Beyond Trudeau’s charm offensive: a social movement guide to cooptation

Justin Trudeau is providing people in Canada with things to celebrate. For starters, he is temperamentally the anti-Harper. Trudeau was seen shaking hands with passersby in a Montreal metro station, took (gasp) unscripted questions from journalists, and announced the withdrawal of Canadian bombers from Iraq and Syria. He reiterated election promises, and there’s some decent stuff in there.

Likely to deliver real change?

It’s hard not to see these changes as a tremendous relief. And it’s perfectly understandable that a lot of people want to take a breath and celebrate the end of the Harper decade.

We’ll see a lot more stuff like this in the first few months of Trudeau as Prime Minister. The charm offensive will include a lot of positive changes. Some of them will be symbolic, some will have a real impact on peoples’ lives.

There are essentially two ways to respond to Trudeau’s charm offensive.

The first, we can call “give him a chance”. On this account, the role of Prime Minister is that of a leader who will work better if we give him some breathing room. Folks with this perspective are exhorting us to not be so critical, enjoy the fact that we got rid of Harper, and wait and see what Mr. Trudeau has in store.

The second response sees Trudeau’s charm offensive as a window of opportunity for an agenda that has objective measures. Measures like “are we addressing climate change adequately to stop ecological collapse?” or “is our society become more equal and democratic or less?” The underlying assumption is that achieving those things is a matter of a battle between competing social forces — roughly oil companies and banks vs. people who want a just and sustainable future. Or the ruling class vs. the working class. We can call this response “eyes on the prize”.