The Decibel - Rebuilding the Liberals after Trudeau

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Beyond picking a new leader, the federal Liberals also need to repair their reputation with voters – while continuing to run the government as Donald Trump ratchets up his pressure on Canada. And they have about 75 days to do all this.Shannon Proudfoot is an Ottawa-based feature writer for The Globe and Mail. She’s on the show to talk about the existential questions the party is grappling with at this moment, and how it compares to past times when the party has found itself in the political wilderness.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

On Wednesday, Liberal MPs flocked to Parliament Hill. There's a place upstairs in the West Block where we all kind of wait to pounce on cabinet ministers and caucus members coming into their meetings. And it was as packed as I have seen it in the last couple months. Shannon Proudfoot was one of the journalists awaiting the members of parliament as they entered their national caucus meeting, a get together of all elected liberals. Originally, this meeting was supposed to be for MPs to air their grievances with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's leadership. But now that he said he'll resign,

they gathered to chart a path forward for a party that has been struggling internally, in parliament, and in the polls. What I found so noteworthy is that for the last few months, for very obvious reasons, all of the questions have been about one man. What's he going to do? What's going on in his head? Do you support him? Do you think he's an albatross around the neck of your party? And all of a sudden today, the questions were all about kind of the hole he's left in the political scene.

Obviously, a big hole is the question of who will replace Trudeau. And there are lots of whispers about who may be starting to organize a potential bid, like Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney. But we did learn Wednesday that one big name won't run. Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc. Wednesday marks the beginning of a challenging period for the Liberals, where they have to pick a new leader and figure out what they stand for. And they only have about 75 days to do it. Shannon is an Ottawa-based feature writer for The Globe. Today she

joins us to discuss the existential questions the party is grappling with at this moment. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Shannon thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So, Shannon, you and I are talking Wednesday afternoon. There is this liberal caucus meeting today. Still going on. They haven't come out yet. So we'll see what they decide when they come out and tell us.

And they're talking about this, the leadership race, right? That's going to happen. Can you just walk us through, Shannon, like, what do we know so far in terms of how this race is going to work? So probably as a mark of how sort of sudden this decision was and how quickly everything has to happen, there's a lot we don't know right now. We might know it within a week. We know that the shape of the contest that will determine the next liberal leader is

in the hands of the National Board of the Liberal Party. Their constitution and the way they run these rules on its own on paper is pretty muddy. It's not entirely clear. So we can't look at their rules on paper and know that they're going to do X, Y, and Z. They basically have to figure it out. And so that is undoubtedly some of what will be going on in this caucus meeting today, but it's also down to the board to sort of meet behind closed doors, draw up the rules of how this very accelerated, very quick liberal leadership race will take place, and then tell everyone else. Okay, so it sounds like things are kind of happening quickly here. A lot that we're still

waiting to hear then. So are there things that we can expect to know soon, but we don't actually know yet about how this is going to work? So there are these questions about what seem like very mechanical rules around the leadership race, but they will directly affect who will be able to throw their hat into the ring and how big a cast of characters we're going to see. Things like the entry fee, who would be able to conjure up a pretty substantial fee, probably $50,000 and up in a hurry. Nomination, the list of signatures of people they have supporting their candidacy and rules

around how many different provinces they have to come from, how many people you have to have as sort of a measurement of how broad a base of support you have. And then there are really big questions about what would constitute membership in the Liberal Party such that you could vote for the leader. This was a big change when Justin Trudeau became leader. They introduced this supporter category where you didn't have to take out a membership even for 10 bucks in the Liberal Party. You could just say, I'm interested in the future of this party. Here's who I cast my vote for.

And this has become a really big heavy issue in the last year or so as we've been dealing with the issue of foreign interference because the foreign interference inquiry has concluded that internal party elections like nominations, like leadership races is sort of the softest entry point for foreign interference to enter the Canadian political system. So there are very real questions. The Liberal Party is currently one of the federal parties that does not require people to be Canadian citizens or permanent residents. And there is not just a feeling, but there was a diagnosis from the foreign interference inquiry that that leaves these kinds of races open to foreign interference, because people who are just in Canada say temporarily, but are foreign nationals,

could be more subject to pressure from foreign regimes to vote a certain way. And the Liberal Party has already let it be known through some of my colleagues reporting that they don't have any intention of changing these rules to respond very directly to this threat. So there are sort of in my mind two tracks of rules we're waiting to hear about, one of which will affect who puts their hand up, who throws their name in to potentially be the next liberal leader and prime minister, and the other track of rules which affect potentially how much other countries could if they wanted to be sticking their fingers into this race. That's a really important thing to mention.

