Well, that didn’t take long.
The Liberal government was sworn in a little month ago, and already its leader, Justin Trudeau, found himself in hot water last week over “Nannygate” as it was dubbed.
In the past, many of Trudeau’s mistakes came from speaking of the cuff, whether it was saying that budgets would balance themselves, cracking jokes about “trying to whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are,” or his 2010 comments about Albertans controlling Canada’s socio-democratic agenda.
However, in the election campaign, the party’s campaign team ran a smart, steady and savvy effort, and kept their leader on point with the middle class message, which seemed to resonate with voters as the Liberals swept to a win.
That message was undermined last week when it came out that Trudeau has two nannies, paid for by taxpayers. On the face of it, this seems like a non-issue, given that the Prime Minister has always had paid staff, including a chef and housekeepers. What smacks of hypocrisy to middle class voters is that Trudeau had said during the election that the wealthy don’t need child benefits, with a resulting expectation that a wealthy politician should be able to cover his own childcare expenses. While hiring a nanny might be perfectly reasonable expense, Trudeau hired two, with the optics progressively looking worse.
Given that 60 per cent of the popular vote went to parties beside the Liberals in the past election, given how deeply mistrustful the west remains of him and his government, Trudeau will have to listen closely to his advisors who will be out there surveying the political winds as they did so carefully and so well in the election. Nannygate is a fairly sad excuse for a scandal, but it is easy to expect he will have far more serious issues on his plate than Nannygate in the near future. First up, figuring out what to do about the fact that federal government coffers are bare, without taking into account the Liberals’ planned-for deficit spending.
In the meantime, he and his wife might just want to pay for their second nanny, if they feel it is necessary, out of their own pockets, if only to hold on to that post-election honeymoon glow for a little while longer yet.
