Justin Trudeau has long been one-third of the Golden Trio of leftist politics: the subjects of infantilised worship by “liberal” left fantasists. Trudeau was also the first of the Trio to face re-election, in 2019.
Trudeau had a narrow escape, then. Unlike Jacinda Ardern, Trudeau had no pandemic goodwill to blind the electorate to his failures. It was only a lacklustre opposition leader who probably saved Trudeau’s bacon, then. Still, Trudeau’s Liberals haemorrhaged 20 seats, just hanging on to government.
It looks like he’s having no such luck, this time.
Justin Trudeau’s political future is on a knife-edge after his party’s five-point lead in the polls evaporated within days of calling next month’s snap election.
Most polls now have the Canadian prime minister’s Liberal Party and the opposition Conservatives neck and neck. Some have the Liberals slightly ahead while another has the Conservatives leading.
This is an astonishing turnaround for the Liberal poster-boy who swept into power in 2015. But if Trudeau thought he could regain a comfortable majority by calling a snap election, he seems to be in for a rude awakening.
Although Trudeau has said he needs a mandate to finish tackling Covid-19 and then rebuild, his opponents have framed the election as a selfish power-grab amid a fourth wave of the virus and slow efforts in evacuating interpreters and support staff from Afghanistan. “Canadians didn’t ask for an election. But like the pandemic, here it is,” The Globe and Mail said.
“We have a horse race,” said Nik Nanos, founder of Nanos Research, a polling company, adding that blistering attacks from the left and right had squashed Trudeau’s lead in the campaign’s first week.
Trudeau has allowed the shortest campaign legally possible in Canada. Presumably, he thought to catch his opponents on the hop. Instead, he’s been laid on the mat, with precious little time left to get back up again.
Stephanie Chouinard, a politics professor at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, said: “[The Liberals’] first week was definitely a bad one, and considering the length of the campaign they won’t have much time to change this momentum.”
The polling aggregator 338Canada gives the Liberals a 14 per cent chance of winning a majority, well below the 34 per cent chance of a Conservative minority government, which would end Trudeau’s six years in power.
The Liberals are also in danger of bleeding votes to the young, left-wing NDP, run by Jagmeet Singh, Canada’s most popular national party leader.
The campaign has already turned nasty as Trudeau paints the Tories as regressive on abortion, euthanasia, guns and climate change, a classic Liberal strategy. “This election is about a choice: forward or backwards,” he said.
Perhaps taking a leaf from his Australian counterparts, Trudeau has tried putting on a Labor-style “Mediscare” campaign. But where Labor got away with peddling blatant lies about supposed wicked conservative plots to undermine public health care, Trudeau has been slapped down in no uncertain fashion.
However, his own party got a slap on the wrist from Twitter as one of its videos, posted by Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, was labelled “manipulated media”.
The video showed Erin O’Toole, 48, the leader of the opposition, saying he would support for-profit healthcare. His statement that universal access would remain paramount had been edited out[…]
Kate Harrison, a Conservative strategist and vice-chairwoman of Summa Strategies, said: “They have tried and trotted out a lot of these very typical wedges and they don’t seem to be sticking.”
The Australian
O’Toole’s Conservatives, on the other hand, are campaigning as the can-do party with a 162-page “Recovery Plan”. O’Toole also pitches an image of the everyman Canadian, former soldier turned lawyer, as opposed to the silver spoon pretty boy Trudeau. Like Scott Morrison, the daggy dad from suburban Sutherland Shire, O’Toole presents an image of solid, if stodgy, substance, over a frivolous elite scion more given to playing Bollywood fancy-dress than the hard yards of leadership.
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