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Futures of Trudeau, O’toole uncertain

Kelly Mcparland

It cost $610 million for Canadians to show Justin Trudeau that a national pandemic is no time to call an election.

The Liberal line in forcing Monday’s vote was that, with big decisions lying ahead, Canadians deserved a say in their future. Even though voters had made clear their view in 2019 when they reduced the Liberals to a minority government, Trudeau wanted to hear it again. So voters repeated themselves. After 36 days of campaigning — much of it ugly, divisive and demeaning — voters returned a Parliament that will be almost identical to the one Trudeau discarded. They’ll have to build a lot of windmills to make up for the emissions wasted on this baby.

Though mail-in ballots remain to be counted, Trudeau will return as prime minister, at least for now, with a projected 158 seats. He had 155 when the campaign started. That’s about $200 million per extra seat. The Conservatives will have 119 seats, down two from before. The New Democrats will gain one seat, the Bloc Québécois two. The Greens are still stuck at two.

The irony is that after the arid meanderings of the campaign, it’s the aftermath that could get interesting. Trudeau called the vote for one reason only: to get a majority and rid himself of the inconvenience of opposition intrusions. He failed at that. Once again, based on initial counts, the Conservatives won the popular vote, by an even wider margin than last time. Only the concentration of the Liberal votes in two big urban centres kept them in office. How long will the country remain happy to be run at the behest of Toronto and Montreal?

Even as compliant a crew as the Liberal caucus may start questioning their faith in the man at the top. A Liberal spin doctor might argue — and probably will — that nothing was lost given that the government retained its position. That’s true enough if you disregard the time, effort and expenses of tens of thousands of people dedicated to little more than satisfying Justin Trudeau’s poor judgment. He might as well have had people digging holes, then filling them back in again.

How much longer will his caucus retain its devotion? In his election-night speech — it’s hard to call the result a “victory” — he opened by declaring “You are sending us back to work with a clear mandate to get Canada through the pandemic and to the brighter days ahead.” Yes, which is precisely what people expected him to be doing before he toppled his own government two years earlier than necessary. Maybe if he’d listened we’d have been spared this empty exercise.

“Some people will talk about division, but that’s not what I see,” he added, after running one of the country’s more divisive campaigns, marked by wedge issues and personal attacks.

While Trudeau’s pre-election minority was fairly secure, the landscape in Ottawa is now far less certain. Conservative Leader Erin O’toole did no better than his predecessor, Andrew Scheer, in taking advantage of a vulnerable opponent and may face rumblings of his own. The Tories don’t seem to know who they are at this point. In gaining the leadership as a “true blue Tory” and then shifting hard to the centre, O’toole tried to play too many sides against the middle, ending up at odds with much of his own party. He favoured Brian Mulroney over Stephen Harper, made an unnecessary mess on guns, advocated vaccines but wouldn’t demand them of his candidates and sided with Jason Kenney for a time before refusing to mention his name. His aim was to convince Canadians his was a new and different party, but with a party unsure it wanted to go along.

Crucially, O’toole’s team failed to gain the ground in the Toronto area he needed to justify his concessions. Jenni Byrne, noted guru of the Harper team, pointedly

called the Tory agenda “a failed experiment” even as the votes were still being counted. The election was “winnable,” she said, implying it was the leader who let it slip away. Don’t think there won’t be others in the Conservative camp who agree with her.

The Liberals, on the other hand, know exactly what they’ve got, and have to decide whether they’re happy with it. Trudeau has twice led them to a place where less than a third of Canadians can reliably be counted on to lend their support. The endless procession of Liberal promises — daycare, pharmacare, eldercare, affordable housing, “our shared journey on the path to reconciliation” — can only survive so many years of going undelivered. Having doubled the debt and run unprecedented deficits without achieving any of the above, he can’t hope to continue his spending spree well into the recovery the country is still struggling to attain. It gets harder when you don’t have money to throw around, and affordability is already a top concern among the millennials the Liberals have counted on so heavily to keep them afloat.

“I hear you when you say you just want to get back to the things you love, not worry about this pandemic, or about an election,” Trudeau said Monday night. You’d presume that means the Liberals are unlikely to drive the country into another snap vote the next time Trudeau thinks opportunity beckons, but this is the same prime minister who told the country “nobody wants an election before the end of this pandemic,” and then went ahead and called one.

The best that can be said of Trudeau’s gambit is that a chastened government may get down to doing the job it should have been doing all along. Canada is far from safe from the pandemic. The economy is a serious concern, for all Trudeau’s effort to shrug off rising inflation, while the immense strains on the health-care system have never been more apparent.

The prime minister spent the final days of his campaign attacking Conservative premiers and painting anything Conservative as a danger to the country; back in office he faces the reality that seven of the 10 provinces are led by Conservatives, only one by a Liberal, and his chief opponent in the election drew more votes than he did. There was definitely a message sent on Monday, the issue is whether Trudeau heard it. And did his party hear the same one?

THE TORIES DON’T SEEM TO KNOW WHO THEY ARE AT THIS POINT.

ISSUES & IDEAS

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2021-09-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-22T07:00:00.0000000Z

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