Stefan Klietsch: How Justin Trudeau hobbled the Liberal Party of Canada
The prime minister’s biggest political mistake may be how he changed the way his party does business between elections.
By: Stefan Klietsch
With the ongoing and persistent slump of Justin Trudeau’s party in the polls, some observers have looked back at what caused the Sunny Ways team to lose its lustre in their years of governing. Some would point to the prime minister’s harassment of Judy-Wilson Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, an episode in which the prime minister clearly lost the battle for public opinion. One personal grievance of mine is the cynical promise that the prime minister had made of the 2015 election being the last such election under the existing electoral system. Others just point to post-pandemic economic conditions, especially higher interest rates.
But looking back to the very beginning of the Trudeau era, the Liberal leader arguably planted the seeds of his inevitable downfall quite quickly after winning his majority in the 2015 election. I speak here of the constitutional package that Trudeau pushed the Liberal Party of Canada to adopt at its 2016 Biannual General Meeting.
It is a recurring theme in Canadian politics that party leaders who form government tend to become more distant and isolated from their grassroots. But whereas most prime ministers and premiers would be content to delegate management of constitutional party debates to their submissive sycophants, a sitting prime minister took it upon himself to invest his personal brand in an appeal to the party’s convention floor to pass an omnibus “modernizing” constitutional package. Since the prime minister did not again participate in the party’s constitutional debates after 2016, he evidently got everything that he wanted all in one go, and with minimal resistance.
Trudeau’s cynicism here is worthy of mockery. Imagine thinking to yourself, “Just months ago, the rejuvenated grassroots institutions of the Liberal party swept me to power and ended the decade of Liberal decline. Better fix what ain’t broke!” The changes, which included slashing of the influence of Electoral District Associations and of policy conventions, were obviously not intended as some grand exercise in democracy empowerment, but rather were intended to protect an incumbent government from any inconvenient messages and influences from a potentially unruly party grassroots.
Yet it was the same independent party grassroots that had helped bring Trudeau to power in the first place. In the 2015 campaign the Liberals had run on what columnist Andrew Coyne called a “daring” platform, a platform crafted with more input and insight than can be offered by only pollsters and political operatives. The then Liberal platform was obviously a factor in the Liberals’ poaching of supporters from the NDP, which had at times held a lead in the polls. From cannabis legalization to electoral reform to the Canada Child Benefit, where did all the big new Liberal ideas come from? The party grassroots and institutions, of course.
My own participation in the Liberal Party of Canada has been fleetingly limited to attendance at its 2021 and 2023 General Meetings (and I currently no longer continue such participation). But I have experienced how much the party institutions are now wholly owned by the prime minister. Having voted in the 2021 policy convention against the Basic Income proposal that was regardless passed by the party plenary, I still took note when the prime minister later that year advocated against Basic Income policy without even feeling compelled to acknowledge the official policy of his own party.
The 2023 policy process was even more lacking in seriousness. The party cynically scheduled its policy debates at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, with the foreseeable result that barely 200 of the over 3,000 registered delegates even bothered to show up. Only one member of Parliament graced the proceedings with his presence. Almost all proposals were voted on with no debate, since the 50-member quorum for debate was clearly intended for a larger voting body. Plenary chairs casually admitted that almost 300 proposals had been officially received and not tabled for debate. And when an electoral reform policy was passed despite Trudeau’s preferences, the policy was casually hand-waved away by the prime minister after a one-day news cycle.
Whatever criticisms one may have of Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives (and I do have some), they do manage to sustain policy conventions that have at least some realness to them. A look at the CPAC recording of the 2023 Conservative policy convention suggests that there were many Conservative delegates present in the policy debates, at least enough to represent every province. Policy resolutions were consistently debated back-and-forth by attending delegates. A few young adults spoke publicly in plenary. Surely the federal Liberal party could muster the same enthusiasm for its own policy debates, if only it could be bothered to even try?
It would be an exaggeration to say that poor policy conventions are responsible for the government’s current low polling. Any government that has been in power nearly a decade accumulates many liabilities, and all of those combined must be considered when examining the PM’s current standing. But if we choose to accept that weak policy conventions are broader signals of a party’s declining institutional strength, this is also a useful way of appreciating the struggles of the Ontario Liberal Party, which has been out of power almost as long as it has consistently failed to organize policy conventions at all.
Liberals and some other politicos are surely debating whether the Liberal party’s best chances lie in Trudeau resigning from office and allowing a new leader to take his place. The available evidence suggests that Trudeau resigning would not be enough to save their party. The Liberal party probably needs to look once again like something of an actual democratic institution, rather than a mere appendage of one man, before Canadians will take the Liberals seriously enough to trust with our democratic institutions again.
Stefan Klietsch is graduating with a Master of Arts in political science from Carleton University.
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The biggest service the Liberal Party and all its activist thugs could do for Canada is to quietly disappear for a good long period out of power contemplating their navels. This is a party full of ideologues whose sole purpose is to do what’s best for them and their ideologies while holding on to power at all costs regardless of the countrys welfare.
I have thought for years that many Canadian political parties, at the federal and provincial levels, are simply extensions of the leader du jour. In Ontario, the Progressive Conservatives flop from being in support of a carbon tax to being opposed depending on the leader. The party itself apparently has no position on the topic. This column confirms my suspicion and worry. Political parties changed from being the primary institution of electoral politics; that is, the mechanism for generating policy ideas and electoral planks of a party, to being a reflection of the moods and preferences of the leader.
Konrad Yakabuski wrote a very interesting article in the Globe this past weekend on a similar change in the relationship between the federal civil service and the governing political party. Where the civil service used to be a source of policy analysis and advice, it has become a tool for implementing the political promises of the governing party. The governing party no longer looks to the civil service for advice and guidance. The governing party, in the form of the PMO, tells the civil service what to do.
Both are examples of the centralization of power in the hands of a single individual: the PM. It's not for nothing that Jeffrey Simpson nicknamed Canada "The Friendly Dictatorship" and that was years ago. It has only become worse under the last two Prime Ministers.