From ‘sunny ways’ to cloudy days: Canadians have tired of Justin Trudeau

TORONTO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose to power in 2015 — and rescued the Liberal Party from irrelevance — on promises to bring “real change” and infuse Canadian politics with “sunny ways.”

Nearly nine years later, the forecast for the progressive icon is cloudy. His party, which has been slumping in the polls for more than a year, now trails the Conservatives by as many as 20 points and is vulnerable not only in key battlegrounds but also in traditional strongholds.

The most recent blow was a special election loss last month to the Conservatives in Toronto-St. Paul’s, a district that the Liberals had won (often, easily) since 1993. It was as if the Democrats had lost a special election in Manhattan, or the Republicans had fallen in Colorado Springs.

Now Canadians are watching to see if Trudeau might be planning his own “walk in the snow,” a repeat of the solitary stroll that his father, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, claimed to have taken in an Ottawa blizzard the day before he announced his resignation in 1984.

In a much lower-key version of Democratic pressure on President Biden to drop out of the U.S. presidential race, several high-profile Liberals, including his former environment minister Catherine McKenna and Christy Clark, a Liberal former premier of British Columbia, have called on him to step aside to give the party a better chance of staying in government.

Trudeau, 52, has given no indication that he plans to step down — and it’s unclear any of the alternatives would have more success turning things around. By law, the next federal election must be held by Oct. 20, 2025.

“I want to be clear that I hear people’s concerns and frustrations,” Trudeau said after the by-election. “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 see and feel.”

Trudeau’s woes echo those of many incumbent leaders, who are struggling amid high inflation and concerns about affordability, particularly in housing. Most housing markets in Canada are at or near worst-ever affordability levels, the Royal Bank of Canada reported in December.

“The prime minister and his government haven’t been able to respond to those concerns,” said David Coletto, chair of pollster Abacus Data. “As Canadians reflect on the state of the country, the state of the world, I think the conclusion increasingly gets to a point where they just want change.”

Trudeau has won three federal elections. He has been in power for nine years — and accumulated nine years’ worth of miscalculations and other baggage: Ethics scandals, photos of him as a younger man in blackface, controversies over trips abroad and vacations at home, struggles to balance growing Canada’s economy with climate action. It’s been more than a century since a Canadian prime minister won four elections in a row.

“A lot of people are talking about St. Paul’s being a bit of a wake-up call, but it really shouldn’t be surprising,” said Dan Arnold, Trudeau’s former head of research and advertising. “If it’s a wake-up call, it’s an 11 a.m. wake-up call, because there were many warning signs beforehand.”

It’s not just political missteps that have cost the Liberals, analysts say, but the rise of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, a populist firebrand who has emerged as the most formidable political opponent Trudeau has faced.

The 45-year-old has taken control of the party trafficking in grievance politics, railing against public health mandates and championing the trucker convoy that shut down U.S.-Canada border crossings in 2022 and brought Ottawa to a standstill for several weeks.

“Canada is broken,” said Poilievre, a member of parliament for two decades. He’ll fix it, he said, with a plan to “ax the [carbon] tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime.”

He has focused his message on hammering the government for high interest rates, stubborn inflation and the historically high housing costs and shortages that have left many millennial voters — a key part of the coalition that brought Trudeau to power — disillusioned.

“He hasn’t offered a lot of compelling policy alternatives,” said Lisa Young, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. “But he’s seen as being much more effective on the issue just because he was the one who was naming it before the Trudeau government started trying to respond.”

Under Poilievre, the Conservative Party has smashed fundraising records — and worked to soften his image. An advertising campaign last year included a spot narrated by his wife, a Venezuelan immigrant, with video of the pair playing with their children.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have been slow to respond. They have tried to cast him as Donald Trump-lite — the former president is deeply unpopular here — but there’s little evidence it’s having much effect.

“I think the Liberals might have missed their opportunity to define him as dangerous or outside the … the boundaries of what’s acceptable in Canadian politics,” Young told The Washington Post.

Trudeau has tried to reverse his slide. Last summer, he overhauled his cabinet in an effort to inject “new energy” into the government. He brought a marketer with a self-described focus on “understanding Millennials and Generation Z” to his team.

He walked back part of the carbon tax, one of his signature policies, in what analysts said was a bid to shore up support in Atlantic Canada — angering not just his own environment minister, but also officials elsewhere who wanted carve outs of their own.

He spent weeks on a cross-country tour to preview a budget aimed at “generational fairness,” breaking with a tradition of keeping budget details secret until the document is introduced in Parliament.

None of it has helped.

“I think they’re at a stage where it really doesn’t matter what they do or what they say,” said pollster Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute. “I hate to use this phrase, but it’s like they ‘jumped the shark.’ Nobody is listening.”

The problem, Coletto said, is that “if the person delivering the message is the prime minister, people won’t listen to it.”

Unlike the Democrats’ pressure campaign on Biden, Liberal lawmakers here have kept whatever angst they might feel about Trudeau private. One member of his caucus has urged him to step down, but there hasn’t been a full revolt — yet.

That’s in part because there’s no clear successor to rally around, or compelling evidence that the people whose names are tossed around as possible replacements — Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland or Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, to name two — would reverse the party’s fortunes.

“[The Liberals] are very much perceived as, I think correctly, the party of Justin Trudeau,” Young said. “It’s really difficult to imagine someone else coming along and being able to redefine the party and the government in a meaningful way in the time that they have left before the next election.”

When Trudeau became the Liberal leader in 2013, the party was a husk of the juggernaut that had so dominated Canadian politics that it was called the country’s natural governing party. It had been banished to the political wilderness; books proclaimed its death.

The Liberals began the 2015 federal election trailing not only the governing Conservatives but also the New Democrats. Opponents bought ads dismissing Trudeau as “just not ready.” But the youthful and charismatic leader defied expectations. The Liberals entered the campaign with 36 of Parliament’s 338 seats. It finished with 184.

“Many members of caucus see themselves as having been elected on Trudeau’s coattails,” Young said, “and they perhaps don’t see themselves as having much influence that they can bring to bear on this.”

Analysts and members of Trudeau’s inner circle say the amateur boxer is accustomed to being underestimated, and he performs well when he’s on the ropes. The question is whether there’s time enough to reverse his party’s fortunes.

“The desire of voters wanting change in the current environment is not limited to Canada,” said Arnold, chief strategy officer of the public opinion firm Pollara. “I feel like we’re in this post-covid funk across the Western world where people are just really frustrated with their quality of life …

“Voters are just looking for change and they don’t really care if it’s left wing or right wing or someone with 34 convictions.”

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