The Decibel - Why won’t Justin Trudeau step down?

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers have been bad for a while. The Liberals have lost two crucial by-elections and are trailing behind the Conservatives in seat projections. They just lost the support of the NDP. The shine seems to have completely come off the nine-year-old government. And yet, Trudeau remains defiant. Why?The Globe’s Shannon Proudfoot set out to determine why, in the face of increasingly long odds, some politicians can’t seem to read the writing piling up on the wall. She spoke to former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne and a pollster on the disastrous 1993 Progressive Conservative campaign to find answers.This episode originally aired on October 4, 2024.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

So I'm in studio right now with Dave Crosby, our audio editor. Welcome, Dave. Hello. Thank you. So I hear that you've chosen an episode for our end of the year selection here. So what episode have you chosen? I did. I chose an episode that we ran early in October called Why Won't Justin Trudeau Step Down? Okay. And why did you choose this particular episode? Well, I think at the time, there had just been sort of another by-election loss, another crucial by-election loss for the liberals. And there were some polls showing

Justin Trudeau not doing very well as he hasn't been over the last year. And I think there were a lot of conversations, but kind of reached a bit of a fever pitch of sort of headlines about why won't Justin Trudeau step down? When is he going to, you know, the writing's on the wall. What's with this guy? And a lot of these questions seem to still be in the air now, actually. Yeah, it seemed, I think, given recent events, I think it seems pretty germane to what people might be thinking about at this time of year. So yeah, our colleague, Shannon Proudfoot, had decided to look into this and take this question seriously. You know, if we assume that Justin Trudeau is a capable politician and an intelligent

man, he can clearly see all the same polling data that we can. He's seen the same headlines. Why isn't he stepping down? Yeah. Well, thank you so much. This is a great one. We will listen to that episode. It's been a hard year for the Liberal Party, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in particular. His approval rating is currently at about 30%, the lowest it's ever been. The Liberals are polling at 23%, and they lost two historically unlosable seats in by-elections this summer. So there's been one question people keep asking. Have Canadians finally had it with Trudeau? In Canada there's growing pressure for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step down. Many in Ottawa have

started to ask is there anyone who could replace the Prime Minister and regain public support for the Liberals? Taxes up, costs up, crimes up, times up. Mr. Speaker, isn't it time for Canadians to have a chance to render their verdict right across the country? Would it be time, as some people are saying, for Mr. Trudeau to cede the way to someone else? Shannon Proudfoot is a feature writer at The Globe, and she's also been wondering about this. So Shannon talked to people who've been in that situation before. She's here to explain why it's so hard for political leaders to see that their time is up. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Shannon, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So I have to ask you now, when will Justin Trudeau step down? If I knew that, like I would buy low priced real estate and stocks and all kinds of things. But the idea is like that is something people cannot stop talking about, particularly in the Ottawa bubble, and also can't stop asking him in scrums to the point it sometimes gets a bit awkward. Like it's sort of funny how blunt political scrums can be sometimes. Everyone really hates you. Like when are you going to take a walk? But a few weeks ago, my colleagues Bob Fyfe and Marika Walsh wrote a really great weekend piece just after the liberal caucus retreat. The upshot of the story was that various sort of liberal luminaries have been approaching

Justin Trudeau privately and trying to nudge him along to a come to Jesus moment. They've been telling him, you know, the polls are really ugly. It is not getting better. This could end very, very badly for us. We think that you should think about a change at the top. And that the response these various people are getting over and over again is sort of a big grin from him and an assurance that he cannot wait to fight the next election and that he cannot wait to take on Pierre Polyev. I read the story and I came away thinking, like, why is he doing this? But I came away thinking it as like a real question, not as sort of a sarcastic, like, what on earth is this silly man thinking? You know, if we can stipulate

to the fact that he's not an idiot, he's a smart man, he's a talented politician, he's lasted this long, like, what is going on there? Because it seems like everyone else is reading the writing on the wall, and he's having a different response to it, at least in this moment. So I found that really fascinating on sort of a human psychological and a political level. Yeah. And then you looked into this, and you found that this is actually kind of a trend with some politicians here. So I know, Shannon, you looked at a couple of examples of basically politicians staying on in the face of this kind of mounting pressure. I want to ask you about former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. She was in power until 2018. So what was her situation in 2018? And how

does that, I guess, kind of compare to what Trudeau is going through now? Yeah. So I'll start laying out her situation and listeners can decide for themselves when it starts to sound familiar. So by 2018, the provincial election where her party was drummed out quite thoroughly by the progressive conservatives winning a big majority. In the run up to that, the Liberals had been in power in Ontario for 15 years, although Kathleen Wynne at that point had only been Premier for four years.

