the water?

Maher

Yeah, that clock was was ticking, and it was difficult. I spent one summer, doing little but hunched over my desk, typing for 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Had to, you know, let down my friends and relatives, and be absent from things where I should have been present. It was hard, and Simon & Schuster recognized that they had to get it out in a hurry, and they did some unusual things in order to make that happen. They thought that if Trudeau left, people would not buy the book, or not many people would. And I’m sure they're right. I had several people ask me about the book. Well, why didn't you wait until he left before he wrote a book? And it's like, well, because nobody would buy it then! And the cautionary tale I often think about is my friend Don Martin, who wrote two political books. He was a long-time columnist and eventually host of a CTV Power Play. His first book, which I would commend to anyone interested in Alberta politics, was King Ralph about Ralph Klein. His second political book—and this is the cautionary tale—was called Belinda. Belinda Stronach, at a time, was a federal politician, and she announced her departure from politics before the book was published.

Whitlock

It's kind of amazing to remember there was a time when you could publish a book just with Belinda Stronach’s first name, and assume that the entire culture would understand who you're referring to.

Maher

Yes, she was well known.

Whitlock

In terms of the reception of the book, were people feeling you were dead on? Or did you get a lot of feeling where people were like, Oh, you were too immune to him, or too positive about him? Or was it all of the above?

Maher

I think mostly people felt I was fair, the people who who know anything about it, which is what I was looking for. I was aware, and I said to Simon & Schuster early on, the way to sell the most books would be to put out a very anti-Trudeau book right now. But I wouldn't be able to do that, because I can't write what I don't think, and my practice as a political journalist is not to be deceptive with people. I wouldn't want to do a bunch of interviews and convince a bunch of people who were part of the operation that I was going to write something positive, and then come up with something very different and leave them feeling that they wish they hadn't participated.

Whitlock

Have you heard anything from the Trudeau camp about the book?

Maher

Yeah, early on, Someone from Trudeau camp told the Star they didn't agree with everything, but that they felt it was fair and reasonable.

Whitlock

That's a blurb for the paperback.

Maher

There actually is no paperback as yet. I hope there will be, though, with a new afterward about the grim last days.

Whitlock

That's what I was about to ask you. Have you now being contacted by Simon & Schuster where they're saying, like, Give us 5,000 words on the last two weeks?

Maher

I'm hoping that'll happen, but I assume they may still have some hard covers they want to get rid of.

Whitlock

That's true, that's true. They gotta clear out the the warehouse first.

Maher

Yeah, and Christmas book buying season is upon us, so I would think that's what they're thinking about now.

Whitlock

On your your personal website, I noticed it lists you as novelist and journalist, with novelist coming first. And you've written a number of thrillers, the most recent being Social Misconduct, which came out under the name S.J. Maher, with Simon & Schuster. So you still work on thrillers? Is that still part of your writing?

Maher

I'm still thinking about them, and I hope to get back to them. But at the moment, I'm working on a non-fiction book. I really like thrillers, and hope to do another one. I've got one half finished that I may return to.

Whitlock

Does it take place on a boat?

Maher

No, one of my thrillers does. The one that I am fondest of is Salvage, which is set in Nova Scotia, where I'm from, and involves boats and fishing and cocaine, and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I do hope to return to them, but I'm busy with journalism and non-fiction at the moment.

Whitlock

Can you talk a little bit about that next non-fiction project, or is it all under seal?

Maher

Yeah, I think I can. I'm working on a book about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I covered the tragic events in Portapique, but I'm also working on a sort of deep dive into the entire history of the force, which dates from the beginning of Canada, and, in some ways, is one of the most important Canadian institutions, and one that I do not believe is fit for purpose at the moment. It needs to be changed and reformed.

Whitlock

There's sort of an analogy there between Trudeau and the RCMP. I think people outside of Canada still see Trudeau, to some extent, as like, Oh, of all the world leaders, he's still the charming one who's doing the right thing. Why does everybody hate him? And then the RCMP. I think people outside of Canada still think of it as like, Oh, they're that noble thing, that symbol of pure virtue of Canada. Whereas for a lot of people in Canada, historically and at the present, are like, no, no, there's whole other side to that force.

Maher

Yes, it's true. Canada is unique in that our police force is our national symbol. When you think of Japan, you think of the samurai. The United States, the cowboy. And Canada, you think of of the Mountie.

Whitlock

That's a little depressing. We're a national police force. Police force is our is our soul.

Maher

Yeah, it's funny. There's a reason things become symbols, I guess.