Trudeau has good reason to be nervous
Justin Trudeau spent most of his last term in office telling Canadians to stay at home. His chances of winning another term, however, rest on getting voters off their couches — Liberal voters in particular.
Any Liberals who were counting on a lazy, hazy summer campaign as the front-runners got some bracing bursts of cold water this week.
The Nova Scotia election results were a large reminder that incumbent governments are no longer pandemicproof — especially Liberal ones.
At the same time, early polls show a tightening of the race in just the first week. The Star’s own polling analysis, The Signal, has shown the Liberals and Conservatives inching toward a statistical tie.
These two developments alone should remind Liberals that there is no coasting to victory in 2021. Trudeau is going to have to work hard for a win, harder for a majority — and that’s not a bad thing.
Complacency has not been a friend to Liberals in the past decade or so. The spectacular electoral crash of 2011, which sent the party back to third place for the first time in its history, was caused in large part by Liberal voters staying home.
In power, complacency brings out Liberal tendencies toward overconfidence and arrogance, two traits often ascribed to the negative side of the party brand.
Trudeau himself is a better campaigner as an underdog, as he demonstrated in 2015, and again in 2019 when his own past came back to bite him.
No one would yet call Trudeau the underdog in this campaign, but Nova Scotia and the increasingly competitive polls show that he’s not the comfortable front-runner either.
Another bit of reality: calling an election in the time of COVID-19 may only have been a good idea in the 2020 portion of the pandemic, when governments in New Brunswick, British Columbia and Saskatchewan were returned comfortably to office through that electoral gamble.
In 2021, it’s looking like a riskier bet. Newfoundland Premier Andrew Furey’s bid to get re-elected was tossed badly off course when the pandemic’s third wave hit his province. Yukon Premier Sandy Silver squeaked by with a only a slim minority, and then Nova Scotia’s Iain Rankin went down to devastating defeat this week.
What do these premiers all have in common, besides their decisions to go ahead with elections in 2021? They’re all Liberals. The coincidence is surely not lost on Trudeau and his team.
Here’s another piece of electoral trivia worth remembering: federal and provincial campaigns don’t often run concurrently, but they did in 1979, when British Columbia’s briefly overlapped with a national campaign. That was the only election that Trudeau’s father, Pierre, lost.
The 2021 election may have
If there are superstitious Liberals out there, this is one other reason not to regard this summer’s election as a sure bet.
Privately, some of the Liberal campaign team, while disappointed about the Nova Scotia results this week, are not altogether displeased that the party is being reminded of the potential for defeat. Much of the Liberals’ electoral success since 2015 has been built on an elaborate network of volunteers and the all-important ground game. That kind of a campaign doesn’t happen if rank-and-file Liberals are sitting out the action, confident that Trudeau will pull it off again from the air.
That does raise the question, though, of why the party would want to engineer the timing of the election the way it did — in midsummer, at the edge of a fourth wave of COVID-19, when even the most diehard Liberals have other things to worry about than getting Trudeau another term in office.
The pace of the Liberal campaign itself is also a bit puzzling in this regard. The Liberals’ chief opponents raced to get their full election platforms released in the past week, presumably in part because this is a pandemic campaign and lots of voters may choose to cast their ballot early.
Elections Canada this week said that it was expecting as many as five million mail-in ballots.
With that in mind, it was smart thinking for the New Democrats and then the Conservatives to lay their policy cards on the table early. The Liberals by contrast seem in no big hurry, telling the Star this week that their platform is still being reviewed and a release date will come around the more traditional mid-campaign mark. Is that complacency? A failure to anticipate how COVID-19 has made this campaign different?
A lot of Trudeau’s old campaign slogans have been revived for 2021, “Forward” and “Real change” among them. If Liberals have been paying attention, expect another one to return: “Hope and hard work.” The 2021 election may have been launched with hope, but this week is a reminder that it’s going to be hard work, too.
been launched with hope, but this week is a reminder that it’s going to be hard work, too