ONE OF THESE 3 MEN WILL BE OUR NEW PM
Major party leaders profiled
OTTAWA — Justin Trudeau has got to be hoping the adage “like father, like son” applies to election campaigns.
His electoral path thus far has been a carbon copy of that forged by his late father, Pierre, some 50 years ago and Liberals are hoping the pattern will hold now as Trudeau seeks a third mandate.
Father and son both rode a wave of giddy Trudeaumania to secure a strong majority in their first elections as Liberal leader, in 1968 and 2015 respectively.
Once in office, both inevitably fell short of unrealistic expectations and accumulated baggage that further took the bloom off the rose. Disappointed Canadians reduced both their governments to minority status in their second electoral outings, in 1972 and 2019.
Trudeau Sr. stormed back with a comfortable majority in his third election in 1974 — a feat his son hopes to emulate on Sept. 20.
It remains to be seen whether Justin Trudeau can accomplish that feat or even hang on to a minority. But historian John English says the unanticipated international crisis seemed to give him a “second wind” — just as it did for his father.
Trudeau Sr. was seen as having competently managed a global economic crisis sparked by skyrocketing oil prices and the United States fully abandoning the gold standard, says English, a former Liberal MP and biographer of Pierre Trudeau.
Similarly, Justin Trudeau’s popularity, which nosedived in the aftermath of the SNC-Lavalin affair in 2019, rebounded as he steered the country through the COVID19 pandemic.
“Trudeau has gone through the crisis and maybe he doesn't get an A-plus but he doesn't get a D or a C,” English says.
At the outset of the campaign, he looked like an effective leader “in enough people’s eyes” that re-election, be it with a minority or a majority, seemed likely, he adds.
But unlike his father, who plunged into the 1974 campaign after his minority government was defeated in the House of Commons, Trudeau pulled the plug on his own government just as a fourth wave of COVID-19 was picking up steam.
And that seems to have generated a backlash that has cost Trudeau the goodwill built up during the pandemic.
Heading into the campaign, pollster David Coletto says Trudeau was in a “much stronger position” than in 2019.
The proportion of Canadians who viewed him favourably was higher, the government's approval rating was higher and almost half of Canadians thought the country was headed in the right direction, Coletto said.
The opening weeks of the campaign have demonstrated that those who hate Trudeau, do so with an intensity Liberal MPs quietly say has surprised them on the doorsteps.
Foul-mouthed protesters have dogged Trudeau’s footsteps, screaming obscenities and accusing him of treason and other crimes.
Trudeau himself has said he’s never seen that kind of intensity of anger, not even when he was travelling decades ago with his polarizing father in Western Canada.
In 2015, Justin Trudeau was the fresh, young, hip face of Canadian politics. Today, at 49, he’s an old man among national political leaders.
The burden of governing combined with self-inflicted wounds — being found twice to have breached ethics rules, for instance, or the revelation during the 2019 campaign that he’d donned blackface several times in earlier years — have taken their toll.
Trudeau, who campaigned on “sunny ways” in 2015, is no longer viewed as someone who will do politics differently, says Coletto. While he’s still largely perceived as being progressive, there’s a sense his government doesn't always act on its purported progressive values.
Trudeau himself reflected on that during an appearance at Ryerson University's Democracy Forum in June.
“I’ll be honest, a progressive Liberal party like ours has a hard time going against the progressive idealist parties that can say, ‘No, we should just change capitalism. Yes, everyone will sign up for that. We’d make it more fair. Yes, we should stop having an army. Yes, we should just shut down the oilsands tomorrow or yes, we should just fix reconciliation in a weekend,’” he mused.
“It’s easy to say those things, much harder to put in the effort of doing them.’”
But if Trudeau has lost the allure of being the trendy, fresh face in politics, he has, says English, gained the advantage of experience.
“He has matured, he’s learned a lot about politics.”
And, unlike his notoriously aloof father, English says he actually seems to thrive on campaigning and meeting people.
There again, however, calling an election in the midst of a pandemic is coming back to haunt Trudeau, limiting crowd sizes, impeding his ability to connect personally with voters and bringing out furious antivaccination protesters.