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Trudeau isn’t as resilient as he once was, and that’s a problem for Liberals

CAMPBELL CLARK

It was the same place, the Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal, where he celebrated his election as prime minister in 2015, but it was not the same Liberal Party waiting for the same Justin Trudeau. This time, the Liberals had spent five weeks watching their leader wrestle with the public’s doubts about his motivations.

He looked the same, still, at 49. But six years ago the Justin Trudeau of 2015 was a figure who for many seemed to symbolize good intentions, even for some who weren’t sure about his politics or ability.

The 2021 Mr. Trudeau had trouble convincing folks he had the right motivations.

The obvious thing was the question about whether he had only called on an election, as a fourth wave of COVID-19 rose, for his political interest, to win a majority. But it wasn’t the only thing. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaigned on the idea that Mr. Trudeau promised progressive things but didn’t really care about them.

The gamble that Mr. Trudeau was taking in calling an election on Aug. 15 – that Canadians would want to move beyond the pandemic with the kind of ‘we have your back’ expansive government they had seen in the crisis – didn’t turn out to be the real wager he was making. It was whether enough still believed he was motivated by the right things.

After pumping out CERB cheques and delivering vaccines, the Liberals expected they’d be riding favourable polls to a straightforward majority. On election day, they were tense, prepared to count even the smallest margin of victory as a win, for now.

This time, the room at the Queen Elizabeth was filled more sparsely (for COVID-19 protocols) than it was in 2015, when a crowd crushed in to applaud the just-elected Mr. Trudeau. Liberal insiders had been making hopeful predictions of last-minute momentum, on the one hand, and then fretting that it was too unpredictable.

There is still some resilience in Mr. Trudeau’s image. The question about why he called the election dogged him longer than any Liberal strategist expected. But there was a bounceback in mid-campaign.

Taking a harder line against protestors, those opposing vaccine mandates or sometimes just shouting vitriolic conspiracy theories, brought back a level of passion into his campaigning. In the final days of the campaign, Alberta’s COVID-19 state of emergency brought back the vaccine-mandates issue that Mr. Trudeau had long tried to make into a wedge with Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole since the start of the campaign. On doorsteps in Ontario, Liberals found it helped them to talk to voters again about the CERB and vaccines. On the hustings, Mr. Trudeau talked up the Liberal record on climate change to fight back against Mr. Singh’s assertion that he doesn’t really govern as a progressive.

In political terms, Mr. Trudeau had a lot to work with to lure voters, including a platform that promised $78-billion in new spending over five years, on top of a three-year $101-billion recovery plan outlined in the April budget.

But Mr. Singh argued Canada’s problems came from the Liberal Leader’s lack of genuine concern. The Liberal government fell short in removing all boil-water advisories from First Nations because of a lack of political will, he insisted; he argued if Mr. Trudeau cared about the housing crisis, there wouldn’t still be one.

The NDP was targeting doubts about whose side Mr. Trudeau is really on, precisely because they believed they were growing among some who once voted for him.

And when the Liberal Leader opened the campaign talking about stricter vaccine restrictions for travel and public servants, there seemed to be a question hanging in the air: Why is he talking about that now?

Today, that’s still a problem for the Liberal Party. It’s Mr. Trudeau’s party, the most undivided it has been in several decades. Liberals can question some of his decisions, but there is no one else waiting in the wings who appears able to match his presence on the political stage. Yet he struggles to get the benefit of the doubt from a plurality.

Clearly, the Liberals made mistakes in failing to properly prepare the ground for an election campaign they were considering on and off for a year, and poorly framing its purpose from the day Mr. Trudeau visited Rideau Hall.

But the question over his motivations was already a recurring weakness. His ratings were riding high in the first months of the pandemic, after panic and lockdowns and CERB, but the thing that clipped that rebound in his popularity wasn’t a publichealth failure or economic collapse but the WE Charity affair. The surprise of a pandemic program being put in the hands of folks who had worked closely with Mr. Trudeau and his family made people wonder about his motives.

He bounced back. There is still goodwill among some who want to believe him like they did 2015. Then he was questioned again. Then struggled to rebound. But he is a politician who has suffered wear and tear being front and centre for six years, and the Mr. Trudeau of 2021 isn’t as resilient.

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2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-21T07:00:00.0000000Z

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