Mitch Heimpel: It's time for the Trudeau conversation

For the first time in a decade, it's not clear the Liberals are better off with this leader than they would be without him

Photo from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

By: Mitch Heimpel

On June 2nd of 2018, I was walking up Rosewood Avenue in Belleville when a campaign volunteer I was canvassing with yelled ahead to me that Kathleen Wynne had conceded the ongoing Ontario provincial election. 

The campaign still had five days to go.

To this day, that is probably the most controversial campaign tactic I can think of. Wynne acknowledged that she was going to lose, but asked voters to give her Liberal party enough seats to at least hold Doug Ford to a minority. I know Liberals who think it saved as many as six seats (for reference, the Liberals ended up with … seven). I also know Liberals who think it absolutely devastated riding associations outside of the core of the cities of Toronto and Ottawa and tanked Liberal infrastructure and voter motivation in a way that the party still hasn’t recovered from.

Both of these groups of Liberals are saying the same thing just in a very different way: Kathleen Wynne acknowledged political reality way too late. 

She is hardly the only politician to have done so. 

Looking back, the Ontario Liberals started to trail the Ontario PCs by approximately 10 points starting in March of 2017, and it only got worse after that. Liberals told themselves this had happened before. In early summer of 2011, the Ontario Liberals were 7-9 points behind the Ontario PCs and they pulled out a four-point win and a minority government.

They clung to that. Walking the halls of Queen's Park back then was a lesson in cognitive dissonance. A lot of Liberals knew it was bad. But, a comeback had happened before. So ... maybe ...

The same issue now faces the federal Liberals. 

For the longest time, Justin Trudeau was the party's best asset. It didn't matter if the Liberals trailed the Conservatives by a few points, the prime minister was viewed by Canadians as the best choice to continue to lead the country when compared to the other party leaders.

That hope now lies in tatters. Trudeau now trails Pierre Poilievre by double digits for preferred prime minister. More importantly, Trudeau trails his party on the generic ("who would you vote for?") ballot question by nine points. What this means in plain language is that a significant number of people are still willing to vote for the Liberals, even though they no longer believe that Justin Trudeau is the best candidate to be prime minister. In only one demographic — women over the age of 55 — does the prime minister lead Poilievre. More importantly for Trudeau, only 45 per cent of Liberals believe he would make the best prime minister; 77 per cent of Conservatives believe the same thing about Poilievre. 

For the first time in his decade as leader, Justin Trudeau is a drag on the Liberal Party of Canada. 

This has been wondered about for months. I have always believed that Trudeau gave the party a better chance of success in the critical places in which it absolutely must win (in Quebec, in the B.C. Lower Mainland and in the GTA) than any other hypothetical leader would. He is a uniquely talented political campaigner. He went from third to first in the campaign in 2015, he recovered from a blackface scandal that would have ended a lesser campaigner in 2019, and he almost-single-handedly saved a Liberal campaign in 2021 that fell flat out of the gate and needed almost three weeks to find anything that even remotely resembled a coherent message. 

That was then, though, and today, this is the longest and most significant stretch of time since election night in 2015 where Trudeau has been a personal liability for Liberals. This is a massive change that I’m not sure the public, and even many Liberals, have fully appreciated.

There is still an argument to be made, even at this late stage, that Trudeau remains the sole unifying force for a party whose main objective is the pursuit of power. That he is the only leader capable of forging the fractured elements of the current Liberal coalition together. You could convince me of these arguments.

But, increasingly, that isn't the conversation you hear people having. Now, you hear more about the failings of the potential successors. Can Anita Anand win in Quebec? Can Mélanie Joly win anywhere but Quebec? François-Philippe Champagne doesn't have the prime minister's “star power.” And so on.

These are not robust defences of the prime minister. They suggest the opposite: that a robust defence of the prime minister is getting harder and harder with each bad poll, and each bad news cycle, that passes. 

The next stop, from here, is usually a defence of the PM on grounds of obligation. He's the leader who won most of them their seats. He's the leader who carried them from 32 seats in opposition to a staggering 2015 election victory in just two years. Don't ungrateful Liberals understand he is owed the right to go out on his own terms?

It is premature to write the epitaph for a politician that has defied gravity as many times as Justin Trudeau. That's why many column inches will be devoted to considering his future in the coming weeks and months. None of this says anything about which party will win the next election. Campaigns still matter, of course.

It does say, though, that for the first time in a decade, the Liberals may be better off if Justin Trudeau wasn't leading them. 

Mitch Heimpel has served Conservative cabinet ministers and party leaders at the provincial and federal levels, and is currently the director of campaigns and government relations at Enterprise Canada.

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