Waggish Ottawa columnist John Robson observes in the National Post that Prime Minister Trudeau’s maiden speech to the Davos Economic Forum left out much while not leaving out nearly enough.
Our prime minister’s oration this week to the world’s richest at their annual gathering in Switzerland was top heavy with platitudes, Robson notes, while substance was left cold, curled and alone on the cutting room floor.
The effect, he implies in slightly more delicate language, was to affirm Trudeau fils as the Prime Minister Lite Brite for our day: as pleasing to the eye as a shelf full of children’s toys, and ultimately as useful for a room full of grown-ups.
It strikes me as an assessment that might be considered accurate without being fully fair. Charitably, which of us has not wondered in the moments before we addressed the wealthiest homo sapiens in evolutionary history whether we’d picked exactly the right topic and, most importantly, who added this task to our job description when we weren’t looking.
And what was he supposed to do in front of this bunch of mega-billionaires? Launch into a dissection of the discursive application of the Filioque clause in separated Christianity’s Nicene Creed to Canadian federalism, i.e., whether or not Quebec proceeds from Ottawa as the Son proceeds—or doesn’t—from the Father?
No. That was his dad’s thing. It is not his. This prime minister did as he does, which is give minimally taxing stump speeches on the way governments can use the tax system to make everyone equally happy. Hey, God calls us all to our vocation.
That said, one thought from the PM, loosed in his charming en passant style, should stir substantive debate across the land. Canadians, he told the great, the good, and the filthy rich in Davos, believe in progress.
It’s uncertain what statistical sampling method supports that claim. It may be the case of politicians forgetting, once again, to use that small but terribly important word “some” in all of their claims about the land they love and lead.
Some Canadians do believe in progress. Some of us do not. Some of us go so far as to believe the very idea of progress is perhaps the greatest step backward humanity has ever taken in comprehending its own nature.
At least as it has come down to us from the 19th century, it makes as much sense to believe in progress as it does to believe in time. The writer Marilynne Robinson points out in her recent collection of essays that we don’t actually even know what time is. We only think we do because we have devised a system for measuring its simulacrum.
We have done the same with progress, where the system of measurement is often a misrepresentation of mere change. As I have argued interminably over the years, a corpse decomposing in a grave is changing but can hardly be called a work in progress. The analogy is acutely apropos in the month when asymmetrical “progressives” in Quebec began injecting lethal chemicals into the arms of terminally ill patients to end their lives before their time.
None of this made it into the prime minister’s Davos speech, what with platitudes being the sharp-elbowed space hogs they are. Perhaps when he returns from the land of cuckoo clocks to the re-opening of Canada’s Parliament next week, he will take up the theme in language of substance for grown-ups.
