TRUDEAU HOLDS ON
Little change in Canada election as PM keeps power
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held onto power in Canada’s election on Monday, but his attempt to push his Liberal Party into the majority in the country’s Parliament came up short after an ugly COVID-focused campaign.
Trudeau had called for the snap election in August, hoping to leverage his government’s agile pandemic response to increase his party’s strength, which was reduced in a bruising election just two years ago. Instead, he found himself in a bumpy and tight race, as many Canadians wondered about the need for the early election, viewing it as a power grab.
Erin O’Toole, the Conservative leader, veered to the center during the campaign and pounded Trudeau over his decision to trigger the vote during a health crisis, calling it “vain, risky and selfish.” Meanwhile, angry right-wing protesters menaced the 49-year-old prime minister on the campaign trail. At one stop in London, Ontario, he was pelted with gravel.
Trudeau ultimately escaped with what he could call a conditional victory: The Liberals were projected to win 158 seats in Parliament as of Tuesday morning, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, capturing one more seat than in the 2019 election. The Conservatives were on track to win 119, two fewer.
“Most Canadians didn’t want this election,” Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal, told the Daily News as the dust settled Tuesday morning and a barely changed Parliament emerged. “This election could have been an email.”
Addressing the nation around 1:15 a.m. on Tuesday, Trudeau acknowledged the campaign’s chilly reception from Canadians.
“I hear you when you say that you just want to get back to things you love: Not worry about this pandemic or about an election,” Trudeau said in Montreal. “You just want to know that your members of Parliament of all stripes will have your back through this crisis and beyond.”
Still, he reveled in what he called a “clear mandate” to push the Great White North out of the COVID crisis and into “brighter days ahead.”
Despite the pothole-laden 36day campaign, Trudeau showed his political staying power, overcoming O’Toole’s promise of a positive, inclusive “big blue tent.” (The Conservative Party’s color is blue.)
The charming and telegenic Trudeau has seen his star diminished in his almost six years in power. He was scarred in 2019 by the explosive revelation that he wore blackface when he was younger and by claims he pressed his former attorney general to drop corruption charges against a construction company.
But with his win this week, he becomes the eighth Canadian leader ever to capture at least three straight election victories. His father, Pierre Trudeau, served four terms.
Trudeau could have waited until 2024 to run again, but he instead opted for the early election. He presented his party as well equipped to battle coronavirus: The country has a robust vaccination rate despite some conservative reluctance, and it handled the early days of the pandemic better than many of its allies.
Today, about three-quarters of Canadians have received at least one shot, according to COVID-19 Tracker Canada, an independent database.
But Lori Turnbull, a political science professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said Canadians are looking beyond pandemic management. “Voters are not going to just thank the government for doing a good job,” she told The News on Tuesday morning. “They’re looking forward.”
And the timing of the election turned off many in the electorate. One headline in The Globe and Mail, a Canadian broadsheet, grumbled about the “crummy, miserable, not very good election.”
Neither Trudeau nor O’Toole — who pushed his Conservative Party toward the center on guns and carbon taxes but spurned strict vaccine measures — found their political status greatly enhanced by the race.
O’Toole indicated he plans to continue to lead the Conservatives.
But Trudeau may be left to consider his political mortality.
“The shine is always going to come off the leader and the government,” Turnbull said of Trudeau, whose party had an absolute majority between 2015 and 2019. “He’s got to be at a point now where he’s thinking, ‘OK, in a couple of years, I need to pass the torch.’ ”