The waiting is the hardest part

Is Monday the day? Is this the week?

Who could have imagined a vainglorious, wildly unsuccessful pandemic election would set the stage for so much anger and unrest?

(Update: Our sources were indeed correct. Trudeau to resign as Liberal Leader Monday.)

“Every day you get one more yard
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part” (Tom Petty)

Depending on when this reaches you, you may already know what I know. If you’re out of the loop, which I encourage as a spiritual practice (it takes a few walks in the woods per week for this writer to wash off the politics), consider this a 2-alarm fire.

I’m being told Justin Trudeau announces he’s stepping aside tomorrow, and will look to prorogue to give the Liberals time to select a replacement (who may, yes—idiotically—be Mark Carney).

This two-week window after the New Year always made the most sense. The PM is back from staring at his navel, and from being yelled at, in British Columbia. The House doesn’t resume until Jan 27. Adjournment tabling, or a quick sprint over to Rideau Hall to avoid a vote of no-confidence, isn’t until the week before on Jan 22nd.

And your Official Opposition and their imagined “far-right” supporters just dropped an atom bomb in the form of a Jordan Peterson chat viewed by 50 MILLION and counting.

(For comparison’s sake, Trudeau’s recent ‘podcast tour’, which cost the government a million dollars, produced, on a few occasions, fewer listens than the preview episode of the Acceptable Views companion podcast.)

It is, indeed, over. Now, we haggle over the details.

“Look, we’re ready whenever he leaves. But it’s still speculation,” says one source, very close to the action. “I think every Liberal ‘source’ wants to be heard, and selfishly wants a little credit. It’s a high probability it’s this week, nonetheless.”

“The PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) is set for an all-hands meeting tomorrow,” says another; news backed up, evidently, by the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley.

From veteran CPC campaigner Jim Burnett:

“Pretty sure Trudeau will announce his resignation tomorrow but will hold on to his leadership as PM until a new leader is found. They will announce a leadership process over late spring. This buys them time to continue in power and in their mind ‘turn things around.’”

For all the Conservatives’ wizardry in the world of comms, the strengths of the Official Opposition leader, and the ability to quickly craft Pierre Poilievre and his shadow cabinet into finely-tuned weapons in the House, on the doors, on social media, and in airplane hangers in need of overflow rooms, 2015’s man being made to turn tale is a victory that, first and foremost, belongs to the Canadian public.

Unable to secure The Blackface Election in 2019 and stood up at the alter by a lousy, un-Conservative Erin O’Toole campaign in 2021, it would have been easy for jilted Canadians to stop their clocks, shrink from the world, and harden around that absence.

But this is not a world of “indolence and myth” (Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest), this is your home, your (failing) communities, the lack of jobs and houses for your children, and the chaos, flag burnings, terrorists, and the Third World rock fights and smash-ups in your streets.

In that refusal to lose, to settle for anything less than what you were once promised, comes a kind of advent: a time of profound discernment, and a gift that has helped convert vision into action.

You held the country-breakers and their braying, fire-eating mobs to two minorities, a massive about-face on broken immigration, and, soon, you get a supermajority to call your very own.

That’s not nothing. If anything, it’s miraculous.

The waiting is the hardest part — but it’s not long now.

Alexander Brown is a writer, communications director, and part-time politico. To support the best-selling Acceptable Views newsletter, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.