Trudeau weathers the storm

Fortunes shifting as campaign enters final week

‘This is John Ivison, reporting from the Liberal campaign bus, in the Quebec riding of La Prairie. I can exclusively reveal that the media left the hotel in Montreal at 8.15 a.m. and are scheduled to make it to bed at around 3 a.m. in Vancouver.”

I know what’s happening in the little bubble of the campaign tour, gender-balanced and rapid-tested.

As for the campaign itself ... er, not so much. It is a fascinating perch from which to observe snapshots of history in the making. But it is less useful for making pronouncements on its grand sweep.

All of that is to suggest caveat emptor for what follows, which may be completely specious. The only comfort for my employers, who are paying my way is that, with a week of the campaign to go, nobody knows how it will play out.

Here’s what I’ve seen on the Liberal tour since we left Ottawa after the English language debate on Thursday.

We spent Friday and early Saturday in Ontario. There was an urgency about Justin Trudeau’s appeal to the progressive voters he needs to line up in the Liberal column. He said that the enemy of progressive politics is cynicism and that the NDP, “for self-serving reasons”, has been misleading Canadians by saying there is no difference between a Conservative and Liberal government, as long as they hold the balance of power.

This is a campaign with the slogan “forward for everyone” — Trudeau called it “the most important election since 1945” to deal with what comes next. Yet nothing much has stuck in the past month (with the exception of gun control) and he’s been forced to pivot to a message that the Liberals’ time in office has produced results for progressives. “Setting a price on pollution, against the objections of Conservative premiers all the way to the Supreme Court, is not nothing,” he said Saturday in Mississauga.

The mood in the Liberal camp on Friday was giddy with fatalism and gallow’s humour. The tour was swinging through Liberal-held ridings in the GTA in a pattern of ever-decreasing circles that did not suggest the Holy Grail of all political campaigns — the Big Mo (momentum) — is building.

Worse news followed, with the release of an excerpt from Jody Wilson-raybould’s memoir, which portrayed Trudeau as a petulant leader who turns on women who don’t let him have his own way. Trudeau is probably right that the SNC affair is already baked into the polling numbers — its issues were aired extensively before the last election and the public gave him the benefit of the doubt. But it didn’t help lighten the mood for the Liberals.

Then good news for the Grits — at the Saturday morning event, the first tracking poll since the English debate landed, giving the Liberals a clear lead. It was supported by two other polls that also indicated that voters had taken a longer look at Erin O’toole and did not like what they saw. The Nanos poll suggested three points of Conservative support had flipped directly to the Liberals.

It was as if dark clouds had lifted. The tour moved to Quebec, and at an orchard in the Bloc Québécois riding of St. Jean, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, a sunny day saw the return of sunny ways. Trudeau was embraced by a non-partisan crowd of Quebecers, in apparent defiance of the province’s premier, François Legault, who said last week an Erin O’toole Conservative government would be better for Quebec.

Mélanie Joly, the tourism minister, was at the next event in another Bloc-held south shore riding, Montarville. Trudeau has been careful not to upset Legault but Joly was unequivocal. “For my part, I come from a generation of women who fought for the right to vote and, during the Quiet Revolution, for the right to think. We don’t like to be told by anybody how to behave in this important election,” she said.

Just as Trudeau is appealing for progressives to desert the New Democrats to ensure the Liberals win in English Canada, he is using the same tactic with the Bloc in Quebec.

At a news conference with his back to the St. Lawrence in the Bloc riding of La Prairie on Sunday morning, he barely mentioned Yvesfrançois Blanchet, reserving his heavy fire for O’toole, who, in his words, is advocating a return to Stephen Harper’s emissions targets, an end to the ban on assault weapons used in the Dawson College shooting in Montreal and ripping up the child care agreement that has already been signed with the provincial government.

There are early signs that this message is sinking in. Trudeau seems to have picked up some Liberal-conservative switchers but there probably aren’t many more of those. The real prize is progressive voters in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, where Trudeau was heading next.

The NDP vote, which has seemed so solid for the past month, is starting to dip below 20 per cent and Jagmeet Singh’s support as the preferred prime minister has slid for three consecutive days in the Nanos poll.

The NDP will not be helped by the release of their platform costing that says the party will spend $214 billion over the next five years on policies like universal pharmacare, dental care and long-term care, partly offset by $166 billion in new revenue from wealthy individuals and profitable corporations. The problem, as Jean Chrétien once said, is that nothing is more nervous

HE IS USING HIS INCREDIBLE ABILITY TO CONNECT WITH CROWDS TO HIS ADVANTAGE.

than one million dollars: “It moves very fast and it doesn’t speak any language,” he said. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, acknowledged as much in his cost estimates for the NDP platform, in which he said there remains considerable uncertainty over the behavioural response of individuals and corporations who might consider the tax measures punitive.

Trudeau tried to exploit the abiding suspicion among progressives that the New Democrats are peddling a persistent and unrealistic myth.

“The NDP is making choices and I don’t think they stand up to closer scrutiny,” he said on Sunday.

Nobody knows how this week will turn out; how the hurricane of spin and counter-spin might shape opinions.

But, just as in 2019, the Liberal leader enters the final stretch having weathered everything that has been thrown at him. He is using his incredible ability to connect with crowds to his advantage.

O’toole’s exposure in the debates does not seem to have worked for him and he does not have as big a pool of potential voters in which to fish as other leaders.

Take all of these observations for what they are — educated guesswork.

But there seems to have been a sudden shift in the fortunes of a leader who appears to have been given the opportunity to build the Big Mo in the final days.