Rejecting the Trudeaupian Dream
Last September, after the Liberals’ lacklustre performance over the summer, I wrote about whether PM Trudeau would stay or go. It concluded that "if Justin chooses to step down, don’t expect it to be next week. The polls will have to be worse than they are for him to leave the best job he will ever have. In the meantime, he’s going to stay, fight and drag his party further down the pit of unpopularity."
The by-election results in Toronto-St Paul's at the beginning of this week signal that Canada may have reached that critical juncture. The polls for Trudeau are now worse than they were in mid-September last year, and Justin has stayed and dragged the party further down the pit of unpopularity.
The pressing question is whether the polls and his unpopularity have hit rock bottom. I remain skeptical. There is still room for further decline, which means the anticipated moment of reckoning may not have yet arrived.
Still, the loss in Toronto-St Paul's is significant when one considers it as safe a Liberal seat as they came in Laurentia, and the effort and resources the party poured into the campaign. Party insider Leslie Church lost.
The gap was less than 600 votes; it was no landslide. However, the result represents a 24 percent swing. That is not nothing! It's significant because it opens the question about the vulnerability of all other "safe" ridings going into an election in over 12 months or less, no matter what Minister Mark Holland says.
The speculation machine is in overdrive, with pundits suggesting two main options for the Liberals. Essentially, they're saying that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government can either shift its policies or switch its leader to stay afloat.
A few ministers have expressed their loyalty with shaky bravado. They insist that the Prime Minister will remain in office until the next election. However, they do hint that adjustments are necessary. Although none have specified which policies might need adjustment, it is likely to be those that have proven most unpopular with voters, as indicated by several polls.
Considering the range of strategies available to the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) to maintain power, sticking with Trudeau and preserving the current suite of Liberal policies seems untenable. Business as usual is no longer an option.
That leaves 3 probable option scenarios. 1) Trudeau stays and changes policies, 2) Liberals get a new leader and keep the same policies, and 3) Liberals get a new leader and a whole new set of policies.
The first option was tried to some extent last summer after announcing that the party needed to change its communication strategies. They seem to have concluded that the leader and the policies were fine; communications were the obstacle: the party was either not communicating how good they are for Canadians to Canadians, or Canadians are too thick to understand how wonderful things are under their leader/government. Frankly, I thought that strategy was born out of some sycophant comment to Justin that all was well under his command.
Soon after, the Atlantic caucus pressed hard. They persuaded the PM that his Atlantic popularity was at stake and would reverse if the government suspended the carbon tax. They found a not-so-stealth way to do it, offering rebates to buy heat pumps. Everyone understood what it meant, however. It was a concession to one region of the country for the sake of votes that Trudeau did not offer to the rest. Liberals were willing to put the tax on hold to save seats.
More recently, the Liberals finally decided to put the Iranian Republican Guard on a terrorist list after resisting the move for seven years. However, the policy reversal did not produce the desired effect; the Liberals still lost Toronto-St Paul's. It makes you wonder what policies the government could change to produce better electoral results. We don't know, but what they have tried has not worked.
The second scenario would involve the Liberals choosing a new leader (Justin stepping down) but keeping their core policies on energy, taxation, "social justice," the environment, federal-provincial jurisdictional boundaries, size of government bureaucracy, spending and deficits, and their tolerance of Islamic intolerance for Jews and Israel. For instance, would Prime Minister Freeland repudiate Trudeau's environmental and fiscal policies? Not likely.
The third scenario involves changing leaders and policies, which would mean re-inventing the party under new command. It is not easy for a party to do an about-face and reposition its policies while in office.
It is true that the Trudeau LPC reinvented itself, veering hard to the left to the point where previous Liberals like John Manley, Paul Martin and Warren Kinsella no longer recognized it. But that was done over a couple of years, and the current lot does not have two years. They need, as the bureaucrats say, to pivot. They may not even have a year, and if they change too rapidly and radically, people may find them phonier and more disingenuous than they already are, losing their core support. So, while this is an option, it is not feasible.
Sometimes, a new leader will want to appear to be changing many policies to distance herself from the previous reign. But that rarely works when there is a deep-seated dislike for the previous leader, the vision and the party's agenda. Ask Kim Campbell or John Turner. Danielle Smith recently pulled it off in Alberta, however, under circumstances that may more or less resemble Mark Carney’s!
But what if the premise is faulty? What if the Liberals' path to remain in power is unlikely, not just due to their policies and leader, but because Canadians reject more than these aspects?
Canadians are tired of the phoney Trudeapian world view. Many are sorry they even embraced it at some point. I hear much of this from people who bought the Trudeaupian vision at first. So there is more at stake here than the rejection of the big government-driven green, woke, intersectional, and fiscally lost vision. People are viscerally against much more than the PM's agenda and his repugnant desire to control truth, facts, and reality.
People are rejecting Trudeau's fantasy grand vision articulated through announcements, press releases, and a stream of never-ending lofty declarations that never found a tangible presence in the real world. But more than rejecting that imaginary Canada, Canadians want an honest, humble, limited, accountable, and competent government.
The Liberal-NDP coalition government have consistently mishandled nearly every federal portfolio. Their mismanagement has driven them to encroach on provincial jurisdictions, seeking new areas to engage with or disrupt, all while trying to escape the incessant backdrop of crises.
None of the four scenarios in which Justin and the LPC remain in office offers what Canadians want. Canadian voters have figured out, after nine years, that no amount of promises dressed in red can provide these intangible but important features of the Canada they've known.
What Canadians are rejecting is the Trudeaupian version of Canada and their incompetent ways. Canadians fell for the initial charm and pretension of a sunny disposition; they fell for an appearance of honesty and openness; they fell for illusion of inclusion and promises of uniting them. But the Liberal Party delivered the opposite of what Trudeaupia painted in words, and Canadians who realised they were duped are now angry. They are angry at the source and instrument of their deception.
And that is what Canadians, even at the heart of Laurentia, are rejecting; not just the leader, his policies and his party. The Trudeaupia dream
turned to nightmares. Even half the people in Toronto know it.