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Harris breathes new life into Democratic Party. Could someone do the same for Canada’s Liberals?
When President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would not seek reelection, his decision, albeit a little late, was quickly applauded by Democrats as a service to his country — and party.
In the higher-minded rhetoric, Biden was cast as a modern Cincinnatus, putting duty above personal interest. Perhaps the writing was already on the wall, with Biden unlikely to resist the growing calls for him to step aside. But the immediate effects of his decision are the same either way: Vice President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, an energetic change candidate, and the party has enjoyed an immediate reenergizing.
After Biden dropped out, the Dems raised an astonishing $150 million from big donors, as well as $81 million from small donors in a record-breaking 24 hours. As many joked on X, Harris outgrossed “Twisters” in her opening weekend. Of note, much of the money came from smaller individual donations of $200 or less — 888,000 of them, in fact.
The Harris campaign immediately rallied tens of thousands of volunteers, hitting 28,000 by Monday, many in battleground states. Scripps News reports that’s 100 times greater than the campaign average. A Zoom call with Black women who support Harris drew 44,000 participants — a staggering number that exceeded the company’s limit of 1,000 people and required it to move the group to a webinar.
The energy boost Democrats are enjoying may have Canadian Liberals wondering if a similar outcome might be possible for them. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insists he’s staying on as leader, readying to fight in the fall 2025 election despite being roughly 20 points behind Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. By the time the vote rolls around, Trudeau will have been in power for a decade.
Trudeau has been asked to step down by a few notable sources within his party, but the pressure to leave hasn’t risen to the level Biden faced. That could be because the election is still more than a year away, or because Poilievre doesn’t present the existential threat to democracy and rights that Dems say Trump poses. Liberals may also think that for all their misfortune, they could still turn things around and that Trudeau is their best bet for doing so. But things don’t look great.
Election projection site 338 Canada’s Philippe Fournier projects the Conservatives will win 212 seats compared to 74 for the Liberals. That’s based on a popular vote projection of 42% for Poilievre’s side compared to 24% for Trudeau’s, a spread that reflects federal polls that routinely find the Conservatives ahead by 14 to 20 points or more. Trudeau’s approval rating, meanwhile, has sunk to all-time lows.
The Conservatives are leading their rivals in fundraising by a lot. In the first three months of 2024, the party brought in just under CA$11 million from 51,000 donors, which was triple what the Liberals managed and more than all opposing federal parties combined. Political donations in Canada are a fraction of what they are in the US, but the Conservative numbers are high for the country. In 2023, Poilievre broke records with roughly 200,000 donors pledging over $35 million. The Liberals managed $15.6 million.
As bad as things look for the Liberals, however, there doesn’t seem to be much hope that anyone else could turn the Liberal campaign around like Harris looks poised to do in the US.
“There’s pretty good data to suggest that when incumbents are replaced by a successor [in Canada,]” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group, “the successor has much lower chances of reelection than the original incumbent, especially when that original incumbent’s poll ratings are below a certain threshold where they’re doing pretty poorly.”
Perhaps the most infamous example was in 1993, after Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stepped down amid plunging poll numbers and was replaced by Kim Campbell. The PCs lost that election to the Liberals, dropping from 156 seats to two.
The United Kingdom’s recent election is further evidence of the phenomenon. The unpopular Conservatives dropped to 121 seats from 365, losing control of the government to an ascendant Labour Party after roughly 14 years in power — and after cycling through five prime ministers.
Thompson says it’s unlikely there’s anyone in the Liberal Party who could replace Trudeau and turn the ship around. Those within Trudeau’s Cabinet are tied to his government and record, painted with the same brush. And those outside the party would face their own challenges, including time.
“Somebody would have to come in and distance themselves from the government here up to this point," he says, "and embrace a set of policies and a style which would have to be very different.”
“I don’t think that just putting a new coat of paint on the same sort of decrepit structure is going to change the fundamentals. You would really have to be a new government, and that’s going to be very hard for somebody who has been a member of that government up to this point who doesn’t have a long runway to prepare that pivot or transition.”
Thompson also points out that for external candidates, like former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney — with whom sources say Trudeau recently met in a bid to get him to join his government — there are few if any incentives to hop on a sinking ship. Moreover, no replacement candidate of Harris’ caliber seems ready, willing, and able to serve.
The numbers bear out that analysis. A recent Nanos poll found that while 19% of respondents chose Carney as the most appealing Liberal leader, followed by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland at 19%, and Trudeau himself at 9%, a quarter chose “None of the above” and another 20% chose “unsure.”
