Justin Trudeau ‘chickened out’ on some tough decisions. Here are 3 that could have made his life easier today

Justin Trudeau told a college crowd recently that most of his regrets revolve around “the times I chickened out.”

As Trudeau marks a decade as Liberal leader this month, the prime minister can no doubt look back on many roads not taken.

But in three particular cases, Trudeau missed some large chances to shake up political culture in Ottawa — in ways that could have made his life a little easier today. All would have required a bit of political risk-taking — or not “chickening out,” as Trudeau might put it.

First is the so-called accountability legislation, which Stephen Harper had declared his number-one priority when he came to office back in 2006. Trudeau, who won power with a huge majority in 2015, had a chance to fix this law or repeal it altogether, but he chose not to take it on.

At first glance, one might well ask what leader in his or her right mind would fiddle with something called the “Federal Accountability Act?” But this legislation wasn’t entirely about accountability; it was also about Harper settling some old scores with the idea of government itself.

To halt what the former prime minister saw as always-suspect dealings between the private and public sector, the legislation clamped a five-year ban on anyone who proposed to move from government into the business of government relations — that is, lobbying.

This law, and this measure in particular, helps seal the idea that any traffic between government and business is inherently corrupt. Politicians love to beat up on corporate Canada these days — that’s true on all sides of the House. But this demonization of the private-public relationship in this country is robbing both sides of expertise and ideas.

Dominic Barton, Canada’s former ambassador to China, who once headed up the powerful consulting firm McKinsey, was hauled up before a Commons committee earlier this year as the opposition was chasing the big money going to outside consultants.

He said that one of the reasons the government needed to draw on outside resources was because the public service had fallen into the “stone age” in terms of technical and training expertise.

“In my view, it’s the training and technology,” Barton said. “I think that having people go in and out … having private-sector people coming into government and government people going into the private sector is good to broaden the mind.”

But the accountability act is a major obstacle to that back-and-forth movement. It also means the longer a government is in power — this one is in its eighth year — the more difficult it becomes to draw in bright minds from the private sector. The result is two solitudes: a government largely staffed by professional politicos with limited knowledge of business, and a private sector unfamiliar with how government works.

The second regret should revolve around the failure to follow through on electoral reform. Many voters have not forgiven Trudeau for backing away from his promise to bring in some kind of dramatic change to Canada’s first-past-the-post system. They accuse him, not unfairly, of chickening out, after that same system won him a majority in 2015.

Maybe it was too difficult to pull off. But Trudeau could have gone part way, by restoring the old public subsidy to political parties. That subsidy was part of a wider, sweeping crackdown on political financing during Jean Chrétien’s last years in office in the early 2000s. In exchange for a ban and strict limits on corporate and personal donations, all political parties received an annual subsidy, based on how many votes they received in the previous election.

It wasn’t exactly proportional representation, but it was democratic — and it did help level the playing field between small and large parties, ensuring that the system didn’t simply reward the political entities with the marketing machines to raise money. Banning the subsidy meant that the parties had to double down on that often-overzealous quest for cash. (Have you seen those pleading emails littering your inbox?)

All that marketing also rewards parties for clickbait-type politics, which feeds polarization. Just listen to any news conference with Pierre Poilievre to hear the fundraising catch lines — on CBC, for instance, or gun control, two big money generators to Conservative coffers.

The first time Harper tried to wind down the political subsidy prompted a full-blown political crisis in Canada, some might remember. In 2008, the Conservatives announced it would be part of their agenda right after that fall’s election. The opposition Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois almost drove the Conservatives from power. Harper had to back down until he won his own majority in 2011.

It wouldn’t have been an impossible stretch for Trudeau, with his own majority in 2015, to say he was bringing back the subsidy, to set right that old dispute and make the system a little fairer between small and large parties. But he did not, and Canada lives with the current reality that has helped turn politics into a race to whip up whatever grievance gets people reaching into their wallets.

The third regret for Trudeau should also revolve around another broken promise — his failure to decentralize government and reduce the power of the Prime Minister’s Office, the top political arm of government, which has come to oversee everything from appointments to broad policy, to communications at all levels.

“Actually it can be traced as far back as my father, who kicked it off in the first place,” Trudeau told the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in 2015. “And I think we’ve reached the end point on that.”

As it turns out, this PMO is as all powerful, and arguably more so than it was during the Harper years. It is the funnel for all decisions, it seems — large and small.

Perhaps this is the product of a fragmented universe in the days of social media, when the only way to keep party discipline is to keep a tight lid on what every team member says and does. Maybe politics is such a risk-averse territory now, with huge, cancel-culture penalties for saying the wrong thing, that the top office has to be ruthless in avoiding mistakes.

But a prime minister who promised to breathe some democracy and sunny ways into government backed away from three ways to do just that — to repeal some measures that arose out of age-old grudges and paranoia of previous regimes.

Some around Trudeau would argue that he ran into the hard reality of power. Others, maybe even Trudeau himself on some reflection, might say he “chickened out.”

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