Trudeau is a social media savant, the
Toronto writer Jesse Brown wrote in the Guardian last year, and he has used this to position himself as a sunny antidote to the turbulent news spilling out from other parts of the world. “Trudeau is the political equivalent of a YouTube puppy video,” he wrote. “Each week, Trudeau feeds the news cycle a new sharable moment, and our Facebook feeds are overwhelmed with shots of the adorable young statesman cuddling pandas and hugging refugees and getting accidentally photographed in the wild with his top off, twice.”
The result is a media frenzy that has at times overshadowed the crucial questions being asking about his government, such as
how they can claim to fight climate change while throwing their support behind two pipelines in Canada and Keystone XL or why
they signed off on a C$15bn deal to sell weaponised military vehicles to Saudi Arabia despite critics who worry the vehicles will be used by the House of Saud against its own citizens. Others wonder whether Trudeau’s self-described feminism will result in tangible change for the
families of the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women or those who left behind in a country where the
cost of childcare and the gender pay gap rank among the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).