With impeccable timing, former New Brunswick premier, Frank McKenna has just reflected on his time in office.
McKenna resigned 10 years to the day after first winning power in 1987.
“I knew that increasingly I was becoming less collaborative, that all the forces coming at you make you retrench and rely on a very small circle of advisers,” he told the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal’s Adam Huras this week. “I knew that was happening to me. I didn’t feel unloved. I just felt personally that I was not quite the same person that started that journey.”
McKenna said that if he was Justin Trudeau, he’d resign.
But the prime minister is not minded to listen to his fellow Liberal, or anyone else for that matter.
Trudeau weathered another uncomfortable caucus meeting on Wednesday. Sources suggest that a presentation by his new election campaign director, Andrew Bevan, may have calmed some of the dissidents in the Liberal ranks.
Bevan is said to have told MPs that there is money in the bank for a fully funded campaign and millions of dollars have been set aside for pre-writ advertising. A campaign team is in the process of being built, he told MPs.
It is also becoming clear that there will be a cabinet shuffle before a fall economic statement, the prospect of which may concentrate the minds of those on the cusp of a promotion.
But the repeated claim by the prime minister that his party is strong and united doesn’t make it so.
Those calling for a secret ballot in caucus are growing bolder, in large measure because Trudeau and his loyalists claim that the vast majority of caucus members still support him — a statement that has obviously not been tested.
At least 11 members of caucus — Sean Casey, Wayne Long, Ken McDonald, Yvan Baker, Helena Jaczek, Brendan Hanley, Rob Oliphant, René Arseneault, George Chahal, Sophie Chatel and Sameer Zuberi — have expressed their preference for a secret ballot to settle the matter.
Loyalists point out that the party’s constitution is set at its biannual convention.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has weighed in by saying that under the Liberal party’s rules, the leader is not chosen by secret ballot of caucus members. “It’s not how we do things,” she said.
A reminder then of how things were done. At its convention in 2012, the Liberal party backed a proposal to allow for a no-fee class of supporters who would be given a voice in choosing the next leader. For an impoverished party in third place in the House of Commons standings, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It proved to be Trudeau’s ticket to power.
With name recognition of more than 80 per cent and a legion of social media followers, Trudeau swamped all-comers in the 2013 leadership contest.
In fact, once it became clear that he was going to run, most serious contenders such as Bob Rae, John Manley and even Mark Carney decided they would not be able to compete with someone who could tap his tens of thousands of supporters to become free members with full voting rights.
That grip on the party’s apparatus has given Trudeau free rein to protect his leadership, including ensuring a unanimous vote against adopting the Reform Act after the 2021 election, that would have given caucus the legal power to eject the leader.
But are registered Liberals a more legitimate voice than elected MPs when it comes to who should be running the party?
Local politicians are the connection between the executive and the voters. Trudeau’s promise in 2015 was that he would strengthen the voice of backbench MPs in Ottawa.
That clearly has not happened.
As former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff warned in his political exorcism, Fire and Ashes, if democracy loses its connection to place, it will be in trouble.
“We will be entirely in the hands of the image makers and spin doctors and the fantasies they purvey… politics will be a spectacle dictated from the metropolis, not a reality lived in small towns and remote communities.”
Trudeau is facing calls for his resignation from the 24 MPs who endorsed the letter presented at last week’s stormy caucus meeting and public calls for a secret ballot from another dozen or so of his colleagues. If the bulk of his caucus is not openly disgruntled, it is far from gruntled.
Yet, we do appear to have lost the connection to place.
Trudeau’s plan seems to be to carry on regardless. He told his MPs last week that he would reflect on their concerns, before stating the very next day that he intends to stay on as prime minister.
That doesn’t seem as if it is likely to quell the rebellion, in fact it might fan the flames, perhaps in the form of abstentions in upcoming confidence votes. Now that the Bloc Québécois has committed to bring down the government, it would only require the two-dozen dissidents to abstain before we were back in a spring 2005 scenario, when both major parties were grubbing for votes from the Independent MPs who would hold the balance of power.
The prime minister is mired in precisely the same morass that Frank McKenna feared he was sliding toward: less collaboration, retrenchment and overreliance on a small circle of advisers.
It is not clear how he intends to extricate himself and persuade Canadians to vote for him if he cannot convince his own MPs that he is worthy of re-election.
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