Trudeau keeps pushing his electoral luck

Re-election should be shoo-in, but the PM is giving voters ample reason for disdain

In retrospect, Justin Trudeau’s 2015 victory was less about Hope and Hard Work, the Liberal Party’s unofficial and mildly nauseating campaign slogan. In fact, it was more like smarm and good luck. Trudeau and the Liberals secured a leftish, immigration-friendly and self-described feminist government barely a year before Donald Trump provided right wing populist movements the world over a playbook on how to win by railing against lefties, immigrants and feminists. The campaign of his opponent, Stephen Harper, was weighted with the fatigue inevitably associated with long-serving governments. On the left, the NDP’s decision to forgo deficit spending robbed the party of the chance to make huge, progressive spending promises during the campaign. Trudeau made them instead, with optimism and freakish cheer — and won the election as a result. Trudeau has since benefited from leadership travails within the NDP and the relative ineptitude of Andrew Scheer, who has yet to meet a populist idea he won’t cede to the wayward right of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. Trudeau’s wounds are self-inflicted, and they will only smart further in the coming months in Quebec, a province that is key to his government’s re-election next year. In 2015, Quebecers largely bought into Trudeau’s multicultural gambit. Yet three years later, at the provincial level, they paradoxically favoured François Legault’s fiscal reserve and rock-ribbed nationalism. This version of the Quebec voter — off-island, mostly white, frustrated by the worldly whims of certain politicians — is now a loud and powerful force. And Trudeau has given him (and her) ample reason for disdain in recent months. Just this week, Trudeau promised $50 million to a global children’s education charity by way of a tweet to comedian Trevor Noah. That the money was already earmarked as part of a larger pledge to support girls’ education worldwide was mostly lost. Instead, in a single 48-word missive, Trudeau managed to convey flippancy, smug self-satisfaction and an apparent disregard for fiscal discipline. He did this mere days after his government offered help worth nearly $600 million to this country’s news media outlets, without a similar regard for the plight of Alberta’s oilpatch, currently suffering the fallout from a massive slide in the price of its export. To top this feat, at the recent G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Trudeau insulted male construction workers. The size of the prime minister’s tin ears is flabbergasting. Already, certain key aspects of Trudeaupian politics are in trouble in Quebec. The decision by Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government to lower by 20 per cent the number of immigrants it allows into the province annually was born of a non-partisan sentiment. Like it or not, reducing Quebec’s immigration rates is a popular idea in this province. And the federal government, which must negotiate with the province to lower these rates, is firmly against such a decrease. By insisting on the reduction, Legault is making immigration a going concern in the coming federal election, which puts the Liberals in an awkward situation. If It allows such a reduction, the Liberal government betrays one of its key principles. Yet if it fights Legault and the CAQ, it pits itself against the general will of Quebecers, whose votes are crucial to a Liberal re-election. Trudeau’s tendency to stumble into self-parody — remember his costumed jaunt through India last February? — has only aggravated the situation. Should Trudeau and the Liberals win the next election — and it’s theirs to lose — it will be in part because of dumb luck once again. The NDP has neither direction nor a leader elected to the House of Commons. On the right, Scheer has yet to capitalize on the demonstrable antiTrudeau sentiment taking hold in many places across the country. Yet by gleefully playing to his own stereotype time and again, Trudeau is pushing his electoral luck, in Quebec and beyond.