I'm glad you noted that. Because, yeah, certainly we heard a lot of talk about foreign interference in the last year. So this is kind of, in practice, The first test of what we've learned from it. And it's worth underlining just how fast all of this is happening. The prime minister has prorogued parliament

until March 24th. So presumably, his successor would have to be in place then, which gives the party about two and a half months, which is a vastly accelerated timeline over anything that would be considered normal. You have to assume slash hope that they had been anticipating the possibility of this turn of events, given everything that's been in the air. So maybe they've done some groundwork, but this all has to happen really, really fast.

So yes, it sounds like whoever is going to come in as leader, like there is kind of a reinvention that is happening here with the party. And I guess I just want to talk about the uniqueness of the situation, because in a way, don't all parties have to reinvent themselves every decade or so in Canada? Like I think about the conservatives before Poliev or even before Harper came to power, kind of in, you know, similar situations. Is this situation with the liberals similar to those, I guess, or is there something that is kind of different about now?

This is a pattern we've seen before. I think what's unique here is how fast it has to happen, and it's that analogy of trying to fix the plane while flying it. They are in power right now. They are enormously unpopular. The prime minister held on for a very long time against a lot of pressure, internal and external, to step down. There's the accelerated timeline of picking the new leader and whatever that says about what this new version of the Liberal Party will be. And then there's how quickly that new leader is going to need to introduce themselves to the Canadian public and face voters in a general election. Though what they're doing is maybe not that unusual, having to do it so fast and when the public mood is

as crabby as it is toward the liberals is what's unusual here, I think. OK. So I think in order to kind of understand what they're facing now and how they're rebuilding now, let's actually look at the last time the Liberal Party had to rebuild. So this is kind of the period between 2006 and 2015. The Liberals were very much kind of down and out. And then Trudeau surprised

a lot of people by winning a majority in 2015. So Shannon, can you take me back to that time, that kind of last lull of the Liberal Party and then Trudeau's rise? Like how did that all happen? Yeah, they were deep, deep in the wilderness for a really long period of time. In that just short of a decade period, they went through four different leaders. There was Paul Martin, who was the last liberal prime minister. Then they had Stefan Dion, then Michael Ignatieff, then Bob Ray. So they went through that cycle that we saw the conservatives go through not so long ago, where every time they lost an election, they heaved a leader out the window and tried someone else. And by the time Justin Trudeau became

leader in 2013, there was serious discussion that the Liberal Party of Canada was going to cease to exist. They were down to 34 seats in the House of Commons, which is just a rump of a caucus, especially for a party that has very cockily at different points in its history, thought of itself as the natural governing party of Canada and sort of had the electoral record to prove it. And they had been sort of counted out in an ideological way that people thought they were getting sort of crowded out the idea that maybe there's not room for a centrist party anymore, not a market for it. And I think this is absolutely key to understanding the much more recent history,

the last couple of years, and the downfall of Justin Trudeau as liberal leader. What happened was he came in with a small cadre of close advisors, Katie Telford being sort of the most visible among them, because she's still by his side as chief of staff right now. Gerald Butz was another, he had this little kind of bubble of advisors. When they took over, the liberals had been out of power and profoundly out of power for so long that all of their operators, their people who kind of knew how to do politics, to fundraise, to run the numbers, to build an election machine, were half a generation out of power by that point. So your bench kind of atrophies and they were kind of rebuilding from the ground up. When I did a profile of Katie Telford a couple of years

ago, I talked to David McNaughton who was the Ontario chair of that campaign. I went on to become Mr. Trudeau's first ambassador to the US. He said they heard a lot of chirping and second-guessing from within the liberal firmament, people who were sort of grumbling, you're not doing it the right way, that's not the way we do this. He nicknamed them the Boo Birds. So you had this situation where you had this young group of upstarts who were building a brand new way to campaign, a brand new identity for a very old and powerful liberal party in Canada that had hit the rocks rocks and you had the old guard second guessing how they were doing it and then they pulled it off. It's sort of astonishing to remember they went from third place to a bumping majority and I think what they learned in

that time was to listen to themselves, to listen to their own instincts, to not listen to the naysayers. This is something anyone would have to learn at high level politics but I think it became absolutely baked into the bones of Mr. Trudeau and his very close advisors to listen to themselves and to not take in the doubts that were coming in from outside. That served them really, really well at the beginning. I think it's what's made them in the last couple of years just absolutely deaf to the criticisms they were getting, to what the public was feeling. I think, you know, like a lot of things in our life, it's a good thing until it's a bad thing.

