I have read some commentary that the election of Joe Biden is bad news for Justin Trudeau because Canadians will no longer compare him to Donald Trump.
What silliness. Although Canadians do care what happens in the US and we tend to take sides with regard to who we would like to be President that does not translate into any real impact in Canadian politics.
I would remind these commentators that Canadians absolutely loved Barrack Obama but that did not stop them from giving Stephen Harper a majority government in 2011. If their arguments would have carried any weight that should not have happened.
However, there may be some impact on the Conservatives. One thing Mr. Trump did was spawn a bunch of Trump imitators and in Canada we have Conservative politicians, at the Federal and Provincial levels, following the Trump play book.
They are doing this because they saw it worked for Mr. Trump so they believe it will work for them. As well, they can imitate him because the world has been distracted for the last four years by the real thing in the United States so voters in Canada have not really been paying attention to his imitators.
However, the US general election has demonstrated that using Trumpian methods are not effective. Certainly, when he was safely ensconced in the White House he seemed untouchable but when he was finally tested in the general election he lost and lost big. That should give his imitators in Canada pause, particularly Mr. Kenney and Mr. Ford. Both followed the Trump playbook to get elected and continue to use it and like Mr. Trump they were successful, at first, but Mr. Trump also demonstrated that his style of politics wears down voters very quickly and accelerates the desire for change amongst the electorate.
Second, his eviction from the White House will reduce his power and influence on US politics. He can still be a blowhard but without any access to the levers of power all he will be able to do is talk. Without any effective way to exercise power he will fade into a voice in the wilderness, with only his most ardent supporters caring what he says, and even that will probably fade over time
So will his lesser stature cause the spotlight to shift a little bit to the actions and words of his imitators in other countries? As the spotlight shifts from him will it focus on his imitators in Canada? Canadians despised Mr. Trump. Even a large number of people who identified as Conservative despised him. Will that disdain shift to his imitators once the world breaths a sigh of relief at his departure?
Only time will tell of course. However, if it does, even by a little bit it will put the Conservatives into a bit of a bind as they may be forced to choose between abandoning Trumpism, and the Canadian voters who like that style of politics, or continuing to following the Trump playbook and possibly alienating those who despise that style of politics.
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Trudeau didn't even mention Trump in the 2019 campaign, despite the urging of some "hawks" to do so. I think the Liberals had maybe one or two ads where Freeland was highlighted as having closed the deal on NAFTA, but there were no specific mentions of Trump in the Liberal campaign materials. (Most likely due to Trump's irritability and potential for retaliation.) Instead, what the Liberals did to great success was to tie Andrew Scheer to Doug Ford, with the messaging that a Conservative government at the federal level would be a broader repeat of the disaster being wrought upon Ontario. Scheer didn't help himself much either with his own photo ops with Ford, plus the MacLean's cover story about the "resistance" being a blue wall of stubbornness against Trudeau. Scheer wasn't in Trump's shadow as much as he was Ford and other provincial conservatives.
Which means the same will be true of O'Toole and his backer Kenney, currently the least popular premier in Canada due to his absolute malicious sabotage of the COVID response. Although O'Toole has not helped himself on the Trump comparison either, even going so far as to proudly state verbatim on CBC that his "Canada First" language is "no different" from Trump's. But even without Trump, all the Liberals would need to do is to point to the hellscape of Alberta and say O'Toole will replicate it across the country. They literally just have to do a find and replace for Doug Ford and Andrew Scheer.
I would think also that Trudeau would register a positive comparison to Biden, and nostalgia for the Obama "bromance" era of the initial Trudeau honeymoon in 2016 before Trump was elected and everything went to hell. For all the tin foil conspiracy theories promulgated by the likes of Poilievre and Rempel-Garner, this is all that the "great reset" is about: a chance to make (North) America normal again.
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