When Liberals Lose Toronto

Monday night, Liberal candidate Leslie Church lost the by-election for Toronto—St Paul’s, the Toronto riding held by the Honourable Carolyn Bennett since 1997, to Conservative Don Stewart. There are many ways to see this outcome, none of which are encouraging to the Liberal campaign team.

Leslie Church herself was a candidate with a strong political pedigree. She started on the Hill a few months before I did, served on Michael Ignatieff’s leadership team in 2006 before that, and spent a few years at Google during the deep opposition years before becoming a key player in the Ministers’ Offices circuit. She knows the game, she has been through it all, and she would have been a pretty strong asset to both the party and the country in elected office.

None of it mattered.

Canadians, even in Toronto, have had enough of Justin Trudeau. They no longer believe him. They no longer believe in him. And they don’t understand why he is still there, hanging on, overstaying his welcome. Regardless of what he has done for this country, how he stick-handled the greatest international health crisis in a generation, or of what I view to be his profoundly altruistic motivations, people are just tired of hearing from or about him.

When Canadians are in this kind of mood, some kind of change is inevitable. The ballot question becomes a simple matter of whether or not we want a fresh face. There is very little evaluation done of what face that would be, or what the person behind it stands for.

Since moving to the Maritimes a few months ago, an area where Liberals consistently outperform their colleagues in the rest of the country, I have been constantly surprised by the degree of animosity toward the brand, the party, the government. People here from demographics that are associated with being the absolute backbone of Liberal support have practically spit while telling me they would never vote Liberal again.

I saw the beginnings of this in my own defeat in 2019. People would tell me and my team all over the riding that “we want David, but we don’t want Justin Trudeau” to which many of my supporters said after the election: “congratulations, you lost David but you kept Justin.”

In private life, people ask me all the time what I think of the Prime Minister. I tell them each the same thing: the Prime Minister is deeply principled and profoundly intellectual man who doesn’t actually enjoy people, and serves out of a sense of obligation. His public persona is one of being an easy guy to talk with, loving of attention and crowds, but in my view that’s not really who he is. And at some point, the public feels it when someone is putting on an act. Messages like ‘he was a drama teacher’ take on a negative connotation that it shouldn’t — that alone is more real-world experience than Poilievre has, and is far from the only item on his CV. Worse, if the Prime Minister were to just be himself now, Canadians would think he’s avoiding them or changing for opportunistic political reasons and would find new ways to see him in a negative light for that, too.

It’s lose-lose.

He wants to hang on for many reasons. Not least of which is that there is no obvious successor who would be both palatable to Justin’s inner circle, who intend to retain control of the party after his departure, and the public at large. I used to joke that while Justin Trudeau would never fire Katie Telford, Katie would eventually fire Justin.

There are other issues, too, that I was criticised for not covering in the linked essay last year, most important of which is Trudeau’s fear that a Conservative government would undo his nine years of vastly overdue and still far from complete progress on Indigenous relations with wanton disregard for our history and the people it impacts.

I don’t, personally, see a path in which the Liberal government can win the next election, barring a fall from grace by Pierre Poilievre so spectacular that even Canada’s overwhelmingly right wing media would be forced to cover it. How comprehensive the defeat becomes will mostly be about how hard the government tries to avoid it. Even a win by Donald Trump in the intervening period south of the border will be met with a collective yawn akin to a poorly done movie remake with too much product placement.

If the Canadian people feel like the Liberal government is bending over backward to make amends with the voting public, they’ll be taken as desperate and insincere. If they simply ignore the apparent concerns of the public, they’ll be seen as uncaring. The best thing they can do is simply focus on doing as good a job as they can, not insofar as the creation of a legacy agenda, but just in flying the burning plane all the way to the ground to improve their passengers’ chances of a survivable landing.

When Paul Martin lost the election at the start of 2006, the Kelowna accord and National Child Care were his defining issues, among the lengthy list of “priorities” his opponents derided to portray him as unfocused. It will be hard to portray these same issues as priorities at the end of another decade-long run in government.

I fear that the campaign will be framed by the Liberal team as being a referendum on the full implementation of a national Pharmacare program or some other as-yet unannounced last-minute legacy item, to which voters will react by saying, “but you had 9 years to do that and you didn’t get it done.” And they will be right.

My advice now is to batten down the hatches. Interesting times are in the forecast.