Harris may be able to continue to inject life into the Democratic Party. She may have a real shot at turning the Democrats' campaign around. But she still has to prove she can stand up to Trump on the national stage.
It doesn’t seem that anyone can — or wants to — do the same for the Liberals, which means Trudeau looks likely to stick around, go down with the ship, and leave the reinvigoration and rebuilding to a successor, who’ll find themselves not on the government side but in the opposition seats.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew shake hands as they meet at the Manitoba Legislative Building in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada February 15, 2024.
Left-leaning premier calls for increased military spending
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced new pressure Wednesday from an unusual source to increase defense spending, when Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said Canada should boost spending to preserve its trade relationship with the United States.
Kinew, a member of the left-leaning New Democrats – a party that is traditionally opposed to increased military spending – said, “If we’re not meeting our responsibility to our NATO allies, it is going to have an impact on [the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement] renewal.”
The trade agreement is set to be reviewed in 2026, which will create the opportunity for the United States to push for changes, which seems likely no matter who is in the White House, since the pressure from the U.S. dairy industry, among others, is likely to persist.
During a NATO summit in Washington last week, under pressure from US politicians, Trudeau announced that Canada will hit the NATO target of 2% of GDP by 2032, and buy a new fleet of submarines, but he has not laid out a plan for doing so. Back in Canada after the summit, Defense Minister Bill Blair said it would amount to about CA$60 billion a year in spending, which economists would require significant cuts or spending increases.
Traditionally, defense spending has not been a vote winner in Canada, but if opinion leaders are increasingly seeing it as linked to the vital trade relationship, that may be changing.
US President Joe Biden greets Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as they attend NATO's 75th anniversary summit in Washington, July 10, 2024.
Stepping up and stepping down: Biden and Trudeau’s two-step problems
For President Joe Biden right now, his biggest challenge is stepping down.
Feverishly trying to quell the internal Democrat rebellion — which actor/democratic fundraiser George Clooney publicly joined yesterday — Biden is doing interviews and working backrooms to try to hold on to power. It’s not working. Despite many allies coming forward to defend him against the so-called nervous nellies, Biden cannot contain the daily calls to step down that are coming from inside the Democratic house. Instead of fighting Donald Trump on one front, as he should be right now, Biden is fighting a two-front war, one internally and one externally, and it looks increasingly like he will lose both. The center cannot hold.
Stepping up is often seen as an act of leadership and courage, leaning into a fight against all odds. Stepping down is viewed as weak, a retreat from the arena. So it’s natural that Biden insists on stepping up and continuing to fight. That’s a given for any political leader.
But after the disastrous debate revealed how diminished Biden has become, 10 House Democrats, one senator, and countless high-profile Democratic operators like James Carville are openly trying to rebrand Biden stepping down as an act of leadership, not surrender. They argue Biden has served well and his record is strong, but that the best way to protect his legacy is to step away and let someone else defend it. They are right.
Democrats are haunted by the ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Despite deep concerns about her age and her health, the legendary Supreme Court justice refused to step down to let President Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Senate appoint a new justice. Instead, she kept stepping up, clinging to her post for so long that when she finally passed away at 87, Donald Trump got to replace her. In the blink of an eye, RBG’s legacy was in tatters and Roe v. Wade was overturned. It was a generational error for Democrats, and many see it being repeated with Biden.
In 2008, when Hillary Clinton was running against Obama, she released the famous “3 a.m. phone call” ad. “It’s 3 a.m., your children are safe and asleep, who do you want answering the phone?,” the baritone phone asked, before cutting to a picture of Clinton on the phone dealing with a crisis. Does anyone believe Biden could take that call now? In four years? Biden recently announced — in a shocking own goal — that he won’t be doing events after 8 p.m. so he can get more sleep. So one thinks a guy Trump has dubbed “Sleepy Joe” needs more sleep. What happens at 3 a.m. when the phone rings? Biden might not even be able to hit the snooze button.
In parliamentary democracies, there are votes of no confidence, which can bring down a government and remove a leader. It is a key check and balance on power. In the US, this doesn’t exist. A motion to vacate can remove the Speaker of the House, as we saw recently with Kevin McCarthy, but outside of impeachment, removing a president is hard. Still, the growing calls for Biden to step down — especially from people who admire and have supported him — are a de facto vote of no confidence.
