Unsettled 2018 to chaos of 2019

No letup for Trudeau as difficult 2018 gives way to wild election year

OTTAWA — Fasten your seatbelts, Canada, 2019 is going to be a bumpy ride.

The past year has been a turbulent one on the Canadian political scene and the coming year is bound to get that much more tumultuous as politicians prepare for what both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer have predicted will be a nasty campaign.

Think of the first six months of 2019 as the semi-finals, with party leaders jostling for position, test-driving their messages and refining their trash talk at opposing teams. The finals will begin when Parliament breaks at the end of June, even though the writ won’t officially drop until Sept. 1, at the earliest, for the vote scheduled on Oct. 21.

Trudeau’s Liberals and Scheer’s Conservatives are the main competitors as they head into playoff season; the NDP, Greens and Maxime Bernier’s breakaway People’s Party are bit players, but potentially positioned as spoilers who will determine which of the two leading contenders walks off with the prize.

But if the past year is any measure, there will doubtless be numerous twists and turns.

For Trudeau, 2018 started with a disastrous trip to India that resulted in a slump in popularity from which he and the Liberals never seemed to fully recover.

Despite a relatively robust economy, the lowest jobless numbers in 40 years and managing to navigate roller-coaster negotiations to renew the North American Free Trade Agreement, Trudeau has been beset by events that have interrupted his narrative.

There was mercurial U.S. President Donald Trump slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum and calling Trudeau “weak” and “dishonest.”

There was the continuing tide of asylum seekers crossing into Canada at unofficial crossings.

And there was the court ruling that shut down work on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project the Liberals paid $4.5 billion to buy. The ruling knocked down one pillar of Trudeau’s signature promise to tackle climate change by balancing economic growth and the environment.

And it shook the other pillar — imposing a price on carbon, starting in April — at a time when some of Trudeau’s most reliable provincial Liberal allies on climate change were being replaced by fierce conservative opponents.

After enduring a summer diplomatic meltdown by Saudi Arabia over a Global Affairs tweet, Trudeau is now ending the year in a bitter dispute with China over Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the behest of the United States. China has detained Canadians in apparent retaliation.

For all that, pollster David Coletto says Trudeau retains considerable goodwill with voters as he heads into an election year. But an economic slump would undermine Trudeau’s contention his government has chosen the right path by running deficits to invest in things that spur economic growth.

“For me, the big theme is do the Liberals look like they’re in control of what’s happening?” says Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.

“I think their greatest weakness or liability is the sense that they’ve lost control over the budget, over the relationship with China, the relationship with Trump, questions around affordability ... You can imagine the narrative being developed by the Conservatives to say that this prime minister has just lost control, that he can’t manage the complex world we live in.”