The Decibel - A crushing loss is making Trudeau’s Liberals rethink the future

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Justin Trudeau and the Liberals appear to be in big trouble. Following a stunning loss in the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election to the Conservatives – a riding they’ve held handily for the last 30 years – the federal government is at risk of losing big in the next federal election, currently set for October 2025. As the Liberals grapple with where to go from here, Prime Minister Trudeau also faces questions about whether he’s still the best leader for the party.John Ibbitson is a reporter and columnist in The Globe’s Ottawa bureau and has been covering federal politics for decades. He joins the show to discuss the Liberal’s potential summer strategy, how it compares to the Conservative’s approach and any signs of Trudeau’s resignation.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

By now, you've probably heard about the Liberals' stunning loss in this week's Toronto St. Paul's by-election. They held the seat for the last 30 years, until they lost it by a narrow 590 votes to the Conservatives. The defeat sends a loud message to the governing federal Liberals about their unpopularity. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the results were not what his party had hoped for. I want to be clear that I hear people's concerns and frustrations. These are not easy times and it's clear that I and my entire Liberal team have much more work to do to deliver tangible, real progress

that Canadians across the country can see and feel. Since the by-election, there have been calls for Trudeau to step down as leader. But Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says that's not happening. Good afternoon, Marika Walsh with the Globe and Mail. Deputy Prime Minister, can the Prime Minister still stay on to lead the Liberal Party into the next election, given that you just lost one of the safest seats in the entire country last night? Yes, he certainly can. The prime minister is committed to leading us into the next election, and he has our support.

Today, John Ibbotson, a columnist and reporter for The Globe in Ottawa, is on the show to talk about where the Liberals go from here as they enter the summer and what their unpopularity means for the Conservatives and the NDP. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. John, great to be talking to you today. Great to be here. So Parliament has risen for the summer and a lot of people were anticipating that the Liberals would win a by-election in Toronto and it just be kind of a regular sleepy political summer. But that, of course, isn't what happened.

So I just want to know, John, what kind of summer do they face now? Well, for the Liberals, it's going to be an interesting and difficult summer. Yes, they had hoped and expected to win the Toronto St. Paul's by-election. It is a very safe Liberal seat. They had also hoped to arrest the decline in the polls that they've been experiencing for more than a year now, about a 20-point spread between Pierre Polyev's Conservatives and them. So they were hoping mostly for stability.

But stability now is an elusive goal. They lost St. Paul's by-election. And that can only mean that there could be little or no increase in their support over the course of the summer. There might even be a further decline in support over the course of the summer. So for them right now, the goal is to stop this seemingly relentless decline in popularity, in support, and I suspect in morale as well, and get back on track towards some kind of governing, legislative and political agenda that can get them through the next year and a half until the election that's expected in the fall of 2025. Can we do a bit of a reality check here, John?

Because there's been a lot of chatter about this one by-election seat. And I mean, I just want to know, like, how bad is it really? Because it was considered a safe seat, but it is, of course, just one by-election after all. So why is there so much fuss over it? I think it's because the by-election confirms the polls. Polls themselves, you know, are mostly reliable, especially if several polls all go in the same direction. And we've known since last summer that popular support for Mr. Polyev's conservative has been steadily increasing. They're at or above 40% now in support.

And the liberal support has been decreasing. They're at or around the low 20s in support. And there's an endless number of columns written, including by people like me, speculating on what all that means. But a by-election confirms all of that. A by-election gives you real numbers. And it's especially true if the by-election is held in a riding that should have been a safe liberal win. And that's what St. Paul's was. So you take the polls that we've been having over the last year or so, and you take the

results in St. Paul's and you go, all right, we can now certifiably say the liberals are in deep trouble. It's something I was hearing was that, you know, it's kind of a message from not just voters, but liberal voters telling the liberal something here. Yeah, if you believe, as it has been the case, that St. Paul's is a safe liberal seat, has been since 1993. And if the writing goes conservative, as it did in the by-election, then that has to mean that some of the people who voted for Justin Trudeau's liberals in 2015, 2019, 2021, this time voted conservative, sending a message to the party they used to support that they're not supporting it now. Now, then we begin the examination of why they've changed their mind, what it is that has them unhappy. But the fact is, we know that the St. Paul's result was, in some cases, liberals sending a message to the Liberal government that they're not liberals right now. So knowing this, what's

the next move for the Liberals this summer? Like, how do they pick up and move on after this loss? Well, after the by-election result, Mr. Trudeau said that it meant that his government had to work harder to try to build trust with Canadians. But I don't think it's a question of working harder. We're not saying that he's not putting enough hours in the day. It's a question of the agenda. What is the governing agenda? What is it that people in St. Paul's and elsewhere object to?