The next few days are crucial for Biden as he does public interviews and leads the NATO summit to try to show the world he is still in the game and ready to lead for four more years. It will not be enough. Biden can’t interview his way out of old age anymore than Trump can promise to stop lying. These are two immutable candidate qualities. The challenge for both parties is to either accept these profound flaws of their leaders — as Republicans clearly have — and damn the consequences or … to honestly assess the situation and do something about it.
For Biden in 2024, stepping down would be his way of stepping up.
For Justin Trudeau, who is also facing multiple calls to step down, this week is a reversal: He has to answer calls to step up on national defense, and he just has. Today, Trudeau announced that Canada will finally reach the target of 2% of GDP to be spent on the military by 2032, though he has not revealed many details on how this will happen. We cover this later in the newsletter, but Trudeau clearly realizes that on the 75th anniversary of NATO, with a war raging in Ukraine and Trump possibly winning the next election, NATO laggards are losers. Hitting the 2% target is now table stakes if Canada is to be taken seriously in NATO or at the G7 or G20. But is it realistic?
As important as it is to hit the NATO target, it will not be cheap. Tens of billions of dollars will be added to the national defense budget, something the Trudeau government, or a potential Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre, would have to find. That means either higher deficits or deep program cuts. The reason Canada has not hit the 2% mark before is simple: choices. There are more votes in health care transfer payments and social programs than in defense. But Trudeau knows that he has to make this promise to be taken seriously and to have any purchase with a future Trump administration. It is an open question to see if future governments actually fulfill it and stick to the timeline.
Is it enough to help Trudeau in the polls? No. It will make no difference. His dismal polling numbers are tied to inflation, the cost of housing, and nine years of governance, not national defense. But sometimes, even when facing calls to step down, you have to make the hard choice to step up.
Leadership is about knowing when to step down and when to step up.
A drone view of three berths able to load vessels with oil is seen after their construction at Westridge Marine Terminal, the terminus of the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, April 26, 2024.
Alberta oil flowing, but that won’t help Trudeau
A pipeline that gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a huge headache is finally delivering benefits — to oil companies, at least — although Trudeau should not expect to get political rewards for his troubles.
Refineries in Washington state and Oregon are displacing Iraqi crude with cheaper oil from Alberta that is now available thanks to the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which moves bitumen-heavy Alberta crude from the oil sands in the north to the British Columbia coast.
Trudeau’s government has endured withering criticism from Western Canadians for failing to back the aggressive expansion of the emissions-intensive Alberta oil production. On the other hand, British Columbians opposed a potentially dangerous pipeline running to their beautiful coastal waters. Still, Trudeau brokered an uneasy compromise with Albertans, who couldn’t believe they had to sell their oil at a discount because of transport bottlenecks. To try to please both sides, in 2018, Trudeau bought the pipeline from Kinder Morgan for CDN $4.5 billion, which pleased nobody.
That decision is now looking like a win for the Canadian economy. There were huge cost overruns, but it will earn an estimated CA$26 to $38 billion over the next 20 years — and oil exporters don’t have to ship their product by railcar, which should get them higher prices, since they can reach new markets. The new oil in US refineries may give Americans slightly cheaper gas and, but the big winners are Canadian taxpayers, who are likely to benefit thanks to royalties and tax revenue for decades to come. Still, while it’s a big win for Alberta, Trudeau is unlikely to win any votes in the staunchly conservative oil patch, where his name is mud.
Canadian Liberals think about pulling the goalie
Spare a thought for Liberal Canadian hockey fans, who have had a tough week.
They cried into their beer Monday night as the Florida Panthers, rather than the Edmonton Oilers, skated away with the Stanley Cup. Then they tasted ashes Wednesday morning when they awoke to the news that the Liberals had lost a normally safe Toronto seat in a by-election.
While the bruised and bearded Oilers are headed to the golf course, the Liberal team has to stay on the ice and keep getting smashed into the boards by opponents, the fearsome Conservatives, who have a huge lead.
Whenever a team keeps losing, as the Liberals do, it’s normal to fire the manager, as the Oilers did Thursday. That’s terrible news for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the player/coach singularly responsible for the upset in Toronto.
It is a bad enough blow that everyone in the rink is now wondering if dumping Trudeau can spare the Liberals the drubbing they expect from the Conservatives.
