Trudeau, main rival trade attacks
Campaign grinds to conclusion
HAMILTON, Ontario, Oct 20, (RTRS): Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, facing the loss of his parliamentary majority in an election next week, traded attacks with his main rival on Saturday as a bad-tempered campaign entered its last few days.
Trudeau came to power in 2015 promising “sunny ways” and a new way of doing politics but saw his popularity drop earlier this year amid an ethics scandal. Images of him in blackface emerged last month, further hurting his Liberal Party ahead of the Oct 21 election.
The 47-year-old prime minister, his voice increasingly hoarse, said Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer would slash spending and rip up Liberal plans to fight climate change.
Polls show the Liberals and the Conservatives in a dead heat, with neither able to capture a majority of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. That would leave the party winning the most seats seeking support of smaller parties to govern.
“I know Canadians want a strong progressive government that would stop Conservative cuts,” Trudeau told a rally in a fire station in the Ontario city of Hamilton, west of Toronto.
In the absence of an overriding narrative, dirty tactics and awkward moments have characterized the campaign.
Another example of that was on display on Saturday when People’s Party of Canada (PPC) leader Maxime Bernier said his party was considering legal action against the Conservatives after the Globe and Mail newspaper reported that the latter had hired a consultant to “seek and destroy” the PPC party and try to get Bernier barred from televised leaders’ debates.
Bernier, a former Conservative cabinet minister, lost the Conservative leadership race to Scheer in 2017 and started his own right-leaning party. Lagging far behind in polls, the PPC could still split some of the Conservative vote.
“This is the kind of dirty politics that confuse Canadians’ faith in politics,” Bernier said at a press conference in Sainte-Marie, Quebec. “He (Scheer) is ready to steal the election with lies and manipulations.
“We have already filed a complaint with Elections Canada with our concerns about what the conservative party did. We are considering other (legal) avenues.”
Scheer, speaking in Toronto, repeatedly refused to answer questions about the report, saying only: “We don’t make comments on vendors that we may or may not have engaged with.”
Asked about the story, Trudeau said: “Conservatives have had to use the politics of fear and division and they just make stuff up.”
A Nanos Research poll for the Globe and Mail and CTV released on Saturday put the Liberals at 32.6% public support and the Conservatives at 30.3%. The left-leaning New Democrats, who compete for the same voters as the Liberals, were at 18.4%.
Trudeau sidestepped questions about his plans if he did not win a majority. Minority governments in Canada rarely last more than two and a half years.
Scheer, speaking in Toronto, said Trudeau would spend his first 100 days negotiating a coalition with the New Democrats that would impose tax hikes.
“Justin Trudeau has made it clear he will pay any price to stay in power, and he will use your money to do it,” he told reporters.
Coalition
There has only been one coalition in Canadian history, in 1917 during World War One.
Trudeau and Scheer made multiple trips to Ontario, which accounts for 108 of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. The Liberals hold 76 of those seats.
Trudeau was scheduled to make four stops in Ontario before flying later on Saturday to the western provinces of Manitoba and Alberta, where anger against the Liberals is rising over government environmental measures that critics complain will hobble the energy industry.
In the absence of an overriding narrative, dirty tactics and awkward moments characterized Canada’s official campaign, making it a bumpy ride into Monday’s federal election.
The fortunes of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s media bus illustrate how things for the six competing parties have gone. On Sept 11, the first day of the campaign, the bus collided with the wing of the Trudeau-branded airplane, putting it out of commission for weeks.
A couple of weeks later, the bus got stuck turning in to a British Columbia parking lot for a rally. Police blocked the road and journalists were asked to get out and push. It happened again in Montreal on Thursday.
“The pitfalls and mishaps have had more prominence because there has been no over-arching story,” said Paul Adams, a journalism professor at Carleton University.
Four years ago, Liberal leader Trudeau won a majority in parliament after embracing “change” as his campaign narrative after almost a decade of Conservative Party rule.
After a six-week campaign, Canadians vote on Oct 21 with polls showing a dead heat between the two frontrunners, Trudeau and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer.
The most explosive moment of the race was when Time magazine published a picture of Trudeau, who has been a champion of Canadian multiculturalism, in blackface in 2001. The next day, a blackface video of Trudeau from the early 1990s surfaced after it was leaked by the Conservatives to a broadcaster.
No angels themselves, Liberal officials had spent two years collecting video clips, documents and social media posts they could use against the Conservatives, two Liberal officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record due to the sensitivity of the information, said recently.
Trudeau this week called the campaign one of the “dirtiest, nastiest” in the country’s history.
Scheer had his own squirm-worthy moment when it was revealed he held American and well as Canadian citizenship. A few weeks later, former U.S. President Barack Obama turned his back on his fellow countryman and endorsed Trudeau.
At an October leaders’ debate, one man showed up dressed as Captain America holding a sign that read: “Make Andrew Canadian Again”.
Scheer also was found to have exaggerated his work as an insurance broker, which political satirist Rick Mercer quipped “is something you’d never put on your dating profile.” It turns out Scheer never held a license.
Trudeau, who loves to canoe, paddled around a lake in Ontario before promising to help lower-income families take a camping holiday. Previously, he promised to use revenue from an oil pipeline to plant 2 billion trees over the next decade.