She had taken over as leader from Dalton McGinty in 2014. It had accumulated a lot of scandals and frustration of the kind that lands really viscerally with the public. They started to see them as being sort of, on the take in some way or completely careless about the well-being of their constituents. And Doug Ford just absolutely harnessed that rage. It was a really feisty, spicy election. And the Liberals were reduced to seven seats. They were reduced to a little tiny rump from governing. And PC Blue just swept the province and they have been in power in Ontario ever since.

And you actually spoke to Kathleen Wynne about her experience. I did. What did she say about, I guess, what was going through her head back then? So I find Kathleen Wynne an uncommonly excellent and important source as a politician because she is super insightful and also incredibly honest. She will just lay it on the table. And so we talked for quite a while about her experience. And as soon as I approached her about it, she got where I was going with it. She was very careful to say, I don't think my situation was the same as the prime minister's because it's on a national scale.

There's a lot of differences. But sort of people seeing the shadows of one and the other is inevitable. She even told me, in the summer, she was at Pride in Toronto. And she was just sort of wandering around with her family. And in the crowd at one point, she saw this tall, familiar figure who was Justin Trudeau. And someone from his entourage recognized her because there's a lot of shared staffing through for over the last decade or so between that era of Queen's Park and the present federal liberals. And the staffer came over and gave her a big hug. And then the prime minister saw her and they walked together for a while. And she said, he said to her, Kathleen, I've been thinking about you a lot lately. And she said,

yeah, I've been thinking about you too. So there's this mutual recognition of you are in a very tough moment. That is a landscape I kind of recognize. And so a lot of what we talked about, what I wanted to know was, what was it like from the inside when you were going through these ruthless scrums, where reporters are asking over and over and over, you know, your numbers are really bad, like, have you looked at how bad they are today? Do you want to talk about how bad they are? Like, I have to say, when you back up a step and imagine this from the other side, even though, you know, there are reasons we ask these questions, it all starts to seem a bit

macabre. She said she looks back on it now almost with a dark kind of humor. She sort of found it funny because the scrums were so repetitive. The questions were so ruthless. And she said she would joke to their staff, like, what do these reporters want me to say? Like, do they want to see me lying on the ground bleeding? Like, what are they looking for here that would satisfy this list of questions? But her take on it in a more substantive way was that these scrums are kind of a waste of time, because the politician in question is just going

to keep smiling and saying they're going to do the work, they're trying to get important things done. And, you know, maybe something like I don't pay attention to polls or whatever they do to kind of wave this off. And we just keep asking. But she also talked through in quite a lot of complexity, this kind of really messy human mix of knowing, like you can see the writing on the wall. She said, I was very aware of how bad things were in terms of polling. She's looking at the same polls that everybody else is, right? Of course. And it's not true when they say they don't pay attention to polls.

Of course, that's not true. So she, yeah, so she had access to the same information we did. She processed it more or less in the same way everyone else did. But there's still sort of always a bit of hope there. You could call it like hope or arrogance or delusion. I don't know. But there's always a reason to hope. She kind of broke it down in very human terms. She said in her experience, no matter how bad the broader situation is, no one in politics thinks they're going to

lose their seat. They always think, yeah, okay, things look pretty grim in the aggregate, but my constituents know who I am. I went to that event last night and 50 people lined up to shake my hand and tell me I'm great. I work really hard. I'm going to be okay. And so I am loath to call it something as denigrating as, you know, hubris or delusion. I think it's just hope. I mean, we celebrate all the time stories of people who do things against all the odds, right? Like every feel good sports movie out there is that story. And so it was really interesting to hear her walk through from the inside, the kind of toggling back and forth between realizing how bad things are and kind of having to sit with that. And then still having some hope, she said she kept saying to her closest advisors,

