Trudeau aims to disprove detractors
Missteps mean the young leader desperately needs to bounce back
OTTAWA— He’s been painted by the Conservatives as not ready for prime time, the camp counsellor unfit to lead a nation, the privileged son of a famous politician out of touch with the realities facing everyday Canadians.
Now Justin Trudeau has his chance to convince Canadians he’s none of those things.
Trudeau heads into this marathon campaign looking to prove detractors wrong and restore the Liberal party from its thirdplace standing to the political force it once was. To do it, he’ll have to overcome the ghosts of past Liberal campaigns, a series of humiliating stumbles and miscues that saw the party knocked out of power in 2006 and then reduced to just 34 seats and19 per cent of the vote in 2011.
His campaign will be centred on hope, an optimistic style that will promise better days ahead for the middle class under a Liberal government.
There’s been a smattering of policy pledges so far: the promise of tax changes, including raising taxes on rich Canadians while reducing income taxes on middleclass Canadians by up to $670 per taxpayer; he’s also touted parliamentary reforms to open up government, a new relationship with Canada’s First Nations and a focus on the environment he says was lacking under the Tories.
But much is riding on Trudeau, who is putting an emphasis on the positive. It’s a contrast, he says, to his rivals Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. Trudeau vowed as much when he handily won the leadership in 2013. He took the reins of the party predicting that Canadians were tired of what he branded the negativity, bullying and cynicism in politics.
Indeed, at the time he assumed the leadership, polls showed that a Trudeau-led Liberal party would win, a political high that extended well into his first year as leader.
Yet those heady days are gone. Trudeau is down in the polls, lagging Harper and Mulcair, who has surged to a pre-election lead.
Being in the crosshairs of Conservative attack ads has eroded Trudeau’s popularity. So too have his own missteps. He mused about an admiration for China’s dictatorship, quipped that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated by hockey and, faced with the decision to deploy fighter jets to Iraq, accused Harper of “trying to whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are.”
Those mistakes have prompted Trudeau to stick more to his lines and speak less off the cuff. It’s helped him avoid mistakes. But it’s also created what pollster Frank Graves says is an “anodyne, scripted, timid” and, ultimately, less appealing politician.
Graves said it’s critical that Trudeau re- connect with voters in the same way that drove his popularity in the months after winning the leadership.
“Trudeau can bounce back,” said Graves, president of Ottawa-based EKOS Research. “His personal approval numbers are okay. He’s just not been able to get enough volume, or clarity or passion to really connect with the electorate in a way that he was a year ago.”
Trudeau does well in front of a crowd. He’s a popular draw, which will be a benefit on the campaign trail in the weeks ahead.
And his leadership win has had an important influence within the party. The Liberals now boast 30,000 volunteers who have already reached out two million times to voters on the doorstep or by phone, which is a record for the party, Liberal officials say.