And I think it taught them to kind of close ranks and have a bit of a bunker mentality and to sort of only hear each other's voices. And so I think it explains both how they rose to power and resurrected this party 10 years ago, and how they ended up where they did this week. We'll be back in a minute. I want to ask you something else about Trudeau's politics as well, Shannon, because part of his brand and something that really differentiated him was, you know, his his sunny ways, right? It was it was a bright kind of politics, positive, optimistic. Does that kind of politicking still, I guess, have a place in Canadian politics in 2025? This is like 10 years later.

Yeah, it's interesting because sunny ways in 2015 was both a policy message. It was about being a more inclusive economy, that they were going to make opportunities for the middle class and those working hard to join it. Remember the free square on your bingo card when any liberal says that you get to stamp it. But it was also very much a tonal appeal. This was a young, charismatic leader. This was a very deliberately, performatively, persuasively, sort of smiley, energetic campaign that was meant to contrast with Stephen Harper's very dour government at the time. They were seen as very competent, but people had sort of had enough. And so it's fascinating to me, like just everything old is new. Because in 2015,

you had a pendulum swing and you had the public feeling like we're done with this kind of steely eyed sort of dour dude where he gets the job done, but there's a bit of a meanness to it. And you know what? This guy who shows up and rolled up shirt sleeves and smiles and like hoist babies in the air, this is where we're at. And now we have the pendulum swinging back where it's been fascinating to watch the way Sonny weighs and the way that sense of inclusivity and kind of the bounciness of what the liberals offered in 2015 has soured because I think what's

changed is maybe not so much the way they seek to project themselves in the world. It's the feeling that voters have that they believe they're in it for them. I think what's soured is the sense that they can occupy that kind of sunny ways, inclusive role. You now have Pierre Poliev sweeping in from the right, from a different political direction, very, very successfully. I think the entire story of the last year or two has been the liberals having a tough hand that they've been dealt. They're a really old government and tired. It's been a really rough economy. Inflationary politics have been brutal to incumbents all over the world. But the liberals responded really, really badly to a tough

hand they were dealt. They didn't catch the public mood and respond to it effectively. And Pierre Polyev and the conservatives have absolutely seized on it. He has been single-minded in a message of the ruin of Canada and the economic difficulties people have been going through and pointing squarely at Justin Trudeau and saying that it's his fault. AMT – This idea of the political pendulum is interesting too because like as you said, kind of right-wing populism is certainly more popular now than it was a decade ago. And I guess that makes me wonder too about what it means to be a big

L liberal these days. When small L liberalism seems to be waning a little bit. I guess what is the place of a liberal today in Canada? Is there still a place for that? Well, there have certainly been people making the arguments that there's not, like sort of looking across the landscape, not just at the federal level, but provincially and looking at how liberal parties and liberal candidates have been mowed down. I would point out that even in 2011, before Trudeau took over and brought this party

to a massive majority, someone like Jean Chrétien was suggesting that there should be a merger at the time between the liberal and NDP, because he was seeing the same sort of landscape. What's noteworthy is that when the liberals won in 2015 and the space they have occupied since then has been distinctly left. It has not been left-centered. They out-lefted the NDP at times. In fact, that was part of the story of the 2015 election was Trudeau's innovation

or original sin, depending on which way you look at it, I guess, that Canadians wouldn't care that much about running deficit budgets. I mean, infamously, they said they would run deficit budgets for three years and then fix it and here we are. But it was this idea that people wanted an activist big spending government. But it's also just they've been caught up in a very strong anti-incumbent move across the world. And so to me, there's sort of bigger winds that are pulling things along here. And we've been here before. We saw in the pre-Trudeau leadership era suggestions that the Liberal Party then was dead and had been crowded out by this sort of polarized politics where everyone kind of splits to the right or left. And it

didn't come to pass then. COLLEEN O'BRIEN So I guess on this idea of whether there is a place for a big L Liberal Party in Canada, I mean, given the poll numbers, isn't there a risk here of the party no longer being relevant? Kind of like what happened recently to the provincial liberals in BC or even the conservatives in the early 90s. Isn't that a risk? Gretchen Kerr I think that is a distinct risk in this moment because there is so much public animosity and distrust, like this feeling that they completely don't get it. They don't get normal people's lives. I would say the complicating factors there are that the federal NDP under Jagmeet Singh has not been any sort of

a real force for growth or a threat. There's no one really crowding them out and eating their lunch from the left. I think a lot really depends on how they respond to this moment. It is not clear to me, I will say, that it matters a ton who is the leader imminently because of that pendulum swing and that pattern. They've been in power for almost 10 years and the polls show that Canadians are profoundly tired of them. And so I think a lot depends not just on who becomes the leader in two months, but how they conceive of the need to rebuild the party, the need to respond better to the public, what they do from then. I think we will know a lot more maybe in a year or two.

