When Justin Trudeau was elected as the Liberal Party’s 13th leader in April, he proclaimed an end to decades of Liberal civil wars that have made the party a shell.
He also used his victory speech to announce that rather than play the negative politics game so rampant now in the House of Commons and the Canadian body politic, he would invoke the “sunny ways” of his father’s Liberal hero Wilfrid Laurier.
His “sunny ways” and a good deal of political cunning and prairie development led the first great Liberal leader to four consecutive majority governments beginning in 1896.
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In Laurier’s day, the term came not just from the idea of being cheerful but from the fable of the wind and the sun competing to force a man to take off his coat.
After the wind did its best by blowing hard and failing, the sun turned up the heat and the man took off his coat.
Last year in a new biography of Laurier, André Pratte offered Laurier’s take on the fable and how it applied to the negative politics of his day.
“Laurier said that his way was not blowing and blowing, being angry and threatening,” wrote Pratte. “My way is the sunny way – that is, dialogue, compromise, understanding, tolerance.”
It seems to be Trudeau’s mantra, at least for the moment.
And on the face of it, it seems to be a perfect foil for the current federal government whose front bench, with a few notable exceptions, has forgotten how to smile, has decided that criticism is war, that critics are enemies.
Many pollsters and social scientists suggest that voter cynicism about politics and voting, including declining voter turnout, actually flows in part from the increasing political narrative that opponents are not just people with differing opinions about what is best for the country but political trash with nothing but the destruction of the country in mind.
The Stephen Harper Conservatives have made this ‘take no prisoners’ brand of politics their style.
But not all of them, as the outpouring of affection for southern Alberta MP Ted Menzies last week showed.
Trudeau doesn’t have to look back as far as Laurier for a model of “sunny ways.”
The rural MP and former farm leader, lately the minister of state for finance, announced last week he would leave politics and did not want to be part of the next cabinet. He wanted to be closer to his community now suffering from severe flood damage.
The outpouring of praise from friends and critics was overwhelming. He was cheerful, they said, he didn’t hold grudges, he had causes but did not consider critics to be enemies.
Unlike many of his cabinet colleagues, Menzies seemed to be having fun, he smiled, he treated critics as misguided rather than enemies to be destroyed.
His fangs showed on the Canadian Wheat Board issue but even there, many opponents found him congenial.
He even had the ability to quickly get over slights, as he saw them, written by journalists.
When prime minister Harper chooses his new cabinet, he might reflect on the power of fresh ministers with “sunny ways” able to reduce the grim anger factor in the government image.
