Goodbye-elections (Why Justin Trudeau Should Retire)
I’m on record as saying by-elections almost never matter to the broader political picture. They are important to local voters, to be sure. But they rarely impact people outside of the riding by reshaping the political calculus province-wide or nation-wide. They are a blip on the timeline between elections and are usually quickly forgotten.
But sometimes — very rarely—they can actually tip the scales. And when they do, their impact isn’t always immediately known. That will be the case in the aftermath of the Toronto-St. Paul’s byelection that has taken place just over a year out from the next general election at the federal level. We simply don’t know yet how this race will shape that campaign. But we can look to two recent Ontario examples to make an educated guess.
Dalton McGuinty’s (Kitchener) Waterloo
When Dalton McGuinty ran for a third consecutive term as Premier of Ontario, the odds were not in his favour. A number of experienced members of his caucus decided not to run again, the party was tanking in the polls, and the Hudak PCs looked poised to form government. But by the time election day rolled around, McGuinty not only won, he nearly won a majority, falling just one seat shy of the mark.
That’s really where the trouble began. Less than a year later, the Liberals got their first chance to take back the majority in the legislature when a seat opened up again in the riding of Kitchener-Waterloo. A by-election had been called in the riding when PC MPP Elizabeth Witmer stepped down.
It was one of two by-elections in 2012 as Liberal MPP Greg Sorbara also stepped down after the general election. His seat was generally seen as secure — his long-time friend Steven Del Duca ran to succeed him and had deep ties to the riding (he would also later become leader of the party in 2020). Kitchener-Waterloo, however, was not a “held” riding and was seen by McGuinty’s team as an opportunity to win one more seat and solidify a shaky majority in the legislature.
That meant a lot of resources were invested into the riding in terms of money, staff, and volunteers. The theory was that flexing the Big Red Machine could tip the scales towards the Liberals given the party had placed a close-ish second place in the general election the year before.
However, that’s not what the experience was like on the ground. The community was openly hostile towards the Liberal brand as the so-called gas plant scandal picked up steam over the summer. They were also angry about having to vote in what many saw as an “uneccessary” byelection only caused by the sitting Liberal Government offering Witmer a position on the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board to free up her seat.
On by-election day, there were so many Liberal volunteers on the ground that I only had one poll to myself for the day’s Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) efforts. There were eight Liberals identified in the poll, according to previous canvasses by volunteers. In actuality two of them were conservatives and the rest weren’t home (or simply weren’t answering).
When the results came in, the hoped-for majority never materialized. The NDP pulled ahead of both leading parties and have held the seat ever since. McGuinty took a few weeks to ponder the result. Despite the loss, Liberals at the party’s AGM in Ottawa in September backed his leadership at the mandatory post-election leadership review. 86% of delegates voted against holding a leadership election.
Just two weeks later, McGuinty stepped down anyway and triggered the leadership election that would elect Kathleen Wynne and make her Ontario’s first female and first gay premier.
Wynne’s Trials and Tribulations
It’s not the most popular take, but I’ve always believed Katheen Wynne’s leadership was similarly undone by a by-election. Yes, she was defeated in the 2018 general election. But the beginning of the end started much earlier when the NDP MPP for Sudbury abruptly stepped down just six months after the 2014 election.
Wynne’s team, like McGuinty’s, saw a chance to flip a seat. Sudbury had been held by Liberal Rick Bartolucci for five terms before he stepped down ahead of the 2014 campaign. It was a sore spot that the seat had been lost despite a majority victory in that campaign. Wynne’s team wanted to win it back.
The Liberal candidate that replaced Bartolucci, Andrew Olivier, lost the 2014 campaign by around 3%—a small margin that could be flipped in a by-election if enough resources were pumped into the riding. Olivier wanted a second kick at the can to make it happen. Wynne’s team instead wanted popular federal NDP MP Glenn Thibeault to join their side and flip the seat from the NDP.
Thibeault became the candidate after being appointed to the role by Wynne instead of facing a nomination race. He ended up delivering a Liberal win by about 6%. That might have been the end of the story except that the candidate who had been sidelined by the party took issue with the process by which he had been pushed out.
