Canadian politicians can learn from Truss’ rapid rise and fall

OTTAWA—Aside from the perfunctory nod to our “shared history, values, and traditions,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Sept. 6 statement to congratulate Liz Truss, the incoming British prime minister, was rather reserved. Now just six weeks into the job, she is gone. Perhaps Trudeau played it safe knowing that Truss’s tenure would be short-lived. She had certainly given enough indications. Throughout her political career, Truss had chosen to rank ideology and bravado over pragmatic policy-making. She fashioned herself as a tough-talking libertarian, not afraid to make unpopular decisions, a disruptor ready to take on the orthodoxy with a platform of small government and tax cuts. And she had an unshakable belief in the return of Rule Britannia. With public finances urgently needed to address domestic needs, she boldly committed to increase the defence budget from 2.1 per cent to three per cent by 2030. As late as the day before resigning her post, Truss was still touting herself as “a fighter, not a quitter.” These self-characterizations had reduced Truss to a caricature: strident, superficial, and predictable. It happens when one pursues image-making over debate and deliberation. The ability to solve hard problems—the ones that require due diligence, thinking outside the box, or making course corrections—gets limited. The image takes over, the humanity gets lost. You become an automaton. Seth Leith, writing in The Spectator on Oct. 17, observed that Truss “sometimes seems cold or standoffish, then smiles awkwardly or expresses warmth and enthusiasm like someone who has read instructions on how to do so in a book.” Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general with the federal government. Photograph courtesy of Bhagwant Sandhu To be fair, Truss had inherited a lot of trouble. Inflation had risen to over 10 per cent in September. The Bank of England was predicting that it would climb to 13 per cent by the fall, and lead to a protracted recession heading into 2023. British households were expected to pay on average $4,000 for energy costs the coming winter, triple from the amounts they paid last year. Garbage collectors, transit drivers, teachers, nurses, and even lawyers had either gone on strike or were planning imminent walkouts. Instead of taking a time-tested approach to policy-making—of seeking expert advice and building consensus for a path forward—Truss chose to plough straight ahead with a dogmatic agenda of trickle-down economics. Her solution of tax cuts totaling $70-billion for the upper income earners and the biggest corporations plunged the national currency, shot up inflation, and sent the markets into a hyper-accelerated downturn. Rather than taking personal responsibility for her mistakes, she promptly fired the finance minister, and offered a disingenuous non-apology apology, of “going too fast, too soon.” When that didn’t work, she pivoted to blaming everything on “Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.” It was too late by then. The customary catchphrases were no longer working. The British media started ridiculing her. Her net favourability rating fell to a record low of -70 per cent. Members of her own cabinet wanted her out of office. If inflexibility was her first weakness, her second was a bloated sense of self-importance. In December 2021, long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Truss took it upon herself to outline a vision for the future of our planet. Delivered at Chatham House in London, her speech was full of bluster and idealized values of the British Empire. “Autocratic regimes,” she said, “are using a maelstrom of militancy, mistrust and misinformation to gain the upper hand.” She proposed “to work with our friends to form a network of liberty.” All the while she was quietly cooking up a plan to ship refugees awaiting adjudication in England off to Rwanda; as well as questioning if French President Emmanuel Macron was her friend or a foe because he had refused to lock up asylum seekers attempting to cross the English Channel. Someone is purported to have once told former United States president, the late Richard Nixon, that “you can say all you want about foreign affairs, but what is really important is the price of hogs in Chicago and St. Louis.” In other words, grand visions and highfalutin rhetoric may help incite emotions and whip up partisan crowds, but they don’t cut it in the biosphere of realpolitik. Ultimately, you have to get serious and deliver on the bread-and-butter issues. The voting public always catches on to the gong show. Canadian politicians would do well, therefore, to learn from the rapid rise and fall of Truss. It’s not about intellectual outsmarting or witty one-liners, it is about keeping it real and earning your basic paycheque. While Trudeau has kept his distance from Truss, his cabinet ministers have not. Some have mimicked her, in style and in substance. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s speech at the Brookings Institution on Oct. 11, for instance, is eerily similar to the one given by Truss in 2021. Instead of “a network of liberty” however, Freeland offers “friend-shoring.” Freeland should give it a break. Surely, she has enough on her plate with the hard problems of rising food prices and housing affordability. Bhagwant Sandhu is Canadian foreign policy commentator and author. He retired as director general from the federal public service. The Hill Times

Canadian politicians can learn from Truss’ rapid rise and fall

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Canadian politicians can learn from Truss’ rapid rise and fall

It’s not about intellectual outsmarting or witty one-liners, it is about keeping it real and earning your basic paycheque.

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