Jeffrey Simpson is the author of eight books and a former national affairs columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Just shy of nine years ago, Justin Trudeau led his Liberals to a majority government with 39.5 per cent of the popular vote. Today, depending on which poll you prefer, the Liberals have lost a shade less than half of that support. Where did it go, and why?
Liberal support began leaking during Mr. Trudeau’s first four-year term. The result of the ensuing election was a minority Liberal government. Since the last election, in 2021, which produced another minority, the Liberals have tried many tricks in the political book and unveiled a range of policies designed to meet social needs, as the party sees them, and to tickle the electorate’s fancy. Politically speaking, nothing has worked. The party has at most one year left before the next election to avoid a crushing defeat. Recently, the Liberals lost by-elections in seats they had long held in Toronto and Montreal, a harbinger of electoral disaster.
Any government faces a myriad of challenges, some foreseen, others complete surprises. Each challenge requires a response, or series of responses. One might say that in politics, as often in life, human beings most easily remember what they dislike. That propensity offers at least a partial explanation why every Canadian government in the modern age has worn poorly, in the sense that its popularity drains the longer it remains in office. It happened to the governments of prime ministers Louis St. Laurent, John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and now Justin Trudeau. The exception might have been Jean Chrétien, who was done in more by internal party rivalry with Mr. Martin than a sour public.
Observers of politics will point to a number of issues and decisions that have soured about 80 per cent of the voters on the Liberals, including the obvious fact that 60 per cent of those who voted in 2015 chose other parties. Presumably, they never liked the Trudeau Liberals in the first place, and what they have since seen has left them still unimpressed. It’s the voters who have left the Liberals in the intervening decade who have imperilled the party’s hold on power. Many factors explain this decline, among which four stand out. Call them the Four “I”s: Incumbency, Inflation, Immigration and Identity.
Incumbency
Prime ministers do not campaign for a minority government, although that is the best result they sometimes know they can achieve. They seek a majority, and then another, just as Brian Mulroney wanted and achieved in 1988. Majority or minority, winning a fourth consecutive election, which the Liberals will soon seek, is a tall order that Canadian history suggests is too tall. Justin’s father, Pierre, won three straight elections (1968, 1972 and 1974) but lost in 1979. Even the venerable Mackenzie King only won three in a row during his long years in office. Only by returning to the early years of the 20th century and the waning years of the 19th do we find the royal flush of four straight electoral wins accomplished by Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir John A. Macdonald before him. In other words, the Liberals’ hopes to win a fourth time next year, with or without Mr. Trudeau at the helm, mock history.
Too many years in office affronts the deepest sentiment in politics: time for a change. Democracy, after all, is about change: of leaders, policies, approaches. Issues change, challenges change, personnel change. What seems like a defensible policy today gets overtaken by events: to wit carbon pricing designed to induce people to alter car-buying-and-driving habits in the name of lowering emissions, something economists would draw up from their textbooks. Except that in the wake of COVID-19, many products’ prices rose and stayed high so that a refundable carbon tax – and the carbon tax is refundable – gives too many Canadians sticker shock. The same reaction helped to do in Conservative prime minister Joe Clark in 1979, whose minority government imposed an excise tax on gasoline to nudge consumers to change their habits. A lot of consumers-cum-voters changed the government instead so that the Liberals won in 1980. Circumstances changed; government policy did not.
Any government makes decisions that segments of the electorate dislike. They err, sometimes in small and superficial ways, but with the media and opposition parties alert to pounce and often exaggerate, these mistakes make for injurious headlines that stick in voters’ memories. The nicks and scrapes of political debate take their toll. The government’s mantra to “control the message” turns ministers into cardboard mannequins, spouting lines that make them, and their government, seem on autopilot. We’ve heard that a hundred times, voters might say of a government whose repetitions deaden rather than energize. Everything in modern politics presents the paradox of governments endlessly struggling, usually unsuccessfully, to get the public’s attention by using the same language, slogans and clichés, as if by repetition alone can a message be conveyed. Government therefore seems formulaic, and no one suffers from the resulting boredom factor more than the prime minister who remains constantly in the spotlight. After a while – there is no defining moment – the public gets weary and irritated, having heard it all before, looking for someone if not better then at least new.
