Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester B. Pearson as Liberal Party leader in 1968. Since then, Trudeau Prime Ministers have led the country for a combined twenty-one years. Justin, despite his scandals and corruption, has delivered on some progressive promises, such as legalising marijuana, taxing carbon and banning assault weapons. He has also gone back on plenty more, notably abandoning electoral reform.
That last decision has reinforced the strong political position of the Liberals under his leadership. In 2015, he took over, following the Obama-Ardern model of youthful, charismatic center-left leaders who inspire hope. The Liberals appeared destined to fall beneath the New Democrats, their main competition on the left. Instead, he led them to a landslide victory, and, although they shed enough MPs to have to rely on governing support from other parties, he pulled off an upset win in 2019 too, despite losing the popular vote.
Canada’s first-past-the-post system disadvantages minor parties through the widespread fear that voting for them will prove a "spoiler". For instance, many leftists vote for a Liberal, rather than a New Democrat they'd prefer, in order to avoid letting a Conservative candidate get the most votes. This makes elections mostly a battle between Liberals and Conservatives, as well as the Bloc Québécois in the province of Québec.
Trudeau has been able to take advantage of this dynamic in the past, and could do again. The far-right populist People’s Party have topped into a vein of voters against COVID safety measures, and they are now surging. They look unlikely to break through anywhere, wasting several percent of the right-wing vote. The Green Party has also floundered with internal division, weakening another potential opponent.
Accordingly, and based on opinion polls which showed majority support for the Liberals, Trudeau decided the time was right. Ever the consummate politician, he called an election. His intent was to convert his minority government into a majority, like Jacinda successfully pulled off here.
And he was promptly slammed for it.
A majority supported the Prime Minister tackling COVID and other issues. A majority did not understand why he would call an election in the middle of that pandemic and the Afghanistan disaster. What would be achieved by giving him the majority he craves?
He didn’t help his case with an incoherent, unprepared and flat-footed campaign. The Liberals have so far only looked to the past, trumpeting their achievements, without promising anything for the future. Minority governments in Canada are quite unstable, usually only lasting eighteen months to two years, but Trudeau’s had faced no signs of trouble yet.
On the other hand, the Conservatives hit the ground running with a 162-page manifesto. Nobody’s going to read all that, but it proves that they are ready to govern. They look like a government just waiting in the wings for Election Day. All of a sudden, Trudeau has gone from riding high to real trouble.
I tuned into the last election debate (the only one in English rather than French) to see what they had to say. As an outsider, I was overall surprised by the tone of the debate. Four of the five candidates (People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier was thankfully not invited) used rhetoric and took stances that seemed quite progressive for anywhere else in the West. A section of the debate was dedicated to indigineous issues, such as the cover-up of hundreds of indigineous children dying, and a lack of access to clean drinking water even after Trudeau pledged to deliver by March 2021. This stood in contrast to how little discussion those received in our own election last year. Here’s my thoughts on each of the candidates.
The pundits reckon new Green leader Annamie Paul did well. I disagree. She’s new to this, and she came off as a bit nervous and unpolished at first. This comes with the caveat that bias against Black women might play a part. I was certainly surprised to see someone like her up there, considering her identity automatically distinguishes her from the Western political default of “white guys in suits”. I’m sure her background was also key to her strong challenge to Yves-François Blanchet over racist policies, but, as much as Canada has surprised me, I still consider “educate yourself” to score miles higher with Twitter pundits than the general public.
Putting aside her early performance, she warmed up later into the night. This was otherwise an impressive performance for a leader in her first election, in terms of appearing the equal of candidates for Prime Minister and leaders of parties polling far higher. However, keep in mind this debate was from 9pm to 11pm, and audiences would be mostly tuning in for the first hour or half. That matters most, and she didn’t have it when it counted.
After googling the disharmony in her party, I wasn’t reassured by her presentation that there weren’t still problems, but nobody focused on attacking her over it, so she avoided most of the public learning about the infighting. Her pitch to change the broken culture in the capital of Ottawa reached many observers. I don’t see how that appeals specifically to the sort of voters who are drawn to a Green party. We’ll see who’s right about her.
Bloc leader Blanchet provides an interesting contrast in multiple ways. His English was unfamiliar and stumbling. I think an audience would be harsher on, for instance, a Black immigrant woman, if English were her second language, rather than this white man. He nevertheless blazed ahead with a frightening degree of confidence and condescension. His presentation was miles apart from the demure respectfulness of the other candidates.
Broadly speaking, I was shocked that pundits and audiences thought that this debate was chaotic, and quite impressed compared to the American and Aotearoan debates I’d seen. Narrowly, speaking I was more shocked by the audacity of this man: how he denied the existence of racism within his province and backchatted to those women on stage with him and moderating the debate. It was unsettling to me that Canadian voters, at least in Québec, don’t seem to punish this sort of rude and boorish behaviour.
His policy stances were similarly bold. The unusual thing about the Bloc is that, because they only run candidates in Québec, they don’t have to care about how much they offend or undermine voters in other regions. In the same breath, he defended laws that discriminate against Muslims and Sikhs, while also advocating for the shutdown of oil and gas. There was no easy way to pin him down as conservative, yet he could by no means be called a progressive.
For that same reason, this debate didn’t actually matter for him. The voters he is appealing to will have been tuning in to the French language debates. His only real failure was to clap back in the argument he lost in those debates, where Justin Trudeau pointed out that he is also a Québecer and Québécois ought to feel safe voting for him. Québec is where Canadian elections are won and lost, and only polling day will tell us if he has continued the growth of the Bloc.
Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats is a young, likeable, brown Sikh man. He speaks relatably to many of the crises and issues of the day and centered the need for bold change to address them in his debate rhetoric. The question is if he really has the plans to make that happen, and it was put to him again and again. That made it all the more confounding that he just wasn’t, though more of the blame lies with his party.
As Trudeau correctly pointed out, climate experts - who tend to adopt the stance that the more government action, the better - actually rank the Liberal plan best. Even the Conservative plan scores better than the more ambitious but less specific pledges of the New Democrats (and the Greens, too). The New Democrats need to do this work if they expect to convert Jagmeet's popularity into taking seats.
My estimation of his performance dipped considerably over the evening. At the start, I bought that his casual, affable manner of speaking preserved what was so good about him. He made the left-wing New Democrats seem safe to vote for amongst a wide range of voters. That includes the blue-collar workers he pitched much of his sell at.
By the end, he still hadn’t answered the second central question Trudeau put to him: if you’re on the left, why vote New Democrat and risk a Conservative government? So long as the New Democrats are bound to be a junior partner if the next government is in the minority, why not create a Liberal rather than a Conservative coalition?
Interestingly, the Conservatives look their most moderate in decades. This could have been a real opportunity for Jagmeet to genuinely threaten to work with them. That would maximise his leverage in post-election negotiations if no majority resulted. He could take a chance that the voters would approve of such a deal. Instead, all he had were glib lines and anecdotes. I want him to do well, and I think most voters do too. I don’t think they see how he can ensure that they’ll do well.
Even though the electoral system still makes this race a tossup, Justin Trudeau is losing voters, and he knew it. He was the most flailing and panicked candidate on stage, with an enormous gap between fourth place for presentation (Paul) and himself.
This would be an unimpressive display from any candidate, let alone the Prime Minister responsible for this election in the first place. The aggressiveness with which he tried to deflect attacks on him by countering back at his opponents embodies the issue: as one pundit observed, voters like candidate Trudeau a lot less than Prime Minister Trudeau.
And there were a lot of attacks. He is just such an easy target for all of the parties to try to break some voters off. He still doesn’t have a good answer to why he called the election. He needs to stave off the Conservatives and win back moderates. Instead, he kept on quarreling with his own left wing by arguing with Jagmeet Singh. His answers devolved to straight-up assertion when it came to denying his government was prosecuting indigineous children. If you want to get away with repeating “No I didn’t” as your only argument, you have to have spades more trust than your opponent, and nobody trusts a Trudeau.
He failed to repeat or reemphasise those attacks he had successfully landed in past debates. Notably, he had painted the Conservatives as flip-floppers on firearms who would repeal his assault weapons ban. His repeated insistence in this debate that Erin O’Toole couldn’t rein in his own caucus went nowhere. Trudeau failed, and if he loses his election, he will have nobody but himself to blame.
Who is Erin O’Toole? He’s the new leader of the Conservative Party, and, at this rate, he could well be the next Prime Minister of Canada. The fact that he began his introduction to the public by calling himself a “pro-choice ally to the LGBT community” speaks volumes. This man is on the sprint to the centre ground. He is using rhetoric and issues that traditionally belong to the left to woo supporters from the Liberals. So far, and especially with the ill fortunes of the People’s Party, there seems to be little risk of a revolt amongst his conservative base. After all, he’s still a veteran, a conservative, and frankly, I doubt anybody but a white guy could get away with this.
O’Toole largely managed to avoid negative attention. Most of the candidates have little to win from him - the Conservatives are weak in Québec, and almost nobody is tossing up between voting Green, New Democrat, and Conservative - so they focused on attacking Truduea. That’s a win for him hanging onto his momentum, and for him still seeming safe, moderate, and reasonable to the public.
He didn’t deal with those past negative encounters that have been more damaging, but there would always be a risk in bringing up those issues and reminding the voters of them, so no harm, no foul. All that is left to be seen is if anything can shake up the race enough to slow him. He is nearing the point where even FPTP can’t stop a Conservative majority.
I can’t claim enough knowledge to confidently predict the details of which way swing “ridings” (seats) are going to go. Right now, though, Trudeau seems likely to have done himself in. There’s just no reason to vote Liberal unless you’re an eternally loyal member of their center-left base or afraid of the Conservatives. That party has done a masterful job looking anything but scary, with plans to address the COVID and climate crises and promises to respect the rights of typically oppressed Canadians.
What seems more up in the air is how much the New Democrats will profit from this. The great irony of this election may be how electoral reform could have kept progressive government in charge in Canada. That government would take the form of an expansive Liberal-New Democrat coalition, similar to a Labour-Greens coalition here. Instead, many left-wing votes will yet again go wasted, compared to relatively few on the right.
Especially if Trudeau falls, he will offer a cautionary tale against the dangers of pure politics. The man lives and breathes for more and more power, suborning measures to help people and make a difference to that objective. Too many who may care about those issues have enabled him in the hopes that he’ll end up doing the right thing along the way. He has descended into corruption and turned on powerful women in his Cabinet. Now he may descend from 24 Sussex with little to show for it.
Our populist era has revealed how ironically unhelpful practiced inauthenticity is to politicians. Either way, a staid career politician will lead Canada after the election, but their ilk elsewhere ought to take notice that the playbook has changed. There are incentives for saying what you think, for standing up for what you believe in, and for doing the right thing. Let's hope they're paying attention.
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