Trudeau is Staying. What Now?
This week, the federal Liberal cabinet is holding a multi-day summer retreat in Halifax. It will be followed soon after by a federal Liberal caucus meeting. It’s the first real chance either group of Liberals has had to come together in one place after the disastrous by-election loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s (my home riding) and before another by-election is held in the Liberal stronghold of LaSalle — Émard — Verdun.
Some Liberals see the cabinet and caucus meetings, as well as the upcoming by-election, as final tests of Trudeau’s leadership ahead of the 2025 general election. For them, the meetings are a chance for the low-key caucus discontent felt all summer to bubble up into something more threatening. The by-election is another chance for voters to state that Trudeau has clearly overstayed his welcome. If all goes well, he’ll stay on. If any go poorly, he’ll be forced to leave. At least, that’s the common thinking.
I’m of the opinion that none of these will impact Trudeau’s hold on the party. If a cabinet and caucus revolt were truly brewing at a scale that was actually threatening to Trudeau’s leadership, it would have happened by now. Those looking to push him out didn’t need his permission to gather or to wait until the end of summer to do so. If they were truly ready to make a move, they wouldn’t have waited until Trudeau and his team organized the venue and catering for his own ouster.
Likewise, the by-election in LaSalle — Émard — Verdun, while also a Liberal stronghold, won’t tell us anything new about how the rank and file feel about Trudeau or the uphill battle he faces trying to become the first prime minister since Wilfrid Laurier to win a fourth-straight mandate. A Liberal general election campaign with Trudeau still at the helm will be a tough sell to many voters, whether he wins the by-election or not.
Timing Matters
What does matter is timing. Leadership races need time to unfold. The eventual winner also needs enough time to put their stamp on the party before standing before the voters. If a race were to begin now and conclude by Christmas, it would give a new leader just ten months to put together a campaign team, develop a platform, recruit candidates, and win over voters on Election Day. Most partisans believe that’s not enough time at the best of times, let alone when you’re talking about a deeply disliked eight-year-old government campaigning for a fourth term.
That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. Doug Ford famously became the leader of the Ontario PC Party three months before Election Day. Just last week, US Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for President with three months remaining before Election Day. Ford won his election and Harris is surging.
But we also have the example of Kim Campbell, who took on the federal PC leadership with just four months to go until the 1993 election. The short turnaround meant she was stuck with Mulroney’s team, who caused serious harm to the campaign when they released an ad many thought mocked her opponent’s partial facial paralysis. It also gave her little time to come up with a new platform to separate herself from the policies of her predecessor. So much so that she was famously quoted as saying, “An election is no time to discuss serious issues.” By election day, her party held just two seats.
Trudeau has also likely seen polling which shows him as the party’s biggest electoral drag and, paradoxically, its best chance of winning again. That’s what happened when Premier Kathleen Wynne tried to win a fifth straight term for the Ontario Liberal Party. Those who hated her really hated her. And those who loved her really loved her. She was the best candidate to bring out both types of voters to the polls. In the end, there were more haters.
It’s this fact that I think is one of the primary reasons Trudeau has convinced himself he must stay on. While many voters dislike him, the most die-hard Liberal voters remain supportive of him. Combine that with his campaign skills and it becomes a potent recipe for a surprise comeback. At least in his mind and the minds of his remaining supporters.
Many senior Liberals also believe they have events on their side. The re-emergence of Donald Trump on the nightly news this fall will do a lot to remind Canadian voters that modern conservatism is a movement mired in hate. When it comes to pocketbook issues, inflation is coming down faster in Canada than anywhere else in the G7. And economists have predicted all year that the country’s financial outlook will start improving this fall.
Trudeau fundamentally believes he’s still the right guy for the job, not only from a moral and policy perspective but also when it comes to natural political skill. His cabinet and caucus have had an entire summer to disagree. Without any real pressure from them, he’s here to stay.
So what now?
If Trudeau wants to stay, his team won’t push him out, and time is not on the side of the ‘choose change’ brigade, political discourse within the Liberal Party has to move on from leadership questions to questions of how to reconnect with voters and win the message war.
