Succession Planning: Justin's Excellent Chinese Adventure

These are sad days. After this weekend we won’t have Roman Roy to kick around any longer. In case your Sunday nights have been spent in quiet contemplation the past few years you’ll know that Roy (played with Quisling-like glee by Kieran Culkin) is the obsequious youngest child of communications titan  Logan Roy in the binge-worthy HBO series Succession.

When last we saw this quivering mass of sarcasm and sexual confusion Roman was trying to deliver a eulogy beside his dead father’s casket. It did not go well. No matter. After this Sunday, he’ll be living in rerun heaven. That we could only say the same for another, similar privileged dramatic persona, Justin Trudeau. 

To those with keen memories the comparison between the blubbering, inconsolable Roman Roy and Canada’s current PM Justin Trudeau is inescapable. Skippy, too, was delegated to eulogize his real father, Pierre in 2000. The result was a lachrymose cascade to rival the Lachine Rapids. Still in his Lord Fautleroy phase, Justin was seen by onlookers as the doting eldest son, a man too sensitive for this life. Little did we know that the performance at Notre Dame Cathedral that day was in fact an audition for higher office.

While Roman Roy’s breakdown seems to have scuttled his hopes of grasping the brass ring in the family business Waystar, Trudeau’s bathetic performance cemented him in the Liberal party as a man they could sell to the gormless hordes of voters in the key 416/613/514 hotbeds. 

Soon he was spreading his lugubrious charm on global fronts, touting his sleeves-rolled-up vision while herding “billions” of disobedient children like Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni or these hapless boobs.

And so “Roman” Trudeau has worked this highwire act through every sort of catastrophe since 2015. The PM may have done enough to sink many careers. Remember the Aga Khan? Bollywood? Blackface? SNC Lavalin? WE Charity? How he has escaped cancellation when Culkin’s character is headed to the Crave TV boneyard is one of the mysteries of the age. 

This week past has rendered another episode that not even the skilled writers of Succession would dare pull off. Having somehow missed the fact that the Chinese government has been actively stirring up trouble in Canada’s elections— elections in which he has personally eked out victory— Trudeau decided to calm Canadians by producing a report on the extent to which his pals in Beijing have been playing for him. 

But here— screen writers take note— is the master stroke. The man in the funny socks decided that the ideal rapporteur for the job of reassuring the nation of his purity was old family friend, onetime board apparatchik in the Trudeau Foundation whose children are reported to have gone to university in China, and governor-general who’ll do what he’s told, David Johnston. Talk about deus ex machina! 

Why the octogenarian Johnston accepted this poisoned chalice is anyone’s guess— writers would call it implausible, unethical for a China hand to be arbitrating this. But accept he did. And Tuesday he disgorged his findings which say, in effect, a public inquiry might unearth too many state secrets. So let’s not go there. Trust me.

Hinting at the utter dysfunction of the PM’s office, the petrified bureaucracy beneath Justin and the epic incuriosity of Trudeau’s cabinet chums, Johnston admitted that the PM’s claims of being ignorant of warnings from CSIS about this problem dating back years might actually have merit.

A fig leaf! Yes, a fig leaf that the ethically bereft PM grasped with both hands, saying in effect that it’s a wonder he can even get the RCMP to do a musical ride into the Trucker Convoy.  But to sit atop a chain of command this moribund? Canada is lucky he’s there to hold it all together. 

Even Johnston’s many friends in the Family Compact were befuddled. Which was the greater lapse? The former McGill U. President accepting to work as Trudeau’s get-out-of-jail-free card or the slap-dash scholarship of the piece? Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole— the man defeated by Trudeau in 2020— wrote that Johnston only interviewed him on this Sino Scandal after he’d sent the opus off for translation. 

We’d say that, this time, Trudeau has exceeded even the plausibility of a Succession script. His scolding by an irate Meloni, followed by this Chinese codswallop must surely mean the end of his character on the long-running PMO show. How can he continue to erode confidence in government— especially his own government— with this carnival of chaos?

Being a betting type we’d say Succession is not coming back after Sunday. But we think the show runners for Trudeau’s long-running show still have at least one remaining season left for more Justin antics. Unless the Chinese say no, of course.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx