A look at Erin O’toole, Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau.
Election call bit of a gamble for Liberals
FEAR OF A CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT MOTIVATES LIBERAL VOTERS AND SCARES NDP VOTERS INTO PROPPING UP LIBERAL CANDIDATES. EVEN WITH THAT BOOST, TRUDEAU BARELY SQUEAKED BACK INTO OFFICE. — JOSEPH BREAN
There is a theory, recently expounded by Reuters Ottawa correspondent David Ljunggren, that the weakness of Justin Trudeau’s political opponents might actually work against him.
Trudeau won his initial majority in 2015 partly because of his own charisma, but also largely because of animus against Stephen Harper at the end of his long time in government.
Without that motivating factor, and with a consistent wide lead in the polls over the Conservative leader Erin O’toole, the theory is that some waffling voters will see a Liberal government as inevitable, and thus vote their conscience, or their protest, or their gut, to the benefit of smaller parties, especially the NDP and Bloc Québécois.
There are worse problems to have.
In the last election campaign, in 2019, Liberal defeat seemed likely before the vote. Fear of a Conservative government motivates Liberal voters and scares NDP voters into propping up Liberal candidates. Even with that boost, Trudeau barely squeaked back into office
This time things look better for Trudeau, and not only because of weak opposition. Issues are aligning in a way that gives a strategic rationale to calling this election now.
Even if Canadians might balk, and candidates might worry about doorstep campaigning in such an unusual moment, Trudeau sees a chance to reclaim his majority.
The economy is recovering, even if it is on the back of massive debt. The military is no longer helping mitigate the disaster in long-term care homes.
A shaky start to the vaccine scramble, which threatened to see Canada at the back of the various production queues and unable to produce its own, has turned around such that Canada is now a leader in vaccination
The pandemic has inspired rally-round-the-flag emotions, helped lately by Olympic successes, and even if that spirit may be waning, it is waning because of optimism, reopening, and lower COVID numbers.
For Trudeau, terrifying case studies in climate change are serving as a sort of real world validation of his government’s approach, from wildfires in Turkey and Greece and catastrophic flooding in Germany to the devastating western heat wave and the total destruction by wildfire of Lytton, B.C.
All of this should help Liberal fortunes even if there is a fourth wave driven by the new delta variant of the novel coronavirus. But Trudeau has a habit of being his own worst enemy, of bringing himself down with his dramatic tendency to overstatement and exaggerated emoting, and allowing ugly revelations to cast shadow on his sunny side.
With a track record like his, who knows what weird revelations are in store this time around? There is always something, whether it is petty like the fact he engaged in the kooky practice of fire cupping, or revelatory, inflammatory and racist like his habit of dressing up in blackface.
This is a prime minister whose government is suing the Speaker of the House of Commons to stop him seeking documents from the Public Health Agency of Canada, which MPS have demanded, to better understand the controversial removal of two Chinese scientists from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
On Indigenous affairs, now at the very top of the political agenda, Trudeau’s government is racking up a list of broken promises on things like clean water, and his Crown-indigenous relations minister is under fire for running a toxic office and insulting the Indigenous former justice minister for suggesting it is wrong to call an election right after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked children’s graves.
His government bungled the issue of sexual harassment in the military, having known for years of allegations against former chief of defence staff Jonathan Vance but done nothing, despite having pledged to follow all the recommendations in the 2015 report of former Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps on “endemic” sexual misconduct in the military.
More than five years after her report, Deschamps told a Parliamentary committee this year that it seemed to her nothing had changed.
In a Global News interview, Trudeau said he is not even angry no one told him about the Vance allegations when his government learned of them in 2018, which simultaneously exonerated himself and minimized the scandal. For someone who apologizes as much as he does — for his own actions, his government’s, his country’s — he never actually seems very contrite.
His personal approval is deflated, and his strategic hope leans heavily on the view that he has weak competition.
The Angus Reid Institute recently released a poll showing Canadians “aren’t
exactly enamoured with their choices for Prime Minister.” It showed 37 per cent hold a favourable view of Trudeau, and 30 per cent think he would make a good or excellent prime minister in another government.
A majority hold an unfavourable view of him, 39 per cent “very unfavourable.”
But the same is more or less true for O’toole. So if Trudeau wins, it will not be with an outpouring of unanimous support. It will be because of the intricacies of Canada’s electoral system, and the failures of his opponents.
In the last election, the Liberal Party’s victory was curious because its candidates took nearly half the seats with less than a third of the popular vote, with fewer votes even than for the second place Conservative Party.
For Liberals, this outcome speaks to the efficiency of their vote, which seems spread more widely and evenly than the more clustered Conservative vote.
So the attention is squarely on Trudeau. This is not unusual. Normally, this is when he does best. Before he got into politics, Trudeau described his charisma as both a gift and a burden. He used to wear it lightly, indulging more than most men his age in costumes and novelty socks. All that has soured.
In his 2014 autobiography Common Ground, Trudeau wrote about struggling to find his place at high school and pursuing “a passion for nerdy showmanship, sometimes bringing in juggling balls, a magic kit, or even my unicycle to put on shows for my friends.”
“At that time, I thought this was all pretty cool,” he wrote. “In retrospect, not so much.”
The danger for Trudeau in this election gamble is that Canadian voters feel the same about him.