CANADA GOOSE
How Justin Trudeau went from liberal darling to a possibly endangered species
JANET Clarkson knows what happens when Canadian voters have “unrealistic expectations” about a politician’s leadership in office: “They vote you out. Period. And that can happen to Prime Minister Trudeau in Monday’s election.” Clarkson should know. She was mayor of Trent Lakes in Ontario for two terms before losing to a challenger. Four years later, she ran again and retook the mayor’s office.
“My loss was over stopping quarries,” she said, but “his challenges are much more complicated.”
Justin Trudeau faces the polls on Sept. 20 after calling a snap election in an attempt to grow his Liberal Party’s power in the House of Commons. Once confident of a victory, he is now neck and neck with his Conservative Party candidate Erin O’Toole. The prime minister has 31.6 percent support compared to 31.3 percent for his right-leaning opponent, according to the CBC. Other parties with substantial backing include the New Democrats with 19.8 percent, the libertarian People’s Party with 6.1 percent and the Green Party with 3.5 percent.
Clarkson said Trudeau is partly in trouble for the way he handled the pandemic. “There are people out there who critique him for the shutdowns and the financial [subsidies] . . . and the spike in inflation that has gone along with it,” she said.
Consumer prices in Canada rose 4.1 percent in August compared to the same period last year, marking the highest annual inflation rate in the country since March 2003, according to Statistics Canada.
But “there is also a backlash because he called this election during a pandemic and people say this was not the smartest move,” added the mayor, who said she still supports the prime minister while recognizing his problems with voters.
The decision to call the election before its 2023 scheduled date has been unpopular, agreed Western University of Ontario political science professor Matthew Lebo. It also seems misguided because smaller political parties — like the rightleaning People’s Party and the leftwing Green Party — are gaining greater traction.
Libertarians have grown more vocal in the wake of the pandemic, leading to the trending hashtag #TrudeauHasToGo on Twitter. “They are the angrier ones, having protests about masks and mandates in schools,” Lebo said. “In some provinces they are at 10 percent support.”
Meanwhile, the Green Party “is unsatisfied that [Trudeau] has done enough with climate change and see this as an opportunity to make their frustration heard,” Clarkson said.
When Trudeau called the elections in August, polls were in his favor, with both liberal and conservative voters supporting his vaccination mandates for federal public servants and rules requiring proof of vaccination to fly, take trains or enter indoor spaces. Currently, Canada has the highest vaccination rate — of single and double doses — anywhere in the world. Eighty-two percent of the eligible population aged 12 and up have received at least one dose and 70.3 percent are fully vaccinated.
If Trudeau loses, it will be because he failed to give voters a good reason to go to the polls after they were told for more than a year not to venture out in public, Lebo said.
“The day he announced the snap election, he was looking great in the polls,” Lebo said. “That all changed within days of announcing he was calling an election.”
In short, voters perceive the move as an exercise in vanity and power.
When Trudeau first ran in 2015, he won in an upset that resulted in a healthy majority, marking the end of nine years of Conservative Party rule. The 49-year-old was seen “as having the vision of his father former Premier Pierre Trudeau, the charisma and optimism of his mother Margaret with this energizing youthful style and liberal brand of politics people were looking for,” said Clarkson.
Four years later, the discovery that he dressed in blackface multiple times cost him 20 seats and his majority rule in the House of Commons. He was forced to form a minority government and rely on support from small rivals to govern.
In the final days of this month’s election, O’Toole has framed the contest as a fight against a selfish elitist who called an election during the pandemic’s fourth wave.
“Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives — privileged, entitled and always looking out for number one,” O’Toole said in a recent speech. “He was looking out for number one when he called this expensive and unnecessary election in the middle of a pandemic.”
Trudeau, meanwhile, has had a tough time of it during his campaign as angry protesters and hecklers have hounded him at nearly every stop of his cross-country tour.
After six years of being the liberal darling — good-looking, young, bilingual, cosmopolitan — the bloom has faded and people are starting to get sick of the party in power.
“He’s been in office six years,” Lebo said. “The clock is ticking.”