PM showing his impatience as election looms
Justin Trudeau’s impatience is showing.
It’s more than just the jump-start Trudeau has administered to his own budget, announcing details well in advance — which had many asking this week whether this is a prime minister keen to take his election show on the road already.
“It feels a bit like an election campaign,” Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio’s “The Current,” told Trudeau during an interview on Thursday. “You’re zipping across the country here and there, announcing things with big dollar signs attached to them.”
Trudeau replied by quickly rattling off the lines he’s road-testing to get back some voters the Liberals have lost since the heady days of 2015.
“Far too many young people, particularly millennials, and gen Z, don’t feel like the system works for them anymore, even if they have a great job,” he said. “They are squeezed on housing, they’re squeezed on rent, they can’t save up for buying a home, they’re pressed on groceries, they’re seeing a world where climate change is getting worse and worse. They’re worried about their future and government has a role in making sure that there is fairness for them.”
Everyone is worried about the future, especially Trudeau’s Liberals. Doug Ford, an on-again, off-again ally of Trudeau’s, put the worry in bracing terms on Monday. “Folks, let’s cut to the chase, this carbon tax has to go or in a year-and-a-half, the prime minister is going,” Ford told a crowd at a farm in East Gwillimbury, Ont.
No question, Trudeau has been showing a chippier side of himself in his many encounters over the past couple of weeks. He is increasingly willing to say flat-out that Conservatives, whether it’s Pierre Poilievre or some premiers, are “lying” about the carbon levy. This week, Trudeau has been stepping up his challenges to premiers to come up with their own carbonreduction plans, as Quebec and British Columbia have.
He also said that if provinces are not going to get moving on housing as quickly as Ottawa, his government will just detour around them and do its own deals with municipalities such as Toronto. Standing with Mayor Olivia Chow at a podium on Wednesday, with no Premier Ford in sight, Trudeau said, “If a province decides it doesn’t want to be ambitious on housing, that’s their decision. We will work with the municipalities within that province that are ambitious.”
Trudeau’s critics are going to be interpreting the sharpness in his tone as a sign that he’s rattled about the next election and the Conservatives’ continued lead in the polls (although a Nanos poll this week showed that lead shrinking to 12 points).
Trudeau continues to say he’s looking forward to that fight, that he doesn’t mind at all being underestimated. It’s definitely looking like he now wants to take the gloves off whenever he gets the chance.
In one noteworthy set of remarks this week, it wasn’t the prospect of a future election hanging over him, but the memories of the last one.
The prime minister was asked about what former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said during his testimony to the inquiry into foreign interference. O’Toole said that, in retrospect, he wished he had spoken out more forcefully about his worries of Chinese government meddling in several ridings important to the Conservatives.
O’Toole didn’t say it cost him the 2021 election — although he said as many as nine ridings could have gone Conservative if not for the meddling. But Trudeau basically said O’Toole was a sore loser. “I can understand where someone who lost an election is trying to look for reasons other than themselves for why they lost an election,” he told reporters. Well, then.
Once, in a casual chat with Trudeau, I asked him how he resembled his father. This was the summer of 2019 and Trudeau was fond of telling crowds that unlike his dad, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, he enjoyed campaigning. “OK,” I asked, “how are you like your father?”
Trudeau gestured as though spoiling for a boxing match. He said he can feel his father’s influence when someone tries to pick a fight with him, that he finds himself raring to get in there and mix things up, as Pierre Trudeau did.
The big event for Trudeau next week will come at the foreign-interference inquiry, when he is slated to be its final witness. The prime minister was widely praised for his last testimony to a public inquiry — the one that examined events surrounding the declaration of a national emergency during the 2022 convoy protests. Trudeau sat there cooly fielding questions, explaining what he knew and when.
This inquiry requires more caution. Trudeau might not be able to be as forthcoming as many want, because of national-security concerns. If that makes him impatient, he might be wise to check that at the door.