And what is the government going to do about that? So does the government have to address the question of the very large deficits that it's been running? Does it have to address the question of the carbon tax, which is a signature policy, but which is quite unpopular? Does it need to revisit the issue of the capital gains tax, which they decided to increase? What is it about their governing agenda that has Canadians so concerned? And what can and should they do to change that agenda? Or can they change it at all? What if it's not about the agenda, though? Like, what if it's about personality more than anything? And that's the real question, isn't it? Were those voters in St. Paul saying, we don't like the carbon tax, we don't like the deficits, we don't like this, we don't like that? Or were they saying, we don't like Justin Trudeau's lead of the Liberal Party anymore?

That is a fraught question. And a number of analysts have said this shows that Mr. Trudeau's leader of the Liberal Party anymore. That is a fraught question. And a number of analysts have said this shows that Mr. Trudeau really has to question whether he should carry on as leader, whether he should step aside and let someone else take the party into the next election. But there was an anguished read poll not that long ago that surveyed other potential candidates, such as Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, such as Finance Minister Christian Freeland, such as Foreign Minister Melania Jolie. But none of the candidates were any more popular than Mr. Trudeau. So, yes, maybe he should step aside and let someone else take the party into the next election, hoping that that will increase popular support. Or maybe he should stay, take the

loss and then, you know, give somebody else a chance to run for the leader after that loss. Mm hmm. I want to do a bit of a rewind here, because I think we're the liberals kind of in this period of self-evaluation and reflection last summer. Like there was this cabinet shuffle that happened in July of last year. And it's been quite some time now that people have been voicing their upset over the current government. So what is different about this summer of regrouping? Well, I'm not sure what is different this summer. I mean, you're absolutely right. The popularity of the government began to decline last summer.

They took steps. Cabinet shuffle was the big one. And they determined that they were going to arrest the slide and then start to rebuild. They didn't. Why didn't they? Well, the fundamentals haven't changed. Interest rates are high. Inflation is high. Home ownership is increasingly unaffordable for younger people. And that is what's driving the unpopularity of the Liberal

Party. It's not whether they hold this by-election or replace this minister with that cabinet minister. The fundamentals of the economy are such that the party is being blamed for the unaffordability of daily life. So as we've talked about, there's a call for the prime minister to step down, which he says he isn't going to do, even after these results at the Toronto St. Paul by-election. But from what you know about how Justin Trudeau operates, what do we know about why he wants to stay on? I suspect Justin Trudeau wants to stay on for the same reason that Stephen Harper wanted to stay on in 2015. Back in 2015, Mr. Harper had

been in power for almost a decade. The government was not that popular. But Stephen Harper believed that Justin Trudeau would be a disaster for Canada and that he was the only person who could stop him. He was wrong. He could not stop him. Justin Trudeau defeated him in the next election. Justin Trudeau clearly believes that Pierre Palliup would be a disaster for Canada and that only he can stop him. So I think that Mr. Trudeau may suffer from the same hubris that Stephen Harper suffered from, and frankly, that most politicians suffer from, the belief that only they can be trusted to defeat the oncoming menace that the opposition leader represents.

Is there anyone that could convince, at least Trudeau here, is there anyone that could convince him that he should step aside? Sure. You know, if Katie Telford, his most important aide, or Dominic LeBlanc, Mark Miller, cabinet ministers who are close to the prime minister, if they decided that they needed to have an intervention with the PM and sat him down and talked to him and said, I think for the good of the party, you need to go. He would listen to them. In public, at least, though, the cabinet is convinced that Mr. Trudeau should stay and that they're loyal to him. You have to remember, Justin Trudeau took a Liberal Party that was completely moribund

in 2013, broke, dispirited in third place, and brought it to government. The party owes him a lot. And the party is not going to turn on him, no matter how bad the polls might be, no matter how serious the defeat they suffered in Toronto St. Paul's might be. They will stick with him to the end if he decides to go to the end. So if not people, are there other things that could force his hand? I think if you saw further deterioration in the polls, if you saw, for example, the Liberals moving into third place behind the NDP, if the fundraising dropped off seriously so that it was clear that fewer and fewer people supported the Liberals each month and fewer and fewer people were prepared to donate to the party each month, that might get you to a point where people were sort of staring at the

wall and going, we're doomed here. And it might convince Mr. Trudeau that he simply can't pull this out and he should step aside. Another thing that would worry Mr. Trudeau is if he did see a number of defections from caucus over the course of the summer. You know, if you are an MP in the 905, the suburban rioting surrounding the city of Toronto or in the lower mainland, and you have won your rioting in the last three elections, but you didn't win by huge amounts, then you have to ask yourself, if we can't win in Toronto St. Paul's, can we win in Brampton? Can we win in Peel? Can we win in Surrey or Burnaby? And the answer is probably not. I'm probably about to be defeated. What are you going to do about that? Are you going to decide to step down and spend more time with your family? Are you going to confront the prime minister in a phone call and say, Justin, I'm toast unless you step aside?