To be clear — nomination candidates don’t own their ridings and have to win back the support of the their party and their community every time they run in an election, including nomination races. But the issue here was about whether there was impropriety in how the way was cleared for Thibeault to run unopposed despite another candidate being interested in the role.
What followed was a debate about party processes (such as the leader having the right to appoint candidates in the party’s constitution), an OPP investigation, and eventually two different trials where staff and supporters of Wynne faced possible criminal prosecution for their roles in the scandal.
While those trials took place, I knew that was the end for the Wynne Government. She had defied the odds to win a fourth Liberal mandate by presenting herself as a different kind of politician. But once voters saw some of her top advisors dragged into the scandal (rightly or wrongly) and watched the premier testify about what happened in Sudbury, the sheen wore off. To voters, Wynne was just another typical politician willing to get her hands dirty over a political win her majority government didn’t even need.
When you look at the polling between the 2014 and 2018 general elections in Ontario, you can clearly see that support for the Liberals dropped after the Sudbury by-election that took place on February 5, 2015. Despite winning that by-election, by May, the Liberals were polling below the Progressive Conservatives and never retook the lead again.
The Wynne Government would hang on for its full mandate, though whether she should remain at the helm became an open question during the final year of her leadership. There were tepid efforts to push her out ahead of the campaign but none of them stuck. Wynne had long since won her own post-election leadership review and none of the grumbling from caucus turned into a full scale revolt.
Instead, she admitted part-way through the the eventual campaign in 2018 that she would not be the premier after election day and urged voters to vote for their local Liberal candidate to stop a Ford majority. She was forced out by the voters and the Liberal side lost badly. It remains an open question as election speculation ramps up again whether the party will ever recover from that loss.
Trudeau and Toronto-St. Paul’s
All of this leads us back to the by-election in Toronto-St. Paul’s. It’s a riding that was Liberal for several decades, it’s in the 416, and it’s near the all-important 905 region. It was held by the Liberals even during the disastrous 2011 campaign, though that likely had more to do with the incumbent MP Carolyn Bennett being popular locally. She stepped down after decades in politics, triggering the by-election. Trudeau’s team saw it as a must win given how reliably the riding has fallen into the Liberal column in recent decades.
So, like McGuinty and Wynne, Trudeau’s team became laser focused on winning a specific by-election and left four other ridings waiting for their own by-elections so that resources could be marshalled into Toronto-St.Paul’s instead. Cabinet minister after cabinet minister dropped in on the riding and I’m told around 400 volunteers pulled vote for the Liberals on election day.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberals chose candidates without much public recognition but with deep ties to the leader’s top organizers in each party. The Conservatives saw the by-election as a chance to break through in Toronto, a community where they have not won a seat since 2011. No effort was spared on either side, making the race a decent test for measuring the mood of the electorate and the skill of each party’s organizing machines.
As of this morning, Conservative candidate Don Stewart was on top, besting the Liberals by more than 500 votes.
Will Trudeau Stay or Go?
As I’ve said in a previous piece, there is no official mechanism for voters or Liberals to push Trudeau out ahead of the next election. The decision is entirely up to him. Poor results in public polling can force a leader to see the writing on the wall and get them to resign early. So far, that has had no effect on Trudeau.
Like with Wynne, there is no real movement in caucus to push him out. Unlike with Wynne, most of Trudeau’s team owes their political careers to him, having been first elected in the storybook 2015 campaign that swept them all to power. I suspect they feel they owe him their loyalty and their silence as he continues to confront an angry electorate that has not warmed back up to him despite an ambitious budget and a new slogan about “fairness for every generation”.
I’m not privy to the conversations Trudeau’s advisors have been having with him about whether he should stay on or not, but I doubt many of them are making the suggestion to him that it might be time to move on. A leader’s staff are their most dedicated supporters and they can fall into a bit of group-think about strategy after spending so much time rowing in the same direction together. Like Wynne’s team, they probably also truly believe that Trudeau is still the right guy for the job and should stay in place to fight for it.