If they are going to be sent to the deep, deep opposition wilderness again, I think whether they sink into obscurity or recover and find some way to respond to the public depends very much on sort of how they respond to that. In the past, because of that natural governing party mentality, it has taken them a very long time to understand that they're not just on a short-term timeout and the public will come around and realize they're the good guys again. They have needed some pretty profound reckoning before they recognize the need to rebuild themselves. And this party has basically been the party of Justin Trudeau for 10 years. And there is strength in that as long as it's strong, but there is great weakness in that

as soon as that brand and that leadership sours because you don't have other centers of gravity, you don't have other viewpoints coming in. And so I think right now they are reaping the downside results of that kind of a sort of cult of personality. Well, this is a really interesting point because as you say, if the liberal brand is so built around Justin Trudeau and his brand currently is quite unpopular, this is a challenge for a new leader then to kind of distinguish themselves from Justin Trudeau, right? Does that also mean that they're going to have to separate themselves though from the whole liberal legislative

record? Like is it going to have to be kind of that distinct of a break? Yeah, it's an incredibly delicate task facing them, right? Because presumably anyone who becomes leader now would either be from the front bench or would be Mark Carney, who has been a close public economic advisor of the prime minister. You can see this already in the way the conservatives have responded to this because I think it's safe to say the conservatives did not want Justin Trudeau to step down. They would have really enjoyed running against a hugely unpopular

guy. The very day after or the day of his resignation, you had the house leader Andrew Scheer out there saying what they have been saying in various ways, which is that anybody else who runs to replace him is just like a different version of Justin Trudeau, like trying to paint all of them with the same brush so that they all have to wear the same political liabilities. Now, you can see the strategic reason why the conservatives would be doing that, but I don't think it's a stretch. I do think it is a very difficult task that faces whoever is the next leader. And of course, the major challenge that every political leader in Canada is going to have to deal with is Donald

Trump. In recent days, he's been now talking about applying quote, economic force, end quote, to bring Canada into a political union with the United States. So Shannon, how do you think that will factor into how the liberal party tries to rebrand itself in this moment? They are really fighting a two front war to have to figure out the new leadership of a political party with a deeply tarnished brand while dealing with a guerrilla next door where you don't know what he's going to do next.

You don't know if he means it. He does not care for norms. This also has very direct kind of more mechanical implications for who runs for the leadership. Because for instance today up on the hill, Melanie Jolie said who has been known to be one of the front runners, one of the names everyone mentions, the foreign minister. She acknowledged she's thinking about running, but she also acknowledged she has a really important job dealing with the US right now. And Dominic LeBlanc, one of the reasons he gave for not running is that he has to deal with the US administration.

Just very lastly here, Shannon, before I let you go, we were talking earlier about where the liberals were before Trudeau. How does that state of the party compare to the place that he's leaving the party in now? It's an interesting question in a very literal way way, then when he took over, they were reduced to 34 MPs as Jack Leighton's NDP had soared to become the official opposition. Right now they have a pretty healthy caucus of 153 MPs and they have been governing as a minority government since 2021. But I think maybe the bigger difference is the trajectory, the feeling that voters are tired of them to the point

that they are not listening anymore. When you get to that point, you don't even have a chance to make your case because people are discounting you because of the messenger who's coming at them. They have stability now. They have had the same man at the helm for 12 years now, whereas then they were coming off a run of four different leaders in about a decade. But I think it's a good question right now whether that stability is helping them or

hurting them because the party has really sort of calcified around a Trudeau leadership. So I think either way they are in for a long regrowth period. It's funny I'm just coming to the end of reading one of the Harry Potter books with one of my kids and I keep thinking of Fox the Phoenix who you know as you see over and over in the books in front of your eyes burns down into the ashes and then is reborn as a little baby bird. And I can't help but picture the Liberal Party right now as you as this little scrawny baby bird trying to poke its head out of the ashes and figure out what it's gonna look like when it grows bigger wings.

We'll wait and see what happens. Shannon, it's always so great to hear from you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramin-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.