Looking at both sides of Justin Trudeau’s election clouds
Please, dear reader, permit your scribe to start new year by joining the mob of political prognosticators in the usual year-end crystal balling. The main fixation this time around? That would be the upcoming federal election, the second fixed one under new rules Stephen Harper’s Conservative government established in 2007 - although Harper did end up calling an election the next year.
Assuming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sticks to the plan, as he says he will, Canadians will go to the polls Monday, Oct. 21. That much we know. What remains to be seen is whether Trudeau the Younger will end up being humbled with a minority government or become a one-term wonder and join the growing list of Canadian political leaders who fickle voters bounced abruptly from office after a single stint.
There’s been a torrent of analysis in recent weeks attempting to explain why Trudeau and the Liberals find themselves vulnerable in the polls less than four years after the giddy love-in that lifted the Grits from third place to a thumping majority with seats in every province, including several in the perennial Liberal wasteland of Alberta.
Dark clouds now obscure Trudeau’s sunny ways, though it’s probably in the prime minister’s optimistic nature, Joni Mitchell-style, to look at clouds like “ice cream castles in the air.” He and his government, though, are learning clouds also “rain and snow on everyone” as they manage the unexpected challenges all pretenders to power must face.
Who knew Donald Trump would (could?) become president of the United States? Who knew Ontario voters would trade in their beat-up Liberal jalopy for a souped-up, carbon-guzzling Ford?
Who knew a Federal Court decision halting the twinning of an existing oil pipeline would stir such passions, darkly reminiscent of the days when Alberta cursed (and worse) Trudeau the Elder’s National Energy Policy, which, irony of ironies, was a response to sky-rocketing foreign oil prices?
Who knew several provincial premiers would turn a proven tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - the “carbon tax” - into a political weapon?
Trudeau’s woes are aplenty indeed, but, looking again at both sides now, he can take comfort from other, more positive, political circumstances. Top of the list would be Trudeau and the Liberals’ continued popularity in Quebec, according to the polls.
(In the three Quebec federal by-elections since the 2015 general election, weirdly enough, Liberals and Conservatives swapped seats in the Saguenay-lac St. Jean region. The other was Stephane Dion’s unassailably Liberal seat in Montreal.)
There is little to suggest Trudeau’s main leadership opponents pose a serious threat to the 40 Liberal seats in the province. The NDP, which still has 16 residual MPS from the 2011 orange wave, is but a Code Red blip in the polls, and are saddled with a leader, who, shall we say, does not have the same folksy charm as the late Jack Layton, or the understated appeal of Tom Mulcair.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer faces the challenge of growing the party’s current 12 seats into a larger rump that could potentially propel him to power. Being a career politician, first elected as an MP at age 25, Scheer would be aware that only once in modern history has a party leader won a majority government with fewer than 10 seats in Quebec. That would be Scheer’s predecessor (and some say surlier doppelganger) Stephen Harper, who pulled off the trick in 2011, based on a massive Conservative wave in Ontario.
Scheer, though, is in the uncomfortable position of trying to woo Quebecers while ginning up his base in the west against the Liberals. Premier Francois Legault’s musings about Quebec’s aversion to Alberta’s “dirty oil,” while factually incorrect (Quebec gets about half of the oil it processes and consumes from Alberta), won’t help the Conservative leader in Quebec when he curses Trudeau’s handling of the Trans-mountain pipeline affair.
That said, the Conservatives are welladvanced in recruiting some quality candidates in Quebec, dipping into the CAQ pool of talent.
And so we’re off on a very long campaign trail, which Trudeau surely hopes won’t leave him musing “so many things I could have done, but clouds got in my way.”