World Events
I don’t think Liberal supporters, caucus members, or staff think things are going to magically turn around for the party. I do think they still see some hope on the horizon in world events that could shift things back in their favour. The sense I get is that they think things are going to turn around in the fall with an improved economy and after the fallout of the U.S. election. The belief is that a re-elected Trump could act as a significant boogeyman about letting your country get sucked into hard-right conservative politics.
This is a mistake for two reasons. First, Liberals never get credit for a good economy. Voters tend to base their views on the economy on how well they are personally doing and how much money the government is hoarding away in surpluses, even as it underfunds social programming. The Chretien Liberals are one of the few outliers but only because they were credited for their austerity agenda and budget surpluses (which created service deficits we are still paying for now).
Even if the economy rights itself as expected in the fall, it will be a long time before that trickles down to the kitchen table. And when it does, voters will point to Trudeau’s spending instead of their improved financial standing.
Second, voters don’t have to wait until November to see how America is being reshaped by Trump. While he’s not currently in power, the Supreme Court he stacked is already reshaping America ahead of the presidential election. Canadian voters already have a front-row seat to what modern conservativism looks like. And they have yet to reject it as Poilievre and conservative premiers import Republican-style slogans, policy fights, and rage farming into Canada.
This second hope is something the Ontario Liberal campaign team banked on in the 2018 election. The assumption was that Ford’s unprogressive conservative style would be self-defeating at the polls and that while voters despised the governing Liberals, they would not be able to stomach someone like Ford. They assumed that Ford, like Hudak and Tory before him, would stick his foot in his mouth and defeat himself. Things did not turn out that way and there’s no reason to believe they will with Poilievre. Voters simply don’t feel the same way about Conservative leaders as Liberal organizers do.
It’s Time for a New Liberal Leader
The simple fact is that if Trudeau doesn’t step down this summer, he will be the Liberal leader in the next election. There won’t be time to call a leadership race in January and set a new leader up for success in fall 2025. That leader would falter Kim Campbell-style, being forced to wear the old leader’s record and rely on the old leader’s team. A new leader’s only hope is being given time to right the Liberal ship. And only Trudeau can give that to them.
He has said he wants to stay on to finish carrying out his priorities. But to voters that just translates to “more of the same” at a time when they are looking for change. If Trudeau can’t bring that change himself, or articulate it with specifics when asked, they will continue to tune him out right up to election day. That seems to be the likely path given his “change” budget has been entirely ignored. Like with Wynne, voters say they like the policies, but they don’t like the person proposing them. When that’s the case, there’s no way to change their minds. They are simply ready to move on.
Staying on means putting the government’s significant policy wins in jeopardy. While those policies wouldn’t have happened without Trudeau, they are now at risk because of him. Almost every program I worked on in government in Ontario was dismantled by the Ford Government within six months of them taking office. The Basic income pilot. Province-wide rent control. Debt-free tuition. The list goes on. No matter how much voters love a policy, they will trade it all in when they can no longer stand the person making it all happen. Change the person at the top in time and you might be able to draw voters back in to save those policies.
To run for office you need a sizeable ego to believe you can bring the change people need. But the longer you stay in office, the more you tend to think that you and you alone are the only one capable of defending that change and growing it. Trudeau is in danger of that kind of hubris now, prioritizing his desire to be the one to complete the work he’s started rather than handing off the task to someone voters might actually listen to come 2025.
The question he has to ask himself now is whether he still has a clear vision for change, whether he is the right messenger for promoting that change as Canadians tune him out, and whether his desire to stay on is more important than seeing the policies he’s championed continue to help Canadians live a better life.
I believe Trudeau got into politics for the right reason — to help improve the lives of Canadians. Now it’s time for him to leave politics for the very same reason — to let his successor protect and build on the progress he’s made. To stay is to gift the Conservatives a virtually uncontested campaign and the chance to tear all that progress down as Canada’s next government.
Theresa is a voter in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s and cast her ballot for the Liberal candidate in the by-election. She has served as the Communications Coordinator for the Ontario Liberal Party, the VP Communications for the Ontario Women’s Liberal Commission, the Director of Communications to Ontario Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, and an election-speechwriter for former Premier Kathleen Wynne. As a member of ‘Team Neutral’, she helped manage the 2013 and 2020 OLP Leadership races.
