I largely walked away from the election about half way through. When Justin Trudeau ended the third week by taking a day off, despite the pundits and the pollsters saying he was losing, I knew that the election was pretty much in the bag. What happened after that would not and did not change that outcome.
The aftermath has been predictable as well. Both Mr. Singh and Mr. O'Toole are on the hot seat and it is an open question of whether either will still be the leaders of their respective parties in the new year. My guess is that Mr. Singh will survive. The NDP does not have a history of eating its leaders and they have been accepting mediocrity since before I was born so he will probably be OK. Mr. O'Toole has a 50/50 chance. The revelation about him double-dipping on his housing allowance is just the thing that can be used to turf him. Keep an eye on that. His only saving grace is there is no obvious choice to replace him. Mr. Ford and Mr. Kenney have both shit the bed in their respective provinces, none of the current CPC front bench are worth a damn and there is no outsider who has the stature to be able to convince Canadians to vote for them as PM just months after winning the leadership.
The Liberals won again but it is only going to become tougher from here on out. The simple fact is the next time we go to the polls Justin Trudeau and the Liberals will have been in power for around eight years and they will be going for their fourth straight mandate. As I have stated here many times governments have life spans. Usually around the eight year mark the desire for change becomes very high and voters begin to look seriously at the alternatives. If they can live with that alternative they make the change. The Liberals will be in that situation the next time we go to the polls. While it is not guaranteed that Canadians will want to make a change it could be a strong possibility.
The problem for the Party that would replace the Liberals is they are going through a serious identity crisis. Are they the hard-right populist party that the West wants them to be or the more moderate conservative party that central Canada wants them to be? How do they satisfy their social conservative supporters without alienating moderate voters who do not want to even talk about their issues? They are going to have to figure that out. However, do not believe for a second that their problems automatically eliminate them from contention. Mr. O'Toole tried to paper over these conflicts but he did a lousy job of it and Canadians were not ready for change anyway. The next time the situation will be different and either Mr. O'Toole or his replacement could be more convincing at hiding the Conservatives' inner conflicts. Mr. Ford became Premier of Ontario because there was a strong desire for change and he managed to appear non-threatening. That was the strategy that Erin O'Toole attempted this time without success but there is no guarantee it will not work the next time, assuming they try to repeat that strategy again.
This is not to say that the Liberals will lose the next election. However, I would point out that the outcome of this election was never in doubt regardless of what the pollster and pundits were saying. The only question at the beginning of this election campaign was whether the Liberals would win another minority or win their much sought after majority. That question never changed. The next time the question will be can the Liberals win a fourth straight mandate? I do not have an answer but I do know that it is possible that the answer could be no.
1 comment:
Historically, incumbent prime ministers do not usually win four straight mandates. Even Trudeau the elder lost to Joe Clark in 1979 but came back for a fifth, his last, in 1980. That being said, this is a very different world than it was in PET's time and the parties themselves are a lot different -- not for the better, either. O'Toole is no Clark; he pretends to be a "moderate" and gets his image polished by the compliant media, but this really isn't your father's (or grandfather's) Conservative party: he's papering over the GOP-style rot that still animates it. The NDP are no longer a serious party, they're a meme club. They're little more than orange cons in that they have no other mode besides shitposting their hatred of Trudeau.
The media landscape is different too since PET's time. Who knows whether or not Justin Trudeau may or may not get tired of the abuse leveled at him and now even his family. I think he may run again, but if the outcome isn't in his favour, I doubt he'd return for another kick at the can like his dad did. Thing is I really don't think Freeland would do as well in Quebec, and even if she did win government, the Liberals would probably be right back to where they are right now.
I think part of this depends on how long this particular parliament can stretch out. If the Liberals can hold on until 2024, it's conceivable they could benefit from the redistricting, as well as the backdrop of the U.S. election campaign. Trump is undoubtedly going to run again, and could even win due to Republican voter suppression and the media craving the chaos they got to cover from 2016 onward. The Liberals would get to frame the ballot question around trusting either them or the Conservatives to handle Trump (while painting the Conservatives as Trump Party North). The caveat of minority parliaments however, particularly in the "Trudeau derangement" era, is that the other parties are bereft of meaningful policy and so will rely on the usual tactics of attacking Trudeau with overblown "scandals" that they'll have the opportunity to waste fishing expeditions on at committees. Having lost to him now three times they will only get angrier, dial up the scandal-mongering even louder and throw everything they can at Trudeau from their... "Tool(e) box".
But I think you're correct anything could happen and not to count the Liberals out though. It will be an uphill battle but Trudeau has been underestimated before.
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