we still have a path to victory, right? But there were a couple of really interesting signpost moments that she recalls even now, six years later, she said about a week and a half into the campaign, someone who was working on one of the local candidate campaigns, who obviously knew her well, called her and said, okay, Kathleen, here's how you're going to take yourself out of the equation in order to try to save some seats for the rest of us, or we could get wiped out. And she said at the time, she was furious. She was indignant. She didn't react to the guy, but she was really displeased and disbelieving and turned to one of her closest advisors, who interestingly is Andrew Bevan, who's now the chief of staff to Chrystia Freeland. So these people, it's kind of like a nighttime soap opera, where it's a very small pool of people who just move between different roles. But she turned to him and said, we're not going to do that, right? And you can imagine how this plays out in a human way, right? When you hear something you really don't like hearing, you kind of know there's some truth in there, but you're not ready to go there. And you turn to someone

close to you and say, that's ridiculous, right? And she said, it's so funny, because she remembers all these years later, exactly what he said. And what he said to her was, well, no, we're not going to do that. We're not going to do that. Not yet. And it's not yet that she remembers that he was trying to sort of gently bring her along. And she said, I just wasn't there yet. But if people recall that 2018 election, a week before election day, she made an extraordinary speech where she did that. And she said, I have accepted I'm not going to be the premier. I am sort of trying to remove myself from the picture. Please vote for liberals in order to prevent either the PCs or the NDP from having free run in this province, which was a pretty unprecedented thing to do. And she said, she cried as we were talking. Like it's, I think it's not, it's not to be missed that these are really difficult decisions and really brutal moments in a political career. And so she got there eventually, but it took three more weeks of just hideous campaigning and really rough numbers and really brutal conversations for

her to get there. So in the face of all of this, though, Shannon, why did Kathleen Wynne choose to stay on? She said, first of all, the polling didn't show that anyone else becoming leader would bring the party to better fortunes. There was nothing that suggested someone else would do better. She said if there had been that, she would have seriously considered it because she didn't want to drive her party into a ditch. In her case, and this might also have federal echoes in this particular moment, there was no obvious heir apparent. There was no one clear who was going to step into the shoes right behind her, say like a Kamala Harris, Joe Biden situation. So there would have been kind of a messy leadership fight. And she also wasn't facing a big caucus mutiny. That's often a thing that will push you out the door if the calls start to come from inside the House.

And all of those things have pretty strong parallels right now for the moment Trudeau is facing. We've seen kind of whispers and some little dissatisfied murmurings coming out, but there hasn't been a big push internally. There hasn't been a lot of dissent in his caucus. There's no obvious successor. And also, I think his argument, very pointedly, would be, I have disposed of three conservative leaders in a row. I've won, in some fashion, a bunch of elections no one thought I could win. People have been kind of discounting me and underestimating me since the beginning of my political career. Why not me? Why not me to take on this fight? So I think it was instructive to hear the nuts and bolts that

someone else was puzzling through. And Kathleen Wynne also said she felt a sense of responsibility to stay. She said, if this is going to end really badly, should I just stay where I am and kind of wear it? Why give that to someone else to take on? Take the fall for your party then, basically. Yeah. Or just like I think of it like the captaining a ship that's going down. You just stay at the wheel. We'll be right back. Of course, this is not just with the liberals, right?

Shannon, you actually looked at the progressive conservatives. In the 1993 federal election, the incumbent PCs went from 156 seat majority to just two seats. You spoke to a pollster for the conservatives in that election, Alan Gregg. What did he tell you about what went on there? In that era of federal politics, the conservative campaign apparatus was called the big blue machine because it was this very consistent small group of operators who had been together for a number of campaigns and had been unbelievably successful. They were very tight personally working together. And they had basically won a bunch of, quote unquote, impossible elections in 84, in 88. When the election got going, the public favored John

Turner's liberals and they hated free trade. And the big blue machine succeeded in turning both of those tides simultaneously over the course of the election and pulling out this massive win. So by the time just before the 93 campaign got going, Brian Mulroney was the prime minister and progressive conservative, obviously. And his approval ratings were in the teens, like they were in the basement. That might make Justin Trudeau feel better about where things are right now. And he stepped down and Kim Campbell took over as leader and prime minister, and then they ran the campaign under her. And so what was really interesting about what Mr. Gregg had to say was that they came into the 93 campaign knowing things

looked ugly, but they had won a bunch of ugly, unlikely fights before. And I think this is also a broadly applicable thing. By the time you get to that level in politics, you have defied the odds in situations over and over where people said, oh, they're toast. This is not going to work out. And so he called it hubris. And what was fascinating, too, is so he built the modeling that they used. So basically the statistics they look at, if you think of like John King on CNN with his fancy little map, as he clicks away at the different counties and states. So Greg built that for the PCs.

