In a normal country, the eldest son of a former prime minister who himself had risen to the pinnacle of power should, by rights, be the focus of cultish devotion.

But because Canada is not a normal country, and because Ottawa is not a normal town — as proof, I am a native Ottawan — the personality cult that surrounds our governing party doesn’t spend much time focusing on Trudeau the Younger.

Instead, we have the Cult of Butts.

Gerald Butts, Gerry to those in the know or who want to seem it, has been Justin Trudeau’s right hand man for as long as Trudeau has held the reins of the Liberal Party. Butts’ role first as a senior campaign aide then as the prime minister’s principal secretary made him the right hand to Trudeau.

His self-cultivated persona as both a shadowy figure, stealthily working his magic in the backrooms, and a punchy blowhard thumbing his days away on Twitter, made him something of a mythic figure. And now, after a rather brief time in the wilderness, he’s back.

Butts is fairly widely known as someone who doesn’t do interviews, which is true to a point. He doesn’t spend much time on the record, yes, but he does seem to spend a lot of time on the phone with various reporters, popping up here, there, and everywhere as a senior government mucky-muck.

And because Butts is in the ear of so many — or at least enough — journalists in Ottawa, it gives every story written about him and the government a background hum of his secret hand genius.

But look where that got the Liberals.

He is, remember, the prime minister’s former principal secretary. He resigned under a cloud over the SNC-Lavalin scandal where he played a central role in pressuring Jody Wilson-Raybould to give SNC a settlement which would allow the company to escape prosecution and instead pay a fine and say they were very, very sorry. (That prosecution is ongoing, and a judge ruled recently to allow the case to go to trial.)

Butts resigned, the story goes, so he would have the latitude to speak freely about his role in the scandal, and set the record straight. The odd thing about it was that the very next day, Trudeau held a press conference where he said essentially the same things Butts did, leaving me with the question: Why did the principle secretary resign, if you were just going to repeat what he said? Anyway.

There, he did an admirable job of giving the people looking to give him a pass a reason to give him a pass. He also let us know, quite clearly, he and the government did not really take the idea of Indigenous reconciliation seriously**.

And for a moment, let’s put aside whether the SNC thing was good or bad, and just look at how it was handled. The prime minister waffled on his response for weeks. Nothing at all happened, the story was false, well maybe the story wasn’t false, but Wilson-Raybould is still in cabinet so that’s fine, and on and on. Butts, the genius message guy couldn’t put forward a coherent message, and then he left.

But, let’s not be too harsh on the man. Some of his reputation is reasonably earned. He was a senior part of a campaign that took a third place party that seemed destined for destruction into the majority, er, powerhouse it is today. That’s not nothing.

But there’s an adage, that borders on cliché, in military history that generals are always trying to fight the last war. Think the Maginot Line — fortresses saved Verdun, so they’d save the whole of France*. Which did not work out so well.

Field Marshall Butts won the last war for Emperor Trudeau. But that was a different campaign. No longer are they the earnest upstarts facing an incumbent Canadians are weary of and ready to toss aside. Whatever genius once contained in Butts may no longer apply.

And there’s plenty of evidence to believe the secret sauce doesn’t work any more.

Once the public got tired of hearing the words “middle-class” droned at them every three sentences, the enthusiasm for the Trudeau government dropped away. These people are not the fresh, dynamic upstarts they sold themselves as four years ago. And four years of not so much governing than it was constant election messaging has further worn the public down.

So many of the promises were cynically cast aside —hi there, electoral reform — double talked around — refugees — or hilariously bungled—looking at you, Finance Minister Bill Morneau. People now have a clear idea of what this government is about.

Recently Butts tweeted how “campaigns matter,” and he’s right, they do. Pretty soon, we’re going to find out how skilled a campaigner the man behind the curtain really is.

***

* This is the central thesis to a trilogy of books by Alistair Horne — ‘The Fall of Paris’, ‘The Price of Glory’, and ‘To Lose a Battle’ — if you want to dive deeper than a breezy paragraph on one of the defining national rivalries of the previous 150 years.

** I wrote about this at the time, a column you can read here.

Photo Credit: CBC News

More from Robert Hiltz. @robert_hiltz

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