Of course, getting into statistics about the exact percentage of promises Trudeau kept is distracting because of the promises Trudeau broke. These were the Liberal Party’s signature issues last election. Trudeau promised electoral reform and junked the idea as soon as it was met with resistance. He promised serious progress on indigenous issues and yet indigenous people are in a grave crisis. He promised a new way of doing politics, where transparency and accountability were paramount, yet was found to have broken ethics laws twice by Parliament’s conflict-of-interest and ethics commissioner. He shut down multiple inquiries and investigations into his office, specifically related to the SNC-Lavalin affair, where he and a few other officials pressured Canada’s attorney general in an attempt to circumvent the prosecution of a well-connected company on corruption charges. Liberals will rue the day such unethical behavior was simply rationalized away for the sake of power, when similar abuses are committed by another political party in the future. The blunt truth is that Canadian democracy has suffered under Trudeau.

Holding Trudeau up as a progressive paragon, Marche then lays down the pragmatist’s verdict: “Canadian progressives, like progressives all over the world, must decide whether they care more about the pursuit of social and cultural change, through the eradication of racist and sexist imagery, or the pursuit of transformative policies.” Notice the false dichotomy presented here as inevitability. Framing the progressive dilemma as a choice between “style” (wokeness) and “substance” (policy) is too simplistic. An officeholder’s style—in my opinion, their character, judgment, reasons for seeking power, and the story they tell and persuade you to believe in—is a perfectly legitimate area for investigation and critique. And if anyone benefited from and exploited the culture of the “woke,” it was Trudeau himself.

Voters were drawn to Trudeau in the first place because of his style as well as his substance. It is a mark of deep lament that Trudeau bears the distinction of getting so many young people excited about politics for the first time and then disappointing them within a single term. “I wasn’t cynical before Trudeau,” a Palestinian Canadian friend remarked to me last month. He was resigned, not even angry. It is a sentiment that could be echoed by many people in the vital suburbs outside Toronto where the upcoming election will be decided.

Marche’s treatment of brownface is superficial at best. First, he moves the goalposts by arguing that how racist Trudeau’s brownface episode was is “subject to debate.” Marche cites Sunny Khurana, the Sikh man who appears next to a grinning, blacked-up Trudeau in the photos, who says he did not find the brownface appearance racist. This was a point that many in Canada’s media made. I suspect Marche knew that this was a glib defense, and one that amplified a single, unrepresentative minority above a multitude who were genuinely hurt and shocked by the photos. Unbeknownst to most liberal whites, there is a vibrant “brown uncle” tradition of excusing and looking away from racism, either out of ignorance or trepidation. To this day, my father has admitted only once that he endured racism in Canada. Silence is a weapon of the shamed, and excusing the racism of a wealthy, flamboyant, powerful son of privilege does not lessen the damage or hurt.