One of the last Covid thugs of the democratic world is in deep, deep do-do. I refer to Canada’s Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party. (Note to readers: in Canada the Liberal Party is and has always been a Left-of-centre party, these days a lot Left-of-centre. Here in Australia the Liberal Party has historically been Right-of-centre, though a fair few current Liberal Party MPs of the Black Hand Gang persuasion – I’m looking at you Simon Birmingham and most all of the remaining partyroom MPs who voted to defenestrate Tony Abbott in favour of Malcolm Turnbull – would much prefer the name ‘Liberal Party’ to be pronounced with a heavy Canadian accent. That’s one of the key underlying difficulties for Peter Dutton, the many, too-many wets in caucus who are incredibly out-of-step with the party base. We saw how that worked out for the Tories in Britain, didn’t we?)
At any rate, some readers might recall that three months ago Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada suffered a terrible by-election blow when it lost an inner-city Toronto seat that had been held by the Liberals for eons. To the shock of many, this past June Team Trudeau lost this blue-ribbon inner Toronto seat to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by 633 votes. That was bad for Justin. It was also bad for Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal Party Deputy Prime Minister, as this by-election loss was for a seat that was next door to her own in the inner-city heartlands of Toronto. (Second note to readers: the Opposition Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre did not throw together Lefty policies to try to cater to this inner-city seat full of the sort of wokesters who here in Australia vote Teal. He simply explained how real conservative policies would help them; he shunned all the focus group risk-averse crap; and he ran knowing he could easily win the next general election without such seats but that if the voters in this inner-city constituency wanted to jettison Trudeau they’d be most welcome to come aboard a party with actual conservative values and policies. This approach produced a stunning upset win.)
That was three months ago in June. Then just two weeks ago there were two more by-elections in Canada. One was in Manitoba in the west of Canada where the Liberals generally do badly (to the extent that in the 1980 general election the Liberals won a majority government while taking only two seats, all up, in any of the four western provinces). And in this just held Manitoba by-election the Liberal candidate won – wait for it – only 4.8% of the vote. Ouch! That is strikingly bad even for the Liberal Party in western Canada. The other by-election from two weeks ago took place in Montreal in one of the most historically famous Liberal Party constituencies in the country. At the last general election the Liberals had won the seat by over 10,000 votes. Yet in this just held by-election they lost the seat by 248 votes to the separatist French-Canadian party the Bloc Quebecois that only runs candidates in Quebec. The Liberals gained only 27% of the vote in the by-election. This, by the way, is a riding or constituency that has been held by a former Canadian Liberal Prime Minister. Hence this was a very, very bad result for Justin.
And what was the Canadian Prime Minister’s response to these two brutal by-election defeats? You can’t make this up. It was a combination of two things. There was the trite, vacuous, vapid, hackneyed, platitudinous slogans that up until recently had served Justin so well – “there is lots to reflect on” and “we need to stay focused” type verbiage. And then there was the blame-shifting founded on a core level sanctimony and smugness. After the two by-election losses Trudeau announced that “Canadians need to be more engaged”. Got that? He seems to think that he lost because the dumb plebs and Hilary Clinton type deplorables weren’t paying attention to all the supposedly good things he and his Government were doing. (Leave aside that on nearly every front the Canadian economy is bad, the Government’s “accomplishments” near-on non-existent and the Trudeau carbon tax is massively unpopular. Pay attention Mr. Dutton. Pierre Poilievre promises to get rid of the Trudeau carbon tax; get rid of the federal EV mandate; get rid of the Trudeau ban on crude oil tankers off British Columbia’s north coast. The Lefties are saying Poilievre will “lay waste to Trudeau’s environmental legislative legacy”. Oh, and don’t forget that Mr. Poilievre continues to pledge to halve the budget of the national broadcaster CBC TV and to turn the broadcaster’s posh head offices (think Sydney’s Ultimo) into social housing units. When a leader is chosen by the paid-up party members – as in Canada, where there are now over 750,000 Conservative party members who alone can vote for leader and only they can remove him – you can observe this thing known as ‘a backbone’ in Right-of-centre party leaders because the views of the partyroom Black Hand Gang types do not determine policy.)
As I said at the start, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is in deep, deep do-do. He is in his ninth year as PM. His first election win was a big majority Government followed by two minority Government wins. When Trudeau first won office back in 2015 he scored 63% approval, a sky high number. Today, after the Left-wing economic policies, all the Covid thuggery, the waning appeal of his vapid pretty boy routine, Trudeau’s approval rating sits at 28%. A few Liberal Party MPs are starting to say out loud that Justin should step down. Polls have consistently shown Trudeau’s Liberals to be about 20 – yes, 20 – points behind Poilievre’s Conservatives. (And in my entire life I don’t recall a Tory party that far ahead in the polls. Canada is a more Left-wing country than here. The median Canadian voter would be a standard deviation or more to the political Left of the median Australian voter.) The Tories lead in every province save Quebec. A couple of recent polls have indicated the Liberals might come in fourth, fourth, in the next election. There are now 343 MPs in Canada’s lower house, the House of Commons, and some polls put in doubt whether the Liberals can win even 35 of those 343 – so just inner city Montreal, the bureaucratic capital city of Ottawa (which is like Canberra in being allergic to conservative outlooks), and maybe a few inner city Toronto ones.
All of this is why the further left NDP party earlier this month tore up its minority Government coalition agreement with Trudeau’s Liberal party. Canada has five-year terms and the next election could be dragged out till as late as next October. But the NDP is just watching to see when a general election might see it replace the Libs as the main party of the Left. It’s balancing that against the clear likelihood of a big Tory win and postponing that for another while. But the odds of the NDP pulling the plug on Trudeau go up with every bad poll and every passing day.
Don’t say I never give readers good news. If the current state of Canadian politics won’t cheer you up then nothing will.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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