Toronto-St. Paul’s — the riding the Liberals lost on Monday — has been held by the Liberal party since 1993, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives were swept from office. In the decades since, even when Stephen Harper presided over a Conservative majority government, Toronto-St. Paul’s and similar downtown ridings were unassailable Liberal bastions. Now and then, the left-wing NDP would take a seat or two in the grittier heart of the city, and the Conservatives nipped at the suburban edges, but most of Canada’s biggest city was safe for Liberal MPs.
Tired of Trudeau
Tuesday’s loss is a sign that the Liberals are losing even the progressive, well-educated urban professionals whose support they can normally take for granted. A low-profile Conservative candidate managed to beat a hard-working and talented Liberal by 590 votes in a riding the Liberals won by almost 14,000 votes in 2021. That’s a 25-point swing to the Conservatives.
“It’s an effing debacle of proportions I cannot even describe to a non-organizer,” one veteran party worker texted me. “We don’t lose those ridings.”
If there was a similar result in a general election, the Liberals would lose all but a handful of their seats in Ontario, a wipeout that would land them in third or fourth place, worse even than their position when Trudeau became leader.
Trudeau was a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. With his good looks and a dynastic connection to voters, he carried the party back to power when it was headed to oblivion. But the magic is gone. Trudeaumania has turned to Trudeau hate.
Ever since Conservatives elected Pierre Poilievre as leader in 2022, Trudeau has trailed him distantly in the polls. It doesn’t matter what he does. Having misread the public mood on immigration, housing, and cost-of-living concerns, he undertook a comprehensive reboot with his budget this spring, rolling out carefully designed new policies over several weeks in an expertly orchestrated campaign – and it did not move the dial at all. Canadians are tired of him and want a change, as they made clear in Toronto-St. Paul’s on Monday. They will get that change. The only question is how.
Many contenders
If Trudeau hangs on as long as he can – to the fall of 2025 – voters will get the change by wiping out the Liberals and electing Poilievre’s Conservatives. If Trudeau leaves now, the Liberals can try to give voters change in the form of a new leader.
After the loss, cabinet ministers went out to say Trudeau has their support and should stay, but insiders are nervously awaiting backbenchers or former ministers to call for Trudeau’s head. “That’s the part he doesn’t control,” said one. “And those voices might come from inside the house or outside the house.”
Trudeau wouldn’t have to heed those calls, but they could make his position untenable.
“Some people say, ‘Well, it’s impossible to push out a prime minister who doesn't want to go,’” says a well-connected Liberal. “Well, it's also hard to govern if you don’t have your caucus behind you.”
If Trudeau does announce soon that he will go, the party could hold a leadership race to end this fall with a new prime minister. There is no obvious successor, but there are promising contenders who could hope to prove themselves in a race, including Anita Anand, Mark Carney, François-Philippe Champagne, Sean Fraser, Mélanie Joly, and Dominic LeBlanc.
Until the whistle blows and we see how they skate, we won’t if any of them can handle a puck. None of them might have what it takes, but it is clear that until Trudeau is gone, nobody is going to be able to take a critical look at Poilievre, the man who wants to replace him.
If Trudeau is the Liberal candidate in the next election, it will be a referendum on him. If it is someone else, it might turn on a different question, like Poilievre’s as-yet-unknown plans for the country.
Of course, there is a good chance that whatever the Liberals do, they will lose. A leadership race may be dominated by debates about Gaza, creating a divisive spectacle that helps convince voters that it’s time to turn the page and bring in the Conservatives.
Dumping Trudeau is like pulling the goalie in the last seconds of a hockey game when you are down 2-1, as the Oilers did Tuesday night. It didn’t help in the end, but it might have, and they were going to lose if they didn’t.
Should Justin Trudeau go down with the ship?
As summer settles in, political parties on both sides of the border find themselves in election mode — with November’s US presidential election and Canada’s federal election by October 2025. While elections in Canada can be triggered early, the governing Liberals and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are not keen to meet voters anytime soon.
Meanwhile, as much as Trudeau confirms and reconfirms his intention to remain as leader, there’s plenty of speculation about whether he’ll stick around. Both Trudeau and Joe Biden are unpopular. Biden’s disapproval rating is hovering around 56%, with only 38.4% approving of his job performance, but his place on the ticket isn’t in doubt.
Trudeau’s place, on the other hand, very much is. His latest approval data from April confirms a downward trend that stretches back to 2020. Two months ago, a mere 28% of Canadians approved of him, while 66% disapproved. Just days ago, a poll put the Conservatives 20 points ahead of the Liberals as support for Trudeau’s party remains stuck in the 20s. That same poll found 59% of Canadians hold a negative opinion of Trudeau compared to 33% who have a positive opinion.
