READY OR NOT: TRUDEAU SWEEP EVIDENT FROM START
Liberal leader rose above the relentless negative messaging thrown at him
For as long as he has been in politics, people have been hailing Justin Trudeau as a future prime minister, and for almost as long the praise has sounded excessive.
As recently as August, when the campaign began, the rookie Liberal leader was seen as a bit player in a battle shaping up between NDP leader Tom Mulcair and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
But as the votes were counted Monday, it was Trudeau who emerged victorious after a campaign that should have finally silenced his doubters.
At 9: 40 p. m., as the CBC declared the Liberals elected with at least a minority government, cheers and chants of “Trudeau” erupted in the ballroom of Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel where supporters gathered to watch the results.
“We conquer,” said an ecstatic Abdur Rabb, a retired university professor who has supported the Liberals since Trudeau’s father, Pierre, was prime minister. “I see the Trudeau mania that his father had,” he added.
At press time, the Liberals were elected and leading in 190 of the country’s 338 ridings. The Conservatives were second, elected or leading in 103 and the NDP third, elected or leading in 35.
The tide began in Atlantic Canada, where polls closed first and the Liberals were on the verge of a sweep — elected or leading in all 32 ridings. In 2011, they won 12 of the region’s seats. For Trudeau and the Liberals, it has been a steep climb since election night 2011, when Michael Ignatieff led the party to a worst- ever 34 seats. As the NDP vaulted into the official opposition, people wondered whether Canada’s so- called “natural governing party” would survive.
Elected party leader two years ago, Trudeau erased those existential questions Monday night.
Both the Conservatives and NDP thought they could score points by belittling Trudeau, who at 43 is by far the youngest of the leaders and has the thinnest resumé.
The Conservatives had been running “just not ready” ads targeting Trudeau as a lightweight with nice hair in the months before the election call.
As the campaign began, Harper made a point of referring to his Liberal adversary as Justin, as if to say, how could this kid be prime minister?
Mulcair piled on, alluding to Trudeau’s acknowledged pot smoking after Trudeau called NDP child care promises “puffs of smoke” during one debate. “You know a lot about that, don’t you, Justin?” Mulcair said.
Before the first leaders’ debate, Tory spokesman Kory Teneycke said Trudeau would exceed expectations “if he comes on stage with his pants on.”
The Liberals ran a shrewd campaign, outflanking the NDP on the left with promises of deficit spending on infrastructure to boost the economy and targeting middle class voters with promises of a tax cut to be paid for through a tax hike on the wealthy.
The star appeal that landed Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire, on the cover of Quebec glamour magazines before their 2005 wedding continued unabated, with people at campaign stops clamouring for selfies with the Liberal leader.
And the Liberals caught a break when NDP support in Quebec tumbled after the Conservatives and Bloc hammered Mulcair over his support of a court ruling allowing the face- covering niqab to be worn at citizenship ceremonies. The Liberals shared the NDP position on the niqab, but once the NDP’s Quebec base began eroding, voters in the rest of Canada who wanted to get rid of Harper swung to the Liberals.
In Quebec, where the Trudeau name has long been seen as a handicap among francophone nationalists, opinion polls suggest Trudeau has gone some way to breaking the curse. A poll conducted Oct. 13- 16 for Léger Marketing found that the Liberals had jumped to 27 per cent support among francophones Quebecers, tied for first with the Bloc.
Trudeau was, literally, to 24 Sussex born, but when he decided to run for office in 2007, he took the hard route back to his childhood home. Unlike his father, who parachuted into one of Canada’s safest Liberal ridings when he entered politics in 1965, Justin Trudeau fought a hotly contested nomination battle to represent the Liberals in Montreal’s Papineau riding. He then went on to defeat the Bloc Québécois incumbent in the 2008 general election.
“The fact is, to be entirely honest, there are a lot of people who like me for my last name and a lot of people who hate me for my last name,” he told the National Post in 2008. “My challenge is to get them to know me for me.”
In 1968, Pierre Trudeau famously proved his mettle when he refused to leave the reviewing stand at the St- JeanBaptiste parade in Montreal as protesters hurled rocks and bottles. In 2015, the brickbats are virtual.
But in batting aside the relentless negative messaging thrown at him, Trudeau showed he inherited his father’s backbone.
There are a lot of people who like me for my last name and a lot of people who hate me for my last name.