Justin Trudeau’s gamble in calling an election two years ahead of schedule in a bid to convert his Liberal minority government into a majority has blown up in his face.
Heading into the third week of the five-week campaign, his Liberals find themselves battling to hang onto enough seats to avoid being swept into opposition. They have dropped into second place into most public opinion polls. Seat projections, while still forecasting a Liberal plurality, suggest that a majority is almost certainly out of reach.
With 170 seats needed for a majority government, the CBC poll tracker at the weekend was projecting the Liberals to win 145 seats on Sept. 20 – or 10 fewer than they held when the campaign began. The poll aggregator 338 Canada projected 141 Liberals. The Conservatives held 119 seats at dissolution. The CBC projected they would pick up an additional seven for 126; 338 Canada predicted 136 Conservatives.
Many Canadians aren’t buying Trudeau’s argument that because Conservative obstruction had rendered Parliament dysfunctional, the country needed a majority government to tackle the challenges of the future.
Whether voter displeasure will persist until Sept. 20 is anyone’s guess. The Liberals seemed to have just about everything going their way in the run-up to the election call on August 15. They had earned good marks for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the public clearly welcomed the spending of unprecedented billions on income support for individuals and businesses. By and large, the electorate seemed receptive to an activist, left-leaning government.
What went wrong?
It started with the entrenched perception that the early election call was wholly motivated by political opportunism. Trudeau and his advisers assumed they could take advantage of a weak opponent. They thought voters would see the Conservatives as Liberals see them – as a rickety party, held together by sticky tape and binder twine, that spreads a message of social conservativism west of the Manitoba-Ontario border and one of reluctant moderation east of it. To Liberals, Erin O’Toole is the true opportunist, a charisma-free chameleon with no fixed political beliefs.
This ugly campaign – already stained by the need to cancel a Trudeau in Bolton, Ont. on safety grounds last week – will only get nastier if personal attacks, coming from both sides, intensify.
Trudeau needs to find a way to calmly reassure voters who are becoming increasingly concerned that new variants of COVID will create a health crisis as severe as the one the Liberals had hoped would be fading from memory by this point in the election.
He also has to counter criticism that he and his ministers took their eye off the ball on Afghanistan – that, having failed to anticipate the collapse of the government in Kabul that Canada had supported for 20 years, they were unprepared to evacuate the Afghan interpreters, drivers and others who had served Canadian troops and suddenly were in mortal danger from the Taliban.
The rescue effort was a national embarrassment. When the Afghan employees called for a lifeline, Ottawa sent them a ball of bureaucratic red tape. While the United States and France were still sending military aircraft to evacuate their local workers, Canada sent out telexes of useless advice.
It was a failure of leadership that, had Parliament been sitting, might well have brought down Trudeau’s minority government.
It is not clear what impact, if any, Afghanistan may have on the election, there being no apparent reason to assume that a Conservative government would have managed the rescue any better than the Liberals. And, with the campaign approaching its midpoint, relatively few voters have yet to take serious stock of the alternatives to the Liberals or assessed the policies of the five parties. That process should begin in earnest after next week’s leaders’ debates.
What is clear is that Justin Trudeau must climb a steeper, more dangerous path to re-election than he had anticipated. It could prove to be more than he can manage.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail. His new book, Flora! A Woman in a Man’s World, co-authored with the late Flora MacDonald, is being published this fall by McGill-Queen’s University Press. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com