On Wednesday, another poll, this one by Ipsos, found 68% of Canadians want Trudeau to go. The polling firm’s CEO, Darrell Bricker, told Global News, “This is as bad as we’ve seen it for Trudeau. It’s close to rock bottom.”
Trudeau looks to make modern history
Trudeau is vying for his fourth election win in a row — a feat no prime minister has managed since Wilfried Laurier did it in 1908. Others have tried, including Trudeau’s father, who came close, but Canadians tend to grow weary of a leader by the time a fourth election rolls around.
On Monday, Trudeau dismissed the polls and his approval rating, telling the CBC’s David Cochrane that voters aren’t in “decision mode” right now. “What you tell a pollster, if they ever manage to reach you, is very different from the choice Canadians end up making in an election campaign,” he said.
Some voters are in decision mode, though. Next week features a byelection in Toronto–St. Paul's, a Liberal stronghold since 1993. An upset is unlikely, but all the Conservatives need is a strong showing, and there’s speculation that this contest – for one of 338 parliamentary seats — could have an outsized effect on the Canadian political scene as a referendum on the future of the government and Trudeau.
But would the Liberals be better off without the man who led them back from the edge of oblivion and into power with a majority government in 2015? For months, pollsters, pundits, social media posters, and plenty of others have speculated about who could replace Trudeau on the ticket, and how they’d fare.
Post-Trudeau options
In May, pollster David Colletto of Abacus Data discussed his firm’s data on preferred Trudeau replacements. Of those polled, 54% were unsure who could best replace him, while 13% preferred Finance Minister Chyrstia Freeland, and 11% favored of former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney. Behind them came Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and Industry Minister Franćois-Philippe Champagne at 5% each. Both Joly and Champagne, incidentally, would likely be poised to perform best in Quebec, an essential province for the Liberals.
It’s hard to think of a Trudeau replacement taking the reins ahead of the next election without thinking about the early 1990s, when the late Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was tanking in the polls and stepped aside, appointing Kim Campbell in his place. She was put in a tough spot, and in the 1993 election, Campbell and her party went from 154 seats to 2, dropping from first to fifth place in Parliament. Conservatives didn’t win a federal election again until a united right managed a minority government under Stephen Harper in 2008.
In June, a Nanos poll found the Liberals would fare better in 2025 with Trudeau out of the picture, with 56% favoring a replacement and a mere 17% supporting the prime minister.
The case for going down with the ship
The numbers suggest that the Liberals would be electorally better off without Trudeau, but could an immediate successor do much better? Trudeau is a strong campaigner, and Canadians could very well transfer their anger and frustrations from Trudeau to his replacement – like they did with Campbell. After a brief improvement in their numbers when Campbell was appointed, the PCs crashed back down to earth. Hard.
That ended Campbell’s career. Should the Liberals take a similar path, they could end up sacrificing one of their rising stars in the same way. Alternatively, should Trudeau stay, there’s a small chance that he pulls off another win. Others have made comebacks in Canadian politics, including Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne in 2014 and British Columbia Premier Christy Clark in 2013.
If Trudeau stays on and loses, the party might still come out better in the long run. The Liberals would get a fresh start with a new leader and a few years to sort themselves out while the country takes a turn getting tired of another party.
Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's global macro-geopolitics practice, agrees. “A successor usually struggles to turn the ship around, and they often don’t get a second chance,” he says.
“There is logic to the idea that Trudeau should go down with the ship in order to give his successor a full parliament to put their own stamp on the party and begin to rebuild its policy and organizational capacity,” Thompson adds.
In this way, Trudeau is both the party’s “biggest liability and their best shot to limit the damage in the upcoming campaign,” says Thompson.
Are the Liberals counting on a Trump card?
While a comeback for the Liberals is a long shot, the cynical talk around Ottawa is of an aptly named Trump card. The reasoning: A Donald Trump win in the US would galvanize progressives in Canada, bolstering Liberal support and making it easier for the party to paint Trudeau’s opponent, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, as Maple Trump.
Linking Trump and Poilievre will not be that easy, says Thompson. Canada’s Conservatives are pushing back against the effort, he explains, by staying focused on economic messaging and distancing themselves from the Republican nominee.
There’s also a risk the plan is “too clever by half” and backfires, he argues.
“It’s always possible that voters conclude that the Tories would be better positioned to handle relations with a Trump 2.0 administration,” Thompson says.
