Trudeau is acting as though he already won
GROUP HUGS ALL AROUND AMID BELIEF MAJORITY STILL IN SIGHT
Justin Trudeau’s election campaign ended in Victoria on Sunday evening, the same place it started 40 days earlier.
Trudeau played it safe on the last day, avoiding questions from the travelling media in favour of photo opportunities and a group hug for candidates at big rallies in Vancouver and Victoria.
The reason is clear — the Liberals think they are on course to win the most seats in the 2019 general election and don’t want to risk a last-minute derailment. Majority? That’s another matter.
The long march to the finishing line started in Niagara Falls, Ont., on Saturday morning, before arriving at a fire training facility in the riding of Hamilton Mountain, solid NDP territory for the past four elections.
Trudeau was at his most fervent. “Good job he’s in a firehall, the man’s on fire,” joked one of his senior advisers. It certainly looked at one point as if he might spontaneously combust, in the manner of Spinal Tap’s drummers, such was his enthusiasm for his own candidacy.
Trudeau was particularly ardent in his efforts to point out that the Conservative Party is intent on making cuts and that this election is about a choice between moving forward or returning to the dark ages of the Harper era — so much so that of the 21 questions posed by reporters, 19 contained one or both of those obsessions in the answer.
The Liberals still believe there is a path to majority — and they may be right. CBC’s poll tracker gives Trudeau only a 10 per cent chance of landing the 170 seats he covets. The most recent seat projections suggest he will be closer to 133.
But all forecasts should be treated with caution — Donald Trump was five to one against on election day.
The parties have a combination of metrics to make their own predictions that are more accurate than public polls with their high margins of error, not least the feedback provided by hundreds of thousands of interactions on doorsteps across the country.
The suggestion from inside the Liberal camp is that they are doing better than the poll tracker projection suggests. A more realistic figure going into the weekend would be closer to 150 seats.
That still has the Liberals losing ground in all parts of the country but, crucially, holding relatively firm in Ontario. The gamble is that by sending Trudeau into ridings the Liberals don’t currently hold, that the party can find the 20 or so additional seats it needs to reach majority territory. Since leaving Ottawa on Oct. 11, the Liberal tour has visited 39 ridings — 12 held by the party and 27 by Bloc, Conservative or NDP MPs. My completely unscientific estimate, based on little more than watching the candidates, the crowd size and the riding history is that the Liberals could add six and save six, leaving them short of majority.
But we have seen late shifts in voter sentiment before.
The crowds have started to swell — at a boisterous rally in Milton, Ont., in Winnipeg Centre and, most surprisingly, in Calgary Skyview at 11 p.m. on a chilly Saturday night.
In Milton, former Olympian Adam van Koeverden is looking to unseat Conservative deputy leader, Lisa Raitt. It’s a tall order, given Raitt’s personal popularity but the rally on Saturday afternoon suggested he has found an audience. He was introduced by Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies, which may prove a mixed blessing given his electoral track record (Robertson endorsed Tom Mulcair and the NDP last time). But it revved up the crowd who cheered noisily through Trudeau’s stump speech. He ended with the line he said he learned from his father when facing choppy water while canoeing: “Sing louder and paddle harder.” The crowd left satisfied. “Good event, good event,” said one man. They don’t always say that.
Next was Winnipeg, where the organizers had to open up room partitions to accommodate a much larger than expected crowd. Another Trudeau line that has become a staple is the story of the Conservative-voting small business owner who handed over his vote to his 13-year-old daughter because of climate change.
“This election is not about the next four years, it’s about the next 40 years,” said Trudeau.
Both the Winnipeg and Calgary rallies reminded Liberal staff who were on the victorious 2015 campaign of the surge of support in the closing days of that election.
Around 1,500 Liberal supporters lined up in the cold for a nighttime rally in Calgary Skyview in the city’s northeast, heckled constantly by a small band of protesters carrying signs bearing Trudeau’s likeness and the headlines such as: “Wanted for Treason.”
“Trudeau should be in jail,” shouted one man, through a bullhorn.
By the time the crowd was inside, the banquet room, in a riding where minorities are the majority, was bursting through its capacity. The largely South Asian audience has apparently forgiven and forgotten the blackface controversy.
Trudeau was emboldened enough to throw rocks at Alberta premier Jason Kenney in his back yard. “I know there are thousands of progressive Albertans who do not think that Jason Kenney speaks for them,” he said.
There may be thousands but probably not enough to hold more than one or two of the four seats the party holds in this province.
The prospects for those candidates were not helped when Trudeau’s star Montreal candidate, Steve Guilbeault, said that the environmental impact legislation that passed through the House of Commons last spring would likely block any new pipelines in this country. Trudeau batted away the suggestion that the admission could spark political and civil unrest in Alberta, which is already at boiling point. He touted his government’s record on employment insurance and on the Trans Mountain pipeline as evidence that Albertans understand his government is serious about a better future for the province. “All Canadians will always be there to help Alberta,” he said.
That has echoes of the sentiments in his victory speech from four years ago: “I will be prime minister of all Canadians,” he said then. It hasn’t always felt like that, particularly in Western Canada.
But the stars are aligning elsewhere for the Liberals. The rise of the Bloc in Quebec, however, may frustrate hopes of another majority.
Trudeau took aim at Yves-François Blanchet at a whistlestop visit to Cloverdale, B.C., when he referred to a speech the Bloc leader made on Saturday. Blanchet’s priority is not fighting climate change or Conservative cuts but is rather the separation of Quebec. “That’s not what Canadians want, or what Quebecers want,” Trudeau said.
Despite the rise of the Bloc, there is a quiet confidence inside the campaign that their strength in Ontario will see them returned as the party with the most seats, whatever the public polls are saying.