These people, again, have some things to think about over the course of the summer. And they're going to be hearing from their constituents over the course of the summer as well. They're going to be telling them what it is they think are their chances and what it is that concerns them. And again, those caucus members will be bringing that back to the PM. So, John, you talked about how other possible leaders like Mark Carney or Melanie Jolie and others won't really pull any better than Trudeau. So I'm just wondering then, why would anyone want to step into that position when it seems like defeat is inevitable? Well, if you're Mark Carney, it's a particularly fraught question because Mr. Carney is not in caucus.

So he would have to run for the leadership, win the leadership, win a seat and then possibly be defeated in the election and sit for the next four years as leader of the opposition asking Pierre Polly of questions. And that's not something the former governor of the Bank of Canada or the Bank of England might be expected to want to do. If you're already in caucus, if you're already a cabinet minister like Francois-Philippe Champagne or Anita Anand or Melanie Jolie, well, it might not be so bad. You know, leader of the opposition wouldn't be the worst thing. And you could spend those four years rebuilding the party, rebuilding its finances and think to yourself, well, you know, in four or six years, I still could become prime minister of this country. John, you are a student, one of our best students here at The Globe of Canadian political history.

Is there any example from the past that could show Justin Trudeau a way forward for this summer? There aren't any historical precedents that are encouraging. There's the case of his own father, Pierre Trudeau, who stepped aside, took the famous walk in the snow so that John Turner could become leader of the Liberal Party. But then John Turner took the party to, up until that point, was his worst defeat in his history. Brian Mulroney, when he was progressive conservative prime minister, was also deeply unpopular. He stepped aside for Kim Campbell. Kim Campbell took the party to two seats in the next federal election. Indeed, Justin Trudeau could decide that he wants to stay on only because the precedent in the past

of leaders stepping aside has not been encouraging. That said, I'm not aware of any case at the federal level where a governing party was 20 points down in the polls a year and a half before a federal election and then came back to win that election. It's an incredibly steep hill to climb. And as far as I know, no governing political leader has ever climbed it. We'll be right back. All right, John, so we've covered the summer ahead for the Liberals, but what about the Conservatives? What is their playbook after this win in the by-election in Toronto? Well, their current playbook is working for them just fine. So there's no real need for them to change it. Again, they'll be going out to the ridings,

talking to people, hearing what their concerns are. I think we can expect to see Mr. Polyev on the road, getting ready again for the fall session. But I don't think at this point, the Conservatives are going to want to change much of anything. It's working for them really, really well. I'm guessing that the Conservatives will probably want to go to the polls sooner rather than later. Yes. If, you know, the polls say if an election were held tomorrow and the Conservatives would say, please, can we have that election tomorrow? They would like to see an election as soon as possible. I suspect they would also like to see Justin Trudeau stay. He's a known quantity. They have the strategies in place to fight him

in the fall and in the spring and in the next election. So they, I think, want Justin Trudeau to stay as much as Justin Trudeau wants Justin Trudeau to stay, if indeed that's what Justin Trudeau wants. Interesting. One of the strategies we saw in that by-election in Toronto is that the Conservative candidate who won, Don Stewart, didn't do much media to get his name out there. What does that tell you about how the Conservatives may be thinking about strategy for a general election? Conservatives generally are not that friendly with the media. Stephen Harper was hardly a pal of the press gallery. And Pierre Polyev not only doesn't do a lot of media he can often be quite antagonistic towards reporters so it's not surprising that they kept their candidate under wraps during the by-election

and they'll probably be keeping everybody under wraps up until and during the next federal election as well for the conservatives especially because they have so much money. The best policy for them appears to be doing local media, so-called ethnic media, social media, and avoiding the big press and the big broadcasters. You know, we know that in urban centers, and especially Toronto, are big liberal strongholds. But if Pierre Poilier is going to make a case to urban voters in big cities who may be fed up with Trudeau, as perhaps we've saw in the by-election.

