Justin Trudeau has never been very fond of the “old” Liberal party — “old” generally being defined as people who were Liberals before Trudeau became leader.

Is he paying a price now for that bias against the party’s history?

Trudeau, who spent his childhood at 24 Sussex Dr., is probably one of the few people in Canada who can legitimately claim to have been ‘born’ a Liberal. Yet he has demonstrated, over and over again, that he wasn’t all that into the party as it existed under his father and subsequent leaders.

During his run for the leadership in 2012-13, when his party had plummeted to third place in the Commons, Trudeau was always telling his audiences that Liberals were the authors of their own falling fortunes.

“Over the past years we lost touch,” Trudeau told an audience in Oakville in early 2013, in remarks pretty typical of the time. “We disconnected people who had always believed in us and trusted us. We took them for granted. We turned inwards and it looked more like arguing over our own positions, our own party than actually fighting for the future of the country.”

He said that the party had lost votes and ridings to Conservatives because “Liberals were too focused on ourselves and we were taking for granted the kind of a traditional base that we’d always had.”

Not all Liberals agreed with this diagnosis of where the party had gone wrong, but Trudeau’s anti-legacy position prevailed. When I was interviewing him during the leadership campaign, I was struck by how he saw himself as different from his predecessors — from his own dad, but also from Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

Chrétien, Trudeau told me, was too caught up “the game focus of politics,” while Martin’s leadership, in Trudeau’s view, seemed to be rooted in fulfilling a family destiny. (Martin’s own father ran against Pierre Trudeau for the party leadership in the 1960s.)

Justin Trudeau’s very first speech as Liberal leader vowed to close the book on the party’s fractious history, too. “I don’t care if you thought my father was great or arrogant,” Trudeau said in his April, 2013 victory speech. “It doesn’t matter to me whether you were a Chrétien Liberal or a Martin Liberal … The era of hyphenated Liberals ends right here, right now, tonight.”

Those who had been listening to him closely weren’t all that surprised when he excommunicated Liberal senators from caucus not long after taking power. It was a bold (some said brutal) demonstration that this Trudeau didn’t need the people who’d been around in the Liberal party’s past.

It’s not unusual now to see former Liberal MPs or staffers speaking out against the Trudeau government on various policy decisions — especially on the tax reform controversies of the past few months. It’s not unusual now to see former Liberal MPs or staffers speaking out against the Trudeau government on various policy decisions — especially on the tax reform controversies of the past few months.

In lots of ways, Trudeau was right — the old Liberal party did need a shakeup. The party has always been fractious, and not all that discreet about keeping its internal grumbling to itself.

And in that respect, all this effort to be ‘new’ is simply creating another set of divisions among Liberals — maybe even some new hyphens, too. Call them “pre-Trudeau Liberals.” They’re also becoming a little more vocal in pointing out the Trudeau government’s missteps — particularly the mounting troubles surrounding Finance Minister Bill Morneau.

“So Morneau will be in Montreal today & not in the House? Come on, folks. Other Ministers have faced QP in times of trouble. Rite of passage,” Penny Collenette wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning, slamming the finance minister for staying away from the House.

Yes, that’s Penny Collenette — former appointments director in Chrétien’s Prime Minister’s Office, wife of former minister David Collenette. You don’t get much more Liberal than the Collenettes.

It’s not unusual, either, to see former Liberal MPs or staffers speaking out against the Trudeau government on various policy decisions too — especially on the tax reform controversies of the past few months.

There’s something definitely symbolic, if not instructive, in the fact that the Trudeau government was warned about looming outrage over taxing employee benefits — and that the warning came from Karl Littler of the Retail Council of Canada.

Littler was a major player in Martin’s Liberal party, working for him at Finance and then organizing for Martin’s takeover of the party from Chrétien in 2002-03. Littler had been saying for some time — including in testimony to the Finance committee — that the Trudeau government would run into a revolt if it tried to tax employee benefits such as staff discounts on merchandise.

It wasn’t until that warning reached the media that the Trudeau government reacted. Perhaps they should have listened to someone who knew his way around Ottawa — and tax and finance?

I’ve been asking seasoned people around Ottawa — not just Liberals — how they explain the current problems the Trudeau government is facing.

Many blame simple inexperience — an inability among rookie staffers and politicians to spot potential controversies on the horizon. The new government, they argue, lacks veterans who can tell the bureaucracy that it’s giving the ministers politically unpalatable ideas — like taxing private corporations.

It can’t be an accident, some old Ottawa hands say, that many major gaffes have fallen in the domain of ministers new to politics — Morneau, Maryam Monsef, Bardish Chagger and Mélanie Joly. But Chrystia Freeland is new to politics too, and she seems to be shining in her job at Foreign Affairs.

It’s entirely possible that the past few stormy weeks have revised Trudeau’s bias against the party as it existed before him. He may even recognize that ‘new and young’ is not always better than ‘old and experienced’ — especially now that Conservatives and New Democrats have leaders newer and younger than Trudeau.

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