Trudeau’s imminent bounce?
Justin Trudeau, the Toronto Star’s Bob Hepburn opined Saturday, is showing signs of “turning a corner and becoming the formidable campaign force the Liberals hoped he would be and that Conservatives and NDP strategists feared all along.”
Well, then. It’s curious Hepburn would have thought that enough to write it, and did not re-write it immediately after reading it. I can’t think of another independent political observer in the known universe who would agree with him, just now — including respondents to the most recent EKOS poll, released Friday, which has the Trudeau-led Grits plunging to just over 23.3 per cent in national public support, almost four points back of Stephen Harper’s Tories, and more than 10 behind Thomas Mulcair’s surging New Democrats.
A Nanos survey published the same day in the Globe contained similarly good news for Team Orange and grim tidings for the Liberals, with the NDP well ahead of the other two major parties — at 34 per cent compared to 27 and 26 per cent for the Grits and Conservatives, respectively — on the question of who is most trusted to help Canadian families. The evidence is increasingly plain that Mulcair is in the grip of a tailwind, and Trudeau the reverse.
Among the reasons Hepburn cites as evidence supporting his belief in Trudeau’s imminent rebound are several that read like further harbingers of doom. He’s highlighting the strength of his team? That suggests he needs all the help he can get. Sharp, critical ads to highlight his personal toughness? Ah, OK — except the team crafts the ad. Or there’s this gem: “Trudeau is adopting a lower public profile,” Hepburn writes. “This time-limited strategy allows him to focus more on policy preparation, debate rehearsals and campaign logistics and tactics without unduly burning himself out before the official campaign launches immediately after Labour Day.”
Wow. This is a man who carved out his early reputation as a winner by out-working and out-enduring his opponents, whether in nomination fights or in the boxing ring. He ran stairs in secret, training double-time for the charity boxing match against Patrick Brazeau that would make him a contender for national leadership in the popular imagination. His youth and energy set him apart from his opponents, both of whom are from an older generation. Now he’s a adopting a lower public profile, in high summer, months before the election, lest he tucker himself out. And this is deemed a good thing?
Nothing is settled, to state the obvious. Everything can turn on a word or a moment in a single televised debate. And Trudeau possesses something of considerable political value that neither of his opponents can boast, to the same degree, which is an ability to easily straddle the centre. His core strategy, which held until the wobbling last fall in the debate over the ISIL mission, was to cut left on social policy and right on economics and security. Should he move back to that this summer, make a few cogent, toughly worded speeches and beat down the media mob in a couple of decent, lengthy scrums, he may yet turn his fortunes around.
It’s also inevitable, as others have noted, that Mulcair’s new halo will soon earn him a beating at the hands of the Conservatives’ ad machine, not to mention the Liberals’. Being suddenly the golden boy is no boon when it occurs this early in the cycle, providing opponents time to counterattack. Also, there’s this: It has been assumed, because of Mulcair’s vaunted surgical skill in Question Period, that he will make mincemeat of Trudeau and even, to an extent, Harper, in the TV/Web debates. Maybe. But the only one of the three who has done this before, as leader of a major party in a national campaign, is Stephen Harper.
And that brings us back to this simple arithmetical dynamic which, beyond any tactic or strategy, sets the frame in October: Trudeau and Mulcair are still two and Harper is still one. Conservative support has slipped but is not in freefall and an NDP surge in seatrich Ontario, as I have suggested before, will help no one more than the Tories, unless it becomes an unstoppable, big wave.
Is such a thing likely? It’s still anybody’s guess.
Either way, Liberals cannot gild this lily, and their supporters would be better off not to try. They may conceivably wind up in a fight to hang on to what they now hold, which is 36 seats. Having the leader cut a lower profile while he bones up on his debating skills will not cut it. I would venture a guess that Trudeau either embraces his underdog status and scraps it out, mano a mano, or he loses, big.
Postscript: Last time I wrote that “there is no explicit rule, that I am aware of, that prevents the prime minister from appointing an MP to the Senate.” In fact, there is such a rule, in Section 39 of the BNA Act of 1867. My apologies for the oversight and thanks to readers who pointed it out.
Trudeau and Mulcair are still two and Harper is still one