Rumours are that the Liberal Caucus believes the way to do that is another cabinet shuffle or a change in the staff team around the prime minister. I don’t personally believe either of these is the answer. While things on the staff side could use a refresh, I’m reliably told that the PM is in the era of his career where he largely listens to his gut rather than his advisors. Changing whose name appears on the PMO’s GEDS directory page will, therefore, do little to change the decisions that come out of that office.
When it comes to calls to shuffle Cabinet, proponents say it’s less about decision-making and more about communication style. But a prime minister should always question the intention of caucus members calling for cabinet ministers to be replaced especially when those caucus members have sat on the backbenchers for nearly a decade. Their calls for change likely have more to do with bench sores than disagreement about communication style. Besides their own self-interest, changing the Cabinet won’t change its communication style if all its members take their direction from the PM and receive their key messages from his staff.
There are also those in the broader membership who think bad polls demand a change in the overall policy approach of the government. They want Trudeau to ‘stop being woke’ and take a hard-right turn back to some mythical centre point on the political spectrum that they can’t define.
But if the progressive bent of the Trudeau government were truly what is sinking the party, it would not have won three back-to-back elections with that approach. If anything, voters are disappointed that he’s not moving faster on more issues they are struggling with. A progressive approach to politics is also a core element of Trudeau’s brand as a politician. If more rightward-leaning supporters want to keep him and his still-intact celebrity status with Liberal voters, they’ll have to continue to accept his progressivism, too.
Reconnecting with Voters and Winning the Message War
Trudeau has already spent the summer beginning the work of reconnecting with voters. While a spring attempt at message correction quickly went off the rails, and while there is little sign of deepening policy responses to key issues for voters, Trudeau has returned to campaigning.
He’s been pictured all summer in the middle of throngs of real people at events taking place across the country. There are countless examples on his Instagram feed of regular Canadians excitedly snapping selfies with him. The photos are meant to blunt the narrative being told by bad polls that he still has lots of support across the country. They also serve a second purpose of giving a boost to demoralized Liberal volunteers, so they will believe that both the boss and the party still have some gas left in the tank.
The Cabinet and Caucus retreats should provide Trudeau and his staff with the feedback they need to adjust their messaging and head into the fall parliamentary session with a bold agenda that provides concrete solutions to the struggles Canadian families are facing. If Cabinet and Caucus members are serious about reversing the party’s fortunes, these meetings are their opportunities to be vocal not about Trudeau’s tenure as Liberal leader but the issues they are hearing from their constituents.
When it comes to die-hard party supporters who will vote Liberal no matter what the polls say, it’s time for them to realize that voting is not enough. After three elections, the party and its activists have become used to Conservative campaigns scoring own-goals that sink their prospects on the campaign trail. This election is different.
Eventually, even poorly executed opposition campaigns will not be a barrier to voters who just want to be rid of the sitting government. We learned that first-hand in Ontario. On top of that fatigue, only two prime ministers have ever won four mandates in a row — Macdonald and Laurier. No one has done it in over 100 years, let alone in the digital age of politics. Now, like never before, Liberals must make the best case to voters.
That means getting active by donating what you can as often as you can from now until Election Day. By sacrificing some evenings and weekends to join local canvass teams or phone banks in your riding. And by speaking to friends and family about policy choices and what each political party is actually offering when they talk about ‘change’.
It means staying informed and sharing information by staying on top of the news and Liberal key messages so you can be a source of knowledge for your personal circle. It means posting images of news headlines on your Facebook and Instagram feeds so people still get facts from credible sources despite the Meta news ban. It means connecting the pieces for others about the nationwide effort by conservative organizers to blame Trudeau for the inaction of conservative premiers and how that won’t change once he’s gone.
It means making the project of re-electing the Liberal Government and defeating the hard-right Poilieve Conservatives part of your daily life in whatever small way you can make it happen. Because while the election is still over a year away, the campaign has already started.
Theresa 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.
