Shawnee Love   •  
May 20, 2016

I am taking a break from my blog series on culture building to discuss the political frenzy surrounding Justin Trudeau’s behaviour in the house of commons earlier this week.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what happened:

A group of politicians were discussing, arguing, delaying, and politicking on the floor of the House of Commons.

Justin gets up from his seat, strides over, grabs an MP from the Conservative party by the elbow and pulls him out of the group. In doing so, he elbows another MP from the NDP in the chest. She must have felt it because she cried “ouch” although I too have yelped as an automatic response to having my toe stepped on or being bumped.

When I first heard about this “incident”, I was pretty surprised he would grab someone by the elbow as it is rare for any deliberate touching in these settings.  I wouldn’t advise a leader to grab someone by the arm and lead them away in any work environment, but if it happened, I wouldn’t pretend the whole world was falling either.  However, the elbowing of the other MP who happened to be a woman didn’t really register as an issue.  It was clearly not intended and that MP wasn’t hurt.  A quick ‘sorry’ (of the type that the rest of the world mocks us Canadians for doing) should have been enough.

The political maneuvering and manipulations happening right now are a waste of air time and our tax dollars, and they are taking our government away from doing the really important work we elected them for.

Justin is a leader of a country.  That means he is held to a higher standard than everyone else, and he must be better.  But it doesn’t mean he can’t be human.

When leaders make mistakes (and they will) they have to rebuild trust.  Rebuilding trust in the face of a mistake requires a  leader to:

• Apologize (which Trudeau did profusely), and
• Never do it again (which remains to be seen, but I for one think he deserves the chance).

For the glass house inhabitants, perhaps it is time to refocus attention on some real problems.