The nuts and bolts behind Liberals’ plan for a majority
Trudeau wants to remove minority government obstacles to his ‘build back better’ goal
OTTAWA—The question of why Canadians are headed to the polls on Sept. 20 is a simple one to answer: Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau wants the majority government he was denied in 2019.
Why now? Because the Liberals want to clear the parliamentary path of obstacles thrown up by a minority government so they can implement their vision of building back better post-pandemic.
Here’s the nuts and bolts of how they intend to get there.
The path to victory
At dissolution, the Liberals held 155 seats in the House of Commons. They need 170 for a majority.
At least two seats could be simple pick ups. Fredericton, where they’ve poached the person who beat them there in the last election — Jenica Atwin, who used to be a Green. The second is Vancouver-Granville, the home of former Liberal turned Independent Jody Wilson-Raybould, who isn’t running again.
Changing demographics offer some hope for ridings in and around Hamilton, Barrie, Niagara and others for the Liberals to wrest seats away from the Conservatives thanks to the exodus of Liberal voters from the urban core of Toronto.
The Prairies will be trickier. The Liberals were shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 2019, and lost three seats in Manitoba. They’ve expended considerable energy trying to reconnect with the region since, much in the person of Winnipeg MP Jim Carr, who acts as an emissary between Ottawa and the West and has met with some success convincing the centre to adopt or pivot on certain programs to meet demands on the ground.
Political conditions may also be in their favour when it comes to seat pickups in the Prairies and elsewhere.
The conservative premiers once known as “the resistance” have softened their tone during the pandemic, and that frees up some breathing room for the Liberals.
At the same time though, fears of how a fourth wave of COVID-19 will roll out and how the Conservative-led provinces will respond could go either way: will provincial premiers try to blame the feds or will voters angry at local decisions pivot to the Liberals?
When it comes to ridings they currently hold and that may be at risk, look to some of the places where long-time incumbents aren’t running again. Among them New Brunswick’s MiramichiGrand Lake — the Liberals won that one by a hair in 2019.
The ground game
After being reduced to the third party in the 2011 election, the Liberals embarked in a total overhaul of their political machine.
They point to a statistic from the 2019 election as proof of how far they’ve come: in the 18 ridings decided by less than two per cent of the vote in 2019, Liberals won in 14, which they attribute to sophisticated organizational tools that allowed them to follow the changing tides closely in 2019 and redistribute resources on a dime.
They’re adding more tools to their arsenal this time, some borrowed from the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign of Joe Biden.
Among them, an app called Greenfly, which allows videos, photos and other content specifically developed for social media to be blasted out simultaneously on candidate and supporter accounts. They’re also using a text-messaging app called Community.
Supporters can text specific numbers to ask questions or to volunteer, and the Liberals can in turn push messages directly to them.
Despite the pandemic, the Liberals’ haven’t let up on their “days of action” program, which mobilizes voters in targeted areas to go door-knocking or hang out at community events to generate buzz around the party.
They moved those days digital this year, deploying a new call banking system that made it more efficient to connect.
They say more than 10,000 volunteers in over 3,400 communities have reached out to well over one million Canadians and hope to deploy a similar sized cadre to head out on the streets for the election.
Who’s in charge? Besides Trudeau
The Liberals’ campaign has more chairs than a wedding banquet.
Cabinet minister Melanie Joly and former cabinet minister Navdeep Bains are the campaign co-chairs, MPs Mona Fortier and Terry Duguid co-chair the platform committee, and every province has two or more people in charge of regional efforts, a mix of cabinet ministers, MPs and current and former Liberal party staffers.
Big names include Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan assisting with the campaign in B.C. and Families Minister Ahmed Hussen helping in Ontario.
The national director for the campaign is Azam Ishmael, who has been national director of the Liberal party since 2017 — he ran the Liberals get-out-the-vote effort in 2015.