He built the whole system that was going to take the polling and show them how it would play out with the seats. And when he did this work and what it spit out was, you're going to take the polling and show them how it would play out with the seeds. And when he did this work and what it spit out was, you're going to be left with two seeds. He looked at it and went, nah, that can't be right. So even when someone builds this whole elaborate apparatus and updates it continuously and looks at what the tea leaves have told them, there is still this capacity to just say, it's not going to end that badly. It has to

be okay in some way. Is there something about the need to have this kind of hope if you're in politics, if you're a politician in this kind of situation? Do you just need to believe that you are going to somehow define the odds? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of it is your own history works against you by this point. To get to the point of being prime minister or premier or governing any kind of jurisdiction for a bunch of years, you have to be a survivor and you have to be a winner and you have to be a defier of odds. You have to be someone who's been counted out over and over. And, you know, you had some core of self-belief or confidence or arrogance or hubris or denialism or whatever it is inside your soul that lets you keep going.

And it's almost like Shakespearean, because the very thing that got you to this point, and that enabled you to have this career, and have the confidence to get up over and over, and shake those hands, even if people are telling you they're not impressed with you, is the very thing that I think maybe doesn't keep you from acknowledging the inevitable, but it prolongs it. It preserves some flame of hope within you because, hey, I've already survived this long. And I think this is directly relevant to Justin Trudeau's career because from the moment he entered the arena, quite literally, in the boxing match against Patrick Brazo, and then running as an MP and

running as leader, he has been discounted and underestimated and mocked as, you know, a dauphin with nice hair. And I think that has become part of his self-image. It's become part of his way of understanding himself in the world. So in this moment, it makes a certain amount of sense that there would be some kind of feisty defiance to you. And you would think, well, they've counted me out before and look what I managed to pull off. So why not try one more time? Let's look at how this plays out here, Shannon. I think you've called this whole process kind of like a pantomime in a way, right? Where everyone around this politician kind of just

pretends like that politician is not going to step down. Like everyone around Trudeau right now keeps saying, you know, he's going to stay on as leader. Can you explain like what is happening there? So this is where I called Alex Marland, who is a political scientist at Acadia University. And Alex's research is really unique and I think uniquely useful because he is more or less an anthropologist of politicians. He has done extensive interviews with all sorts of politicians and can basically explain them almost as an organism or a society to you backed up by research. And so when I called Alex and started to ask these questions that you and I are talking about, immediately he turned it on its head and said, but why do we keep believing him when he says he's not going anywhere?

And so Alex sort of walked it out and kind of added up these facts to me. He said, like, if you presented this to any ordinary Canadian, if you laid out for them, the information Justin Trudeau has at his disposal, what kind of conclusion do you think a normal person would come to about what's going to happen? So he said, being prime minister, pretty cool job, right? We can all agree with that lots of stature, lots of power, it's kind of the height of your career arc, if you're a politician, you're not going to let that go unless and until you have to, right? There's always the possibility that something incredibly weird could happen and could change things. So it makes the most sense to give as much time as possible for events, my dear boy, as the famous saying goes, to play out because you never know,

weirder things have happened, right? And then Alex also pointed out the moment a politician like Mr. Trudeau, the moment he says, I'm done, I've given notice to the Liberal Party to run a leadership race, he becomes sort of the space to fill instead of the main character. He loses all of the center of gravity, he loses all of the control, the interest, the oxygen in the room, all shifts to leadership race, the palace intrigue. And I think this was kind of what I was hoping the story would answer, which is that these people are generally, they're not idiots, they care about their legacy, they don't want their legacy to be that they drove their party into a ditch. So even though we're talking about all the factors that add up to waiting as long as you can or some sense of kind of hopeful denial, eventually they will see the writing on the wall and they don't want to be responsible for destroying their party.

