The good, bad and ugly for Justin Trudeau
With exactly six months to go before the federal election, Justin Trudeau is facing a rising chorus of complaints about his leadership of the Liberal party.
Importantly, many of the complaints are coming from within the party itself, especially among longtime Liberals who fear the party’s chances of winning the Oct. 19 election are slipping away.
Their concerns are fuelled by the party’s decline in recent polls, by Trudeau’s tendency for flippant and ill-considered remarks, by his failure to unveil a detailed campaign platform and by nasty fights over local riding nominations.
Even top Trudeau organizers admit privately that mistakes have been made.
Indeed, a close look at Trudeau’s record since he became Liberal leader two years ago reveals some good, bad and ugly moves and decisions.
This is especially true in Ontario, where the Liberals won only 11 seats in the 2011 election, and the Toronto area in particular, where the Liberals hope to add to their 2011 result of just seven seats.
On the good side, Trudeau has sparked renewed interest in the party at the grassroots level. Party membership now totals about 200,000 in the province, including 14,000 in one Brampton area riding where 4,000 members attended the candidate nomination meeting.
Just last weekend, more than 1,000 volunteers took part in a “day of action,” knocking on doors across the province and making more than 12,000 phone calls to current and potential members.
And unlike in 2011 when former leader Michael Ignatieff had trouble recruiting top-flight candidates, under Trudeau a wave of new, well-qualified candidates have come forward to run in ridings around Ontario.
Significantly, almost half of the 90 candidates nominated to date are women, from a range of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
This is a dramatic turnaround from the 2011 election where some ridings had barely a few dozen members and quality candidates were in short supply.
On the bad side, the controversies over candidate nominations has created a sense that the Liberals remain today as divided internally as in the past.
The Trudeau team badly handled the decision to let Eve Adams, the Mississauga-area MP who jumped in February to the Liberals from the Conservatives, seek the party nomination in Eglinton-Lawrence. The move unleashed a furious backlash from Liberals in the riding, including Liberal MPP Mike Colle, who calls the decision “the dumbest” he’s seen in politics.
Adams reportedly chose the riding herself, but top Trudeau organizers now concede they should have insisted Adams seek a seat elsewhere.
As well, Trudeau badly misrepresented his pledge of “open” nominations. While insisting anyone — or almost anyone — can seek a nomination, Trudeau never made it clear that he or his team would be actively backing “preferred” candidates in many ridings, some of whom he had personally recruited.
In fact, the party vets every potential entrant and has “red lit,” or rejected, a number of them.
On the ugly side, Trudeau had to contend with an internal battle for the heart and soul of the party between the “old guard” and the new, youthful Trudeau team.
Veteran Liberals have been pushed to the sidelines, their phone calls and emails often not returned for days, their advice unwanted and their participation in nomination contests actively discouraged.
In the Toronto area, these include former power brokers such as Sen. David Smith, a former Jean Chrétien loyalist who was national campaign chair under Stéphane Dion, and former MPs Dennis Mills, Joe Volpe and Tony Ianno.
Many of these people have been at the core of the party for 30 to 40 years. The truth is that they are not any longer, a reality hard to swallow for some of them who keep stirring “background noise” that puts Trudeau in a bad light.
If Trudeau is to portray the Liberals as a unified party in the coming election, this older generation needs to step aside.
Under Trudeau, the party is in the midst of a generational shift, with an army of young volunteers and with national and provincial campaigns spearheaded by people in their 30s and early 40s.
This new generation of leaders is trying to move the party away from the days when federal politics, at least for the Liberals during the Chrétien-Martin era and the Dion and Ignatieff terms, were seen as toxic.
Since becoming leader, Trudeau has done much good for the party, especially when it comes to inspiring a dramatic renewal of interest at the grassroots level and in implementing a generational change within the party’s organizational hierarchy.
Party loyalists, though, will have to wait until the election to see whether all that good will be enough to overcome the bad and the ugly of the last two years.