What is that case? The case for voters in downtown Toronto, as it turns out, is exactly the same as the case for voters in suburban ridings and rural ridings. Prices are too high. Interest rates are too high. Your kid can't get a home. And the Liberals simply wanted to focus on reducing carbon emissions. And that's simplistic and exaggerated, but that's often what political messages are.

And I don't think there's any reason the Conservatives would change that message. And Toronto St. Paul suggests that message may resonate with voters, even in the so-called progressive elites of the city centers. Is there a sense that the Conservatives might put more focus into these areas? I mean, I'm just thinking about my writing in Toronto and I barely saw the Conservative campaigning the last election. I'm just wondering, could we possibly see more of this kind of focus for the Conservatives going into these areas? Yeah, it's going to be a very interesting question for Mr. Paul Levin, for his strategists. My hunch is that the Conservatives will keep their original strategy of focusing on places like suburban Toronto and suburban Vancouver, but they might push a few more dollars because they have a

lot of dollars to spend, at least into the outer downtown ridings, such as Eggington Lawrence. They're not going to put all of their eggs in the basket of winning Toronto Centre. But they might pay Toronto Centre a little bit more attention than they did in the past. Interesting. So what about the NDP then? Wouldn't it make sense for the NDP to focus on these ridings? Yeah. And as some of my colleagues at the Globe and Mail have said, in some ways, it was a worse result for the NDP than it was for the Liberals. They did very poorly in this riding.

And Jagmeet Singh must be asking himself, having created this supply and confidence agreement with the Liberals, having sustained this Liberal government now for three years, what does he have to show for it? He has some policy gains to show for it. There is pharmacare. There is dental care. Those were high NDP priorities. And they can say to voters, look, we got to show for it. There is pharmacare, there is dental care. Those were high NDP priorities. And they can say to voters, look, we got these things for you. But voters seem to be angry at the big government spending.

They seem to be angry at the lack of concern over their core issues. And they seem to be blaming the NDP along with the liberals for those challenges. It must be disconcerting for Mr. Singh that he is not profiting from the decline in the support of the Liberal Party. Instead, he's bleeding support to the conservatives as well as the liberals. And that's not something anybody expected. Yeah. So what is the case that Jagmeet Singh and the NDP need to make to progressive voters? I think Jagmeet Singh needs to make two points to progressive voters. First, if you are progressive, I got you the things that you should most support and value, like pharmacare, like dental care. That was the result of this supply and confidence agreement, and you should reward the NDP for going

into it. Secondly, there is no chance for Justin Trudeau to win the next election. So the old case of a vote for the NDP is really a vote for the Conservatives no longer applies. You should think about switching your vote from the Liberals to the NDP because the NDP might very well become the official opposition and would be a better choice to confront Pierre Pallievre in the next parliament. And what about the young voters, John? Because they are often thought of as progressive votes to get. And in fact, Trudeau really appealed to them and won their votesials and Gen Zs, these are the people who brought the liberals to power and sustained them in power. But the polls show the younger voters

are now more likely to vote conservative than they are to vote for the liberals or the NDP. These are the voters who can't afford to buy a house, who can't afford rent. They are the ones who now are angrier than anybody else and they are the ones more likely to go to the conservatives than anyone else. That is a sea change in Canadian politics and And frankly, one that I never thought I

would see. So John, just to end, what does a successful summer look like for the Liberals? I think a successful summer for the Liberals is one in which things don't get any worse. And that's a very low bar. But at this point, hoping for some kind of improvement in Liberal fortunes and improvement in the polls of improvement in liberal fortunes, improvement in the polls, improvement in fundraising, that's just not realistic. What's realistic for them is that things stabilize. It gives them some kind of base to work with when they come back in the fall. And then a successful summer is one in which they think through what it is they're going to do in the fall, what they're going to bring to parliament to regain public support and trust,

an agenda that they can take to voters in the new year or in the next fall, whenever the next federal election might be. A successful summer is one in which the liberals regroup and plan how to recover from the depths that they currently find themselves in. And then what about Justin Trudeau? What has to happen for him to have a positive summer? Well, I think Justin Trudeau should just go and surf, you know, recharge. I suspect he's going to be on the phone a lot to caucus members and cabinet members over the course of the summer, taking the temperature with the party. And maybe he does want to go to a cottage sometime with three or four of his closest

friends and just sort of sit back and have a beer or two and think through what's likely to happen in the months ahead and what he should do. John, always great to get your insights. Thanks again for coming on the show. Cheryl, it was my pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our intern is Kelsey Arnett. Our producers are Madeline White and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. And Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening.