Justin time, again: Trudeau’s second term

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Ireland was once one of Europe's most religious countries with laws to match. But through a citizens Assembly, a series of referendums and a remarkable national reckoning, it's become surprisingly progressive, surprisingly fast. And every year, the Economist Intelligence Unit publishes its Democracy Index, ranking countries by how well they preserve democratic norms. The global picture this time reveals that democracy is at its lowest level since the index started. But first, Next week, Canada's Parliament will reconvene for its first long session since October's election. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party is still in control, but in a minority government with smaller parties. Back in 2015, after winning a thumping parliamentary majority, Mr. Trudeau declared that a new Liberal era had begun.

Have spoken. You want a government with a vision and an agenda for this country that is positive and ambitious and hopeful.

Four years later, he sounded much the.

Same, and they voted in favor of a progressive agenda and strong action on climate change.

But in October's election, his party won a million fewer votes and won no seats in the western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The victory speeches may have sounded similar, but in his second term, it seems Mr. Trudeau may not.

Justin Trudeau had struggled to get re elected in part because he had attempted to, I think, try to change the world. In fact, at one point, his Twitter bio read changing the world a little bit every day.

John Iverson has reported on Mr. Trudeau's fortunes for the Economist.

And I think that the electorate really wanted him. Rather than to change the world, they wanted an agenda that was a little bit less planetary in scope. It was made worse by the fact that then his own blunders seemed to make him look like a hypocrite, particularly repeatedly wearing blackface when he was younger. This emerged during the election as a bit of a bombshell.

This is something that I deeply, deeply regret darkening Your face, regardless of the context or the circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface.

And then mainly the scandal which was reverberating in early 2019 when he demoted his Justice Minister after she refused to help a Quebec based construction company settle a criminal case and avoid prosecution over allegations of bribery in Libya.

This has been a tough few weeks. Canadians expect and deserve to have faith in their institutions and the people who act within them.

Well, first of all, the Justice Minister was a woman. Secondly, she was an indigenous woman. And these were the issues that he'd been pontificating on. He was particularly tarnished in the eyes of progressive voters.

Well, that's not to say, though, that he hadn't taken on some big causes at home.

No. I think that the Liberal government was very proud of its record. In the first four years. There were some pretty transformative changes, the legalisation of pot being one of them. A very generous child benefit allowance that lifted many people out of poverty.

Today, nine out of 10 families have more money in their pockets for things like new skates or hockey camp. The CCB now helps more than 6 million children and their families and has helped lift hundreds of thousands of kids out of poverty since its inception in 2016.

They managed to enhance the Canada Pension plan. They established a national price on carbon and probably most crucially, for the Canadian economy. They renegotiated a new free trade agreement with the Trump administration that while it made some concessions, it did not give away the farm. It was a pretty good result for Canada.

What's striking about the election result, though, is how much the west of the country didn't seem to support him.

Yes. So Trudeau was locked out of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, no MPs, no representation, and a rising feeling that some of these attempts to change the world, particularly on climate change, were being done at the expense of the resource producing regions of the country. So there's clearly, in the second mandate, things that Trudeau needs to address and he has started trying to address them.

Address them in a change of tone or more concretely in policy.

Well, he came back from a Christmas vacation in Costa Rica. He had adopted a salt and pepper stubble, which was designed, I think, to make him look a little bit more seasoned. I think that was symbolic and deliberately symbolic because I think this is a new low key approach. I think that they felt that while they made some transformative changes in their last mandate, they didn't really get a lot of credit for that. As we saw in the election result, there were far too Many times that Trudeau was pictured championing the latest cause, the latest woke cause that his critics would claim, while not really talking about some of the things that he was actually doing.

And what do you think are the big issues in his inbox now that he has this thinner majority?

The government gave its speech from the throne just before Christmas. The main broad themes will continue to be support for the middle class. They showed themselves with that in a broad based tax cut that came before Christmas. The other major themes from the first term are gonna continue. Reconciliation with Indigenous communities, continued attempts at ensuring the health and safety of Canadians, things like the introduction of a national drug benefit plan. But the middle class has permeated just about everything they've done. They've even appointed a minister for the middle class. Now, the term was ridiculed and it's really a junior finance minister's role, but clearly there's a feeling that if they can push the average Canadian, increase their earnings, lift people below them out of poverty, that this is the winning formula and they should be concentrating on this rather than on some of the more identity politics issues which dominated the first term.

And so what will he be kind of working against as he tries to do this and keep all of these various constituencies happy?

The obvious one is this is now a minority Parliament. The Liberal government needs the support of at least one other of the major parties. The ndp, the Left of Centre ndp, the Bloc Quebecois, which is the separatist party. I don't think we could expect an election anytime soon. The NDP are a bit strapped for cash. They're not likely to want to force an election. The Bloc is quite happy as long as its issues concerning Quebec are addressed. The other constraintsobviously, the problems on the prairies with Saskatchewan and Alberta have to be addressed. The one other thing that comes to mind is that there are fiscal pressures. This is a government that has spent a lot of money in the first four years. In its first platform, it said the budget would be back in balance by 2019. In fact, this year's deficit is likely to be somewhere in the region of $26 billion Canadian. As Bill Morneau, the finance minister, said when he met with reporters after he gave a fiscal update just before Christmas. He said, nobody said it was going to be easy and it's not.

So all of this sort of taken together, I mean, how do you expect this second term to play out, both with the fiscal and political constraints? The prime minister now expected to be taken a little more seriously with his salt and pepper beard, how do you think this will come together all told?

I think it largely depends on who the Conservatives choose as their next leader. Andrew Scheer, the former leader, has been ousted and they're going to be in a leadership contest until late June. I mean, it remains to be seen whether Trudeau wants to go for another election. I think there are large question marks about that, whether he wants, if this is a minority that goes for more than two years, he may feel at that point that he's done enough and he's going to exit stage left. But let's assume that he stayed around. There are a number of options for the Conservatives. I think it depends which one the membership picks as to how Trudeau looks at the next election. It's not clear yet all of the potential candidates, but there is a female, Ronna Ambrose, who was the interim leader of the Conservatives before they chose their permanent leader. I think Mr. Trudeau would find it very hard to run against a woman leader. If, however, the Conservatives choose a leader who is a small C Conservative, then on social issues as the last leader, then that plays into Trudeau's hands. The membership base wants a leader who is perhaps skeptical of same sex marriage, who is pro life with these credentials. That's why Andrew Scheer lost the last election, partly his views on climate change as well. I think the Conservative Party has to have a much more enlightened view of who it's trying to appeal to. And if it does pick a leader who can win votes in the largest provinces of Quebec and Ontario, then Trudeau may be in trouble next time.

John, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Ireland used to be one of the most conservative religious countries in Europe.

With immense joy and with profound gratitude to the most holy Trinity that I set full today on Irish soil.

In 1979, a million people attended a mass celebrated by Pope John Paul on his visit to the country. But Ireland has changed a lot since then. Through a series of referendums. In 1996, divorce was legalized. In 2015, same sex civil marriage was allowed. That prompted a huge party in Dublin. And in 2018, abortion was legalized. Now, in a couple of weeks, the country is heading for an election against the backdrop of Brexit, with a new generation entering politics that's even more liberal. Running for re election is the country's Taoiseach, or Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who's the gay son of an Indian immigrant. His premiership would have been unthinkable only a generation ago. Social change usually happens slowly. So how in Ireland has it come so fast?

So I travelled across Ireland. I started in Dublin.

Emma Hogan is our deputy briefings editor.

And then my first stop was to Longford in central Ireland, where I spoke to an 83 year old grandmother called Agnes McKenna. What, even if you like a cup.

Of tea to wet your throat.

And her 27 year old granddaughter, Sheena Cahill. I spoke to them because they're a remarkable pair. Sheena is an activist. She works on LGBT rights.

I was canvassing hundreds of homes.

She was very involved in both the same sex marriage campaign and the abortion campaign.

Marriage equality passing and the sky not falling in proved that you could move forward with social change.

And what was striking about them is Sheena is 27 and comes from a different island to the one that Agnes grew up in.

Just memories. I can talk more about the past than the present because I understood the past. Not sure I totally understand the present. It's going too fast for me. I'm not able to.

Agnes grew up in Leitrim in western Ireland. She grew up in a house which had no electricity, no heating. Lived in Ireland that was run by the Catholic Church, pretty much schools.

They were in charge of all the schools. The priests ruled Ireland in them days, really more than the government did.

But Sheena came out to Agnes before she came out to her parents.

And I rang you, I think it might have been October or November that year. I said, granny, I won't be bringing home any lads from America. And then afterwards I kind of followed up and said that, you know, I, you know, I like girls, Granny. And you were very like, you were.

Totally fine with it.

Like, you didn't.

I accepted it, is that it was you I was interested in, not your sexuality.

And so I wanted to meet them to see this example of intergenerational change where two people who have basically seen Ireland change before them could have very different views on some things regarding religion, but could also have similar views on what they thought about same sex marriage and the abortion referendum.

The kind of social change that you're describing that these people have seen often goes so slow you don't even notice. Why do you suppose that it's gone so quickly in Ireland?

Well, in retrospect, it feels inevitable. I think one of the main factors was that the church, by virtue of being there when the constitution was written in the 1930s, they were so powerful and so all encompassing in Irish life.

They got handed and wrote our constitution.

They had too much power in the past.

So there's a sense in which I think that the power was so overweening that it was inevitable that people were going to react against it. But there were other factors as well. So to take the example again of Agnes, she moved abroad to London when she was 15.

I was my own boss.

I had my own little room. You could do what you want. You could go out, you know, go dancing, which I loved.

She saw a different world. And that's an experience that a lot of Irish people with a large Irish diaspora have experienced as well. It was also sped up by the fact that from the 1990s to the 2000s, there were a series of really quite dreadful scandals in the Irish church. Bishops who were very well known and beloved, being found to have had illegitimate children, the sexual abuse scandals, paedophile priests. And then from the late 1990s, there were investigations into the Magdalene laundries, where unmarried mothers were sent to work and often treated very cruelly, and the mother and baby homes, where unmarried mothers again would often have children and were often separated from these children. And there have been investigations that are ongoing into allegations that children, babies and young children were buried in unconsecrated ground in places such as Chum in West Island. There have been denials about this and there have been a backlash towards this as well. But it certainly seems to be the case that in several institutions, hundreds of children died, either through malnutrition or through other reasons, but that these really are. This shocked the Irish state, the idea that places that were meant to provide care did the opposite.

So was there a single turning point when that dynamic was reversed, where people started to make these realizations?

I think this happened over decades. But that one particular point came in 2012 with the death of an Indian dentist called Savita Halapponara. It was a wanted pregnancy. She died of sepsis after she was refused an abortion. The midwife reportedly said to her, we're a Catholic country, so because her fetus still had a heartbeat, it couldn't be aborted. That really shocked a lot of Irish people. What I think also helped this was that the government, led by Edna Kenney at the time, decided to set up a Constitutional convention to consider, to assess.

To examine matters that are deeply complex, hugely challenging and profoundly ethical.

It's pretty revolutionary. It's a form of a citizens assembly, where initially 66 randomly selected citizens sat for, I think, just under two years to discuss different topics that might be changed constitutionally. And this session included the question of same sex marriage. It really was transformational. And I spoke to a postman, Finbarr O' Brien, who took part in the convention, he's someone who was abused as a child by a layperson, has struggled in his life with that, had tried to commit suicide, had got psychiatric help and realized that he had equated homosexuality with paedophilia.