So sort of as Alex adds up his detective clues, he thinks it's coming. It's just a question of when Justin Trudeau feels backed into a corner and feels like he has run out of other possible plot twists. And the essence of it is kind of that only he can answer that. So all of this is locked in the black box of Justin Trudeau's head and the close, close advisors he may be confiding in and having the most difficult conversations with right now, which means that none of us will see it until the black box spits out a different decision at the other end.

And that means that all of this is kind of a pantomime. It's a charade. We keep asking in these scrums, are you going to step down? And the thing is, the answer is going to be no, because it has to be for him until it turns to yes. So that means that all of it is not a real conversation. We keep asking and he keeps answering. And everybody involved kind of knows that it's sort of a fake conversation, but it's kind of all anyone can do right now. And so we just keep going around this insane merry-go-round. Well, then let me ask you, I guess, about the media's role in this, because it sounds like this is kind of a conversation between the politicians and the media and everyone kind of knows what's happening, but we kind of, we play into it anyways. I mean, does the media kind of perpetuate this cycle? Or what is

the media's role here? Yeah, I think we do. I mean, I understand why we do it. Like, look, I'm not going to denigrate my colleagues. I am one of the pack who is doing this. But I think we treat it as an accountability issue, which it is, right? He is the leader of the country. He's the leader of a governing party. So we keep asking because our job is to demand answers to important questions. And that's a pretty important question. I kind of see how we are trapped on this merry-go-round. And I don't know if I see a way off because I understand that for the prime minister, he cannot let on that he is even entertaining stepping down until he's decided to pull the chute for all the reasons we've just talked about in terms of,

you know, power and message control and attention. But we can't stop asking because it would sort of be a dereliction of duty if we didn't. I would argue that maybe we could calibrate that a bit better because, look, if we only get so many questions a week out of this guy who is running the country, there's only so many times we can ask him when he's stepping down and get a non-answer before nobody's learning anything new. So I don't know how that looks in practice because reporters can all ask whatever they want in the scrum and this prime minister is not great at making himself either available for questions or answering them in a straightforward way. But it would maybe be useful if there was some element of understanding of it just is what it is until it's not. This is where it all gets like super existential and it's like a yoga meditation or something.

It is what it is until it's not. So maybe let's just ask at a reasonable interval. But otherwise, Kathleen Wynne made this point and this one will stick in my brain for a long time. There are other things we could be asking. We could be asking, what are you trying to do in the meantime? What do you think is the most important policy file to move forward? Carbon tax, kind of a big deal right now. And we keep talking about it as a political story. So we could be asking, what are you going to do instead? What alternatives are you considering? Is that a legacy piece you want to save? But I have to ask you, though, about what we saw playing out in the

states over the summer, right? Because Joe Biden did step down in the face of immense pressure, and it had a really positive impact on the Democrats, right? Like Kamala Harris, the polling, the fundraising, all of that. It was a huge change for them. So what was the difference? Yeah, so I would say there's one very big difference in the U.S. that makes it something not applicable here. But there's two other lessons that are applicable here. So the first is that in before Mr. Biden stepped down, what we were seeing in the polls over and over again was a strong lean toward Trump. But because Trump is, shall we say, a problematic candidate for a lot of people, it was very much I am picking the least worst of two options. And Mr. Biden was just seen as

too out of it, too old, too decrepit, even though Mr. Trump was only four years younger than him. And so I think there was a sense of kind of letting tension out of the balloon. When Biden finally stepped out and Harris took over, you saw quite a substantial move both in the polls and in fundraising because people thought, finally, I have somewhere more solid to park my interest because I don't want to vote for Trump. So those are the things that are different because there's just a different landscape here. We've seen tons of people are incredibly energized by Pierre Polyev. It is not a hold your nose and vote situation here.

It is people sort of willingly following the Pied Piper. But the thing that we do learn from the US is that a change in leadership and a positive outcome from that can happen much, much Biden made the announcement that he was stepping down, his answer was no, I'm not going anywhere. So we also see an example there of how the answer about your political future can be a staunch, stubborn, I mean it, I am not going anywhere, until eventually someone rethinks things or a Nancy Pelosi visits them and says we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way or something accumulates within them. We all know how big decisions get made in our own lives. It's like a drip, drip, drip. And all of a sudden you're kind of pushed over the top of the roller coaster

and there is the decision. So it also tells us that the answer can be no right up until the moment when it's yes. Shannon, this was so interesting. Thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.