So, should Trudeau stay, or should he go? Please share your thoughts with us here.
Why is Justin Trudeau still prime minister?
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went to Port Colborne, Ontario, last week for a good news announcement about an EV battery plant, he probably expected to get a bit of credit for it. Instead, a reporter reminded him that he’s 20 points behind the Conservatives in the polls.
“The public appears to have an overwhelmingly negative view of you personally,” Globe and Mail reporter Laura Stone said, “and you seem to have lost control of the conversation on some of the key issues that Canadians care about. I think the public might be looking at you and your position right now and thinking ‘For the good of the Liberal Party, why is he staying on?’”
Stone said what many think. Trudeau has been trailing Conservative Pierre Poilievre in the polls for so long that an aura of inevitability has settled on his opponent. And this spring’s budget, full of carefully conceived and artfully presented measures, did not appear to impact the public mood.
Polling shows that while the public approves of measures in the budget — including billions for housing and help for those struggling with the cost of living — voters were unimpressed by the whole package.
Failing to reboot
So if the problem isn’t the message, is it the messenger? In-depth polling shows that Canadians are not that enthusiastic about Poilievre, who many see as dishonest, even deceitful. But still, they have had it with Trudeau.
Whether former supporters have turned on the prime minister because of his mistakes or as a result of right-wing efforts to tarnish his name, it doesn’t matter. If the Liberal Party doesn’t show Trudeau the door, Canadian voters will next year.
Yet, Trudeau shows no sign of going anywhere. He publicly relishes the prospect of facing Poilievre in an election. And since the modern Liberal Party of Canada is Trudeau’s creation, it is unlikely to force him out. When he took over in 2013, the party was in third place, behind the socialist NDP, and going nowhere. Trudeau brought it back from the brink, partly because voters knew him as a child when his father Pierre was prime minister.
His policies have faced opposition
That connection has since worn out. During the pandemic, he alienated anti-vaxxers and libertarians. His environmental policies have caused simmering anger in the oil patch. Across the country, there is a widespread sense that he has failed to grasp cost-of-living concerns. Many hold him responsible for the housing crisis, and others share a profound irritation with what his critics see as virtue-signaling around diversity.
Even a growing number of Trudeau’s supporters think things might get easier if the Liberal Party had a different leader — with some pointing to Mark Carney, for example.
Does Trudeau get it? Disciplined politicians who are thinking about resigning don’t talk about it, because the minute they do, their problems multiply. Trudeau is good at being hard to read. His birth was front-page news, and he grew up accustomed to shielding himself from the public gaze and hiding his real feelings. So it is not possible to know if he is sincere in his repeated insistence that he plans to lead his party into the next election, and insiders have suggested the party has a target to start climbing out of its hole in public opinion by July.
Uniter becomes divider
If Trudeau is hellbent on staying, it may stem from an inability to recognize that his moment has passed. Over the past 16 months, while working on a book about his government, I learned that some people who worked closely with Trudeau believe he is a textbook narcissist.
“I think he’s narcissistic,” a former minister told me. “I think he truly believes that he is needed by Canada, has done great things to save Canada.” Other former colleagues are convinced that’s wrong, that Trudeau cares deeply about his country.
Either way, Trudeau is at a crossroads. After almost a decade in power, his charismatic presence, which once drew Canadians together, now divides them. If he is motivated by his love of Canada, it may be time for Trudeau to take that reporter’s question to heart – and to see that better serving his country may require stepping aside.
US President Joe Biden
Israel-Gaza policy shapes US and Canadian politics and elections
President Joe Biden is facing pressure as House Republicans press for a bill to chastise the administration for its Isreal policy, despite White House plans to go ahead with a $1 billion arms deal for the Jewish state.
What likely concerns Biden more than Republican censure, however, are the Gen Z voters — upset with his support for Israel — who may decide to park their votes elsewhere, or simply stay home on Election Day. Foreign policy crises like this are the last thing Biden’s approval rating needs.
North of the border, increasingly unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a similar challenge as younger voters, activists, and Muslim voters consider abandoning the governing Liberals even after the government adopted a partial arms embargo on Israel.
Biden and Trudeau’s best hope is that while voters, especially younger ones, care about Gaza, it may not be their central issue of concern. Most young voters, and voters of all ages, care more about the economy and cost of living. Still, it may not matter for Trudeau, who is as many as 20 points behind Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre, or Biden, who polls eight points behind Trump on the economy.