1 week Ago By Chris Nelson, For The Calgary Herald
The Liberals didn’t get it at first. After all, they’d heard this 51st state silliness long before. It was just Donald Trump being Donald Trump, the U.
S. president enjoying nothing more than making others squirm in that endless game of one-upmanship he plays. Justin Trudeau, then unknowingly playing out the string as Canada’s prime minister, was hardly surprised at the insult.
He’d heard the same juvenile jibe at Canada’s expense during Trump’s first go-round, alongside being labelled as governor of the Great White North. So when he and Trump dined at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Nov. 29, everyone around the table — those politicians and hangers-on from both countries — had a good old time.
That 51st state blather was simply sloughed off as the usual Trumpian bluster. Don’t take my word for it. This is how Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who was at that veritable feast, described the atmosphere.
“In a three-hour social evening at the president’s residence in Florida on a long weekend of American Thanksgiving, the conversation was going to be lighthearted. The president was telling jokes. The president was teasing us.
“It wasn’t a meeting in a boardroom with 10 bureaucrats keeping notes. It was a social evening, and there were moments where it was entertaining and funny, and there were moments where we were able to do some good work for Canada.” But something was afoot.
While it might not have fazed the politicians having fun in Florida, when those 51st state comments filtered back across the border they began resonating with ordinary Canadians. That’s when Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s former principal secretary and considered the brains behind that first 2015 election victory, took to social media to urge folk to calm folk down. It was, he wrote, no biggie.
“Trump used this ‘51st State’ line with Trudeau a lot during his first term. He’s doing it to rattle Canadian cages. When someone is trying to get you to freak out, don’t,” was his wise advice.
That should have been that. But then an odd thing happened. The angrier Canadians became, the better those previously pathetic Liberal polling numbers became.
Now, this upswing came too late for Trudeau, who bowed to the seemingly inevitable early in the New Year and handed in his resignation. But it didn’t stop his potential successor from grabbing this political lifeline. This was an insult to build a campaign around, a perfect way to deflect from 10 years of Liberal rule.
Mark Carney became Captain Canada, and within weeks the Grits were giving Lazarus a run for his money in the resurrection game..