Opposition parties merely assist in the self-destruction of governments. Why this current government self-destructed has many theories, but one might be that these Liberals, being overwhelmingly self-described “progressive” Liberals, have tried to do too much with the result that ambition has run ahead of effective implementation. With a cabinet of 39 ministers, each desirous of making announcements and with each clutching a “mandate letter” overflowing with requirements from the all-powerful Prime Minister’s Office, there are too many voices scattered across too many priorities so that whatever is the government’s core message gets lost. The more numerous the messages, the less the impact attached to each so that the longer a government remains in office the more the messages become blurred and voters ask: What exactly are they doing? And the more politically desperate a government becomes as the years roll on and the polls sag, the greater the temptation to try and do more, either of the same with ever-greater intensity or bet on a Hail Mary such as the economic ideas Mr. Trudeau has just asked former central banker Mark Carney to assemble, nine years after the party was first elected.
The first of the “I”s is therefore incumbency, the constraints of which grow tighter with time and the escape from which becomes more difficult with every passing day. British prime minister Harold Macmillan coined a phrase that morphed into a cliché. What did you worry most about, he was asked. “Events, dear boy, events.” He might have replied, “Time, dear boy, time.”
Inflation
Inflation has gut-punched governments around the democratic world. Governments, including Canada’s, did not create inflation although they might have added to it with too-expansive fiscal policy.
The core problem was the pressure of constrained supply and pent-up demand caused by the unforeseen and devastating effects of COVID-19. Government budgets were distended to provide help for those afflicted and protect those who were not. The curtailing of domestic commerce, the shuttering of public institutions, the fettering of international trade and supply chains – the results were grim, for individuals, institutions and governments, and not just in Canada. China, where the pandemic originated, eventually entered almost total lockdown. The United States threw its research and economic might into finding remedies and succeeded, by which time, however, much damage had been done, worsened by the bizarre medical advice offered Americans by president Donald Trump. Every European country and many others around the world suffered. Canada was not alone in being smacked by COVID-19, and although the Trudeau government was criticized in certain quarters, the government’s performance was not worse, and in some instances better, than that of comparable countries. Of course, COVID-19 revealed Canada’s lack of preparedness in vaccine supply, a problem that predated the Trudeau government.
The government was politically hurt not so much by its performance as the central bank’s response to the inflation that accompanied the pandemic and its aftermath. The Bank of Canada followed standard central-bank monetary policy around the world to fight the inflation surge. It raised, and raised again, interest rates, which in turn produced higher mortgage and loan rates, put pressure on wages that many employers struggled to meet, raised prices for basic goods and services, and sparked political anger. The anger was especially directed at food and housing prices: the basics of basics that touched so many Canadians. The script was written in Canada, but it resembled the one in democratic countries everywhere (and in the Global South, too).
The search for culprits to explain economic difficulties hurt the Trudeau government politically. (Witness the political slide of U.S. President Joe Biden, or the political problems of Western European governments through inflationary times.) The Bank of Canada, like central banks in many countries, drove up the interest rates, but did not take the blame. Central bankers are not elected; indeed, they are largely unknown to the public. The bank took the decisions that produced public anger, but it was and remains immune from control by elected governments – for the very good reason that if elected officials ran the currency, their temptation to operate it for partisan advantage would rob the currency of its credibility.
In country after country, elected officials felt the political wrath of the citizens whose circumstances were worsened. The Trudeau government was no exception, to which the Conservatives’ reply in opposition to COVID-19 was to call for spending less money without identifying on what and to “fire” the bank’s governor, which is almost impossible in law and would be stupid in practice.
The central’s bank’s painful policies eventually worked. Slowly. Inflation is heading to near the bank’s 2-per-cent target. But inflation is like COVID-19 itself. Both take a long time to abate. Inflation’s sting lingers for those who took out or renewed mortgages at higher rates or negotiated a car loan or lost their job because their company struggled. Governments, rather unfairly, take the blame.
