What happens to "F--- Trudeau" now?

On the end of a perfectly symbiotic relationship

I wish I had a picture of it, but we’re always driving by too quickly, and there’s nowhere to stop safely, so a description will have to do:

It’s on Highway 11, in Ontario’s Muskoka area. An old abandoned gas station, closed and boarded up, waiting for years now for expropriation by the government when it gets around to adding lanes on the highway. Tall weeds growing between cracks in the concrete, random construction junk piled to the side. And graffiti, often changing but ever present.

This was the first place I saw a “Fuck Trudeau” out in the wild. It was nice and big and black, with no other message. I think this was the fall before the freedom convoy, because after that the flags seemed to proliferate, but I could be mistaken.

Anyway, the next time we drove past, someone had tactfully spray-painted over it. But the following trip, it was back. And on and off it went for literally years. Eventually though, sometime before last summer, after making a final halfhearted “X” over it that left the text clearly visible, whoever was either enforcing political decorum or defending Canada’s Prime Minister…just gave up.

And yesterday, so did the man himself. But not before “Fuck Trudeau” had turned into a nice little line of business for anyone wanting to make some money from the country’s angriest people.

I wonder if, in coming years, these flags and signs will be our country’s equivalent of America’s old “I like Ike” buttons, or more recently the iconic Obama HOPE posters. If so, it’s a shame that profanity be our most recognizable political trademark, but at least it will deal another blow to the “Polite Canadians” myth.

But I’m more interested in where that anger goes from here—because it won’t vanish. It can’t. Certainly not when Trudeau exits the scene, nor even when a Conservative PM is sworn in, likely later this year. The anger has been here all along, Trudeau was just the perfect vessel to give it form.

Like Batman needs the Joker, these people need a personality to attack, not just a party or an issue. And it worked so well because right up until the end, Justin Trudeau needed them, too—a faceless mob of crude hate onto which he could project whatever best suited him politically.

Every time Trudeau was in political danger. Every time the polls took another decline, he would return to them to cast himself as the decent alternative, and his opponent as the would-be leader of these rude imbeciles. Not in so many words of course—except for the times when it was in pretty much those words—but in the waning years of his time as leader, his go-to fallback was to allude to the ugliness that might be unleashed on our parliament should he lose his job.

Meanwhile, those folks flying the Fuck Trudeau signs? They’ve made an entire political personality out of hating one man, specifically. (And Chrystia Freeland, too, I guess.) And soon he’ll be gone.

I’m not saying that means these folks will now dig into policy issues deeply and shift politics back towards the civil exchange of grand ideas or anything. But I am curious to see what happens to the Hating Trudeau Industrial Complex. It’s a cottage industry fuelled entirely on ‘look at this dipshit drama professor maybe he’s gay lol’ and I don’t know how that translates to whoever comes next.

Love him or hate him, Justin Trudeau was extremely lovable or hatable depending on where you stood. The next Liberal leader is not likely to be much of either. How well do you think the “Fuck Carney” Or “Fuck Erskine-Smith” flags will sell?

I don’t know that they’ll move the same number of rifles, for instance:

If I was someone selling those flags on Etsy, I’d be pulling hard for Freeland is all I’m saying. She might not have been a drama teacher, but she is an accomplished professional woman in politics…and that’s probably be good enough to move some units.

I guess we’ll see.