Who do you think the next Liberal leader will most emulate — Pierre Trudeau, Paul Martin or Kim Campbell?
Assuming the suddenly invisible Justin Trudeau uses his Christmas break to shelter in place and finally decides to step down, do you think the Liberal who replaces him as party head will (a) revive the party and win it a majority? (b) save at least a minority or (c) suffer an electoral thumping of record proportions?
I am not entirely convinced Trudeau will step down, even following the ritualistic disembowelling his former finance minister Chrystia Freeland gave on her way out the door of his Cabinet this week. Trudeau is enough of a narcissist to convince himself that others are the source of all his problems and that he alone has the skill and intelligence to save this government.
For the better part of two years, Trudeau and his Cabinet have been arguing that their drop in the polls is only a “comms” problem — a failure of communication. If they could simply tell their story better, Canadians would come to appreciate all the good things this government has done for them.
This is utterly delusional, but it is the narrative the Liberals have been spinning to reassure themselves that they are really still Canada’s greatest hope.
It is also one of the main reasons the Liberals are in favour of a law that permits censors they appoint to control messages on the internet. They genuinely believe they are victims of a grand conspiracy to prevent all their goodness from being shown to the public. Those who disagree with them have to be suppressed so their magnificence can shine through.
If Trudeau somehow manages to remain in his job until he can no longer avoid facing voters in October 2025, his party is done.
Where once his style was seen as a refreshing modernization of the role of a leader, it is now seen for the feckless, formless, whiny, limp act it always has been.
There is no way Justin Trudeau will win another election. In his last win in 2021, his party received the lowest percentage of the popular vote of any government in our history. Does anyone really imagine he could match that pathetic result today?
This will be magnified if the already despised Trudeau comes back in January and prorogues Parliament to stall any chance of him or his government being forced out. Using such an arbitrary strategy to upend democracy would plunge him and his party even further down in the polls.
Already, major polls have the Liberals at between 15% and 21%. It’s not hard to imagine prorogation pushing that into the low teens or even single digits.
The Liberal caucus could solve this overnight by finding enough backbone to vote him out. The last three Tory leaders in the U.K. were driven out by their caucuses. There is nothing in Canadian parliamentary procedure to prevent the same happening here — only the courage of his MPs. But many Liberals appear to be as timid and mealy as their leader.
Presuming Trudeau knows all this, too, and finally decides to leave, will the next Liberal boss be a Pierre Trudeau who replaced Lester Pearson and restored a majority for his party? Or will he or she be a Paul Martin, who at least preserved a minority after he replaced Jean Chretien? Or will the next leader be a Kim Campbell, who could not keep her party from being punished for holding onto the unpopular Brian Mulroney too long? Campbell presided over a campaign that ended with her Progressive Conservatives winning just two seats.
I’m betting Trudeau’s unpopularity now extends irreversibly to his entire party and the Campbell outcome is most likely.