Immigration
The Trudeau government has swayed public opinion to a degree thought to be next to impossible not long ago. For years, public-opinion surveys showed Canada as an outlier among the western community of nations in attitudes toward immigrants. Depending on the poll, 70 per cent to 80 per cent of Canadians had a positive view of immigration. Not just because many citizens and legally landed immigrants awaiting citizenship came from abroad, but also because the Canadian system blended national self-interest in encouraging immigrants with academic credentials and high skills while allowing for some entrants on humanitarian grounds.
Just about everywhere else in the Western world, governments either discouraged immigrants (see South Korea and Japan) or experienced a political backlash against migration. Brexit was about many British historical fantasies but also fears of a loss of control over borders that allowed too many “foreigners” into Blighty. France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and other Western European countries witnessed the rise of anti-immigrant, nationalist parties. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary, for example) went even further. They all but closed their borders to immigrants and asylum seekers. In the United States, immigration roiled the body politic, with Donald Trump and southern-state Republican governors railing about immigrants flooding across the southern border. In the 2024 U.S. election campaign, immigration ranks near the top of public concerns, to the political advantage of Republicans. In Canada, by contrast, no political party had attacked immigrants or asylum seekers or the system that processed them. Immigration was seen not long ago, in political-science speak, as a “public good,” a balanced, well-administered policy with clear goals blending humanitarian and self-interested economic objectives.
The Trudeau Liberals’ immigration policy turned out as disastrously for them, and arguably the country, as the National Energy Program did for Pierre Trudeau’s government in the early 1980s. The Liberals’ immigration changes (aided somewhat by provincial education policies) turned more than half of Canadians in recent polls against both existing immigration levels and types of immigrants and asylum seekers. The majority of Canadians now believe there are too many immigrants and asylum seekers: students admitted to “diploma-mill schools” in suburban shopping malls, temporary migrants gaining work permits, gaming the system in other words; immigrants arriving because the government weakened the points system used to judge immigrants’ abilities.
With housing costs high, and in short supply in parts of Canada, with unskilled foreign workers keeping wages down (which is why, in part, business wanted more immigrants), with mayors screaming about no place to house asylum seekers, with the Immigration and Refugee Board flooded by cases, many of which it has neither the time nor personnel to process, with pressures on social services and school boards, public opinion has turned against immigration as it has recently been conceived and administered. With good reason. The fault lies almost exclusively (provinces can shoulder some blame) with the Trudeau Liberals, who, feeling the hot breath of public annoyance, have backpedalled modestly in some areas. Their changes, however, will not have a discernible effect for some time, certainly not in a major way before the next election.
Historians of this period will look at cabinet records to figure out why the Liberals took the decisions they did that turned public opinion against immigration and the incumbent government. Was it the old Liberal reflex that immigrants usually vote Liberal so the more the merrier? Was it a response to those who proposed that Canada should become a country of 100 million people? Was it a response to business leaders who wanted more cheap labour? Was it the Liberal/liberal reflex to want to do good rather than to be smart? Was it a response to higher education institutions whose budgets were stressed by inadequate provincial funding and so needed foreign students whom they could charge higher fees? Was the push for record-high immigration needed to fill the gap of a declining birth rate? Was it that a party that had wrapped itself in self-virtue could not believe that a variation of what had happed in other Western democracies could not and would not happen here? Was it blind incompetence not to appreciate that driving up immigration and refugees to unprecedented numbers would produce a myriad of negative side effects and destroy what had been close to a consensus in favour of previous levels of newcomers?
Federal departments had warned their political masters that housing availability, social services, school systems, health care and other social programs would all be strained. The warnings were ignored. The public, too, could see these stresses in their communities and wondered what on Earth the Liberals had been thinking. Whatever the Liberals’ ambitions for immigration, they blew up politically in the party’s face.
Identity
From the time of Sir Wilfrid Laurier to the arrival of Justin Trudeau, the Liberals were the party of patriotism. Not that the Conservatives were unpatriotic, but they did stick to the British connection for a long time. The party’s frequent frustration