The biggest problem with people is ignorance. You know, they don't know enough because it's a thing that happened to me personally years ago. I was abused. And automatically from there on, any gay person I came across was. I categorized him as the same as the abuser, which meant that I didn't have enough knowledge, I didn't know. And I think there's an awful lot more people in the country that are on the same boat as I was. And I kept that up until I got. I got help and I got educated. And then I found out that the gay people, whether they're men or women or whatever, they're perfect people. There's nothing at all wrong with them, just the attitude that I took because I didn't know any different.

I think examples like that show to the public at large, who could watch the Constitutional Convention on a live stream how much attitudes had changed.

So over the course of this sort of grand shift in perceptions, has the church tried to reform or to change or to fight the change?

Look, the Catholic Church is still very powerful in Ireland. It's still an overwhelmingly Catholic country. About 3/4 of people still consider themselves to be Catholic. Most of the primary schools are Catholic. But what I was struck by was in many cases people are still Catholic and yet they're not necessarily going to Mass and they're still Catholic, and yet they are. They're defying some of the key teachings of the Catholic Church, such as over same sex marriage or abortion. In terms of what this means for the Catholic Church in the future, I think it will be a smaller presence in Ireland. In some instances, it might be more conservative. You still have a third of people in Ireland who voted against abortion and against same sex marriage. You can still see that in Ireland. There are some divisions there, but I don't see it changing anytime soon.

Emma, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

2019 was a tumultuous year for democracy in Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong and beyond. People made their voices heard in protests and governments got tougher on dissent in Russia, Iraq and Turkey. Every year, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research arm of the Economist Group, compiles all these data into a global picture of democracy.

2019 was a new low point for democracy around the world.

Joan hoey is the EIU's director for Europe and compiles the Democracy Index.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's annual democracy Index recorded its worst ever global score since we began producing the index in 2016. There were many negatives, but there were some bright spots. And for us, the main bright spot is that there was an upsurge of popular protest in many regions of the world, and that was a plus for democracy.

I mean, how do you even go about tackling such a big and woolly question of how's democracy doing?

Yeah, there's been reams and reams written about how you measure democracy and methodology and so forth. But our index is what I would call a wide measure of democracy. We look at countries across five categories. One is electoral process and pluralism. Another is the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. We think that it's very important to look at political participation and political culture because we think it's all very well to have in place the formal institutions and processes. But the real measure of a proper functioning democracy, really is the involvement of people.

So with all that in mind, then, which countries are best at democracy and which worse?

Okay, there's probably no surprises. Right at the top, we have Norway. The Scandinavian countries in general do quite well, and Europe does well. That's Western Europe, not Eastern Europe does very well. Right at the bottom. Usual suspects, North Korea. China's now very close to the bottom. Many of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle east, in the Commonwealth of Independent States, definitely the biggest mover was Thailand, which moved up the global rankings by 38 places. And that's mainly because finally, Thailand held elections several years, the coup d' etat that occurred. And those elections were held in a relatively free and fair manner. And there was pluralism, there was choice for voters and so on. So that was a big step up for Thailand.

The big headline result here, though, is that democracy has broadly declined. Is the lowest, in fact, that you've ever seen. Why do you suppose that is?

Yeah, it's a very big question, and I don't think there's a straightforward answer. And I think a lot of attention has been focused on economic drivers, particularly in the wake of the global economic and financial crash in 2009. Austerity, cost of living increases, unemployment, and so on. And usually protests and reactions come with a lag. And that's certainly what happened in the wake of that crisis. And there was an upsurge of protest around the world in 2014. I would say that it would be a mistake to think that's the kind of main underlying cause of this upsurge of protest. I think the drivers actually are really political. It's popular dissemination, satisfaction with the political status quo. And if you look at the deterioration in the category scores, you can see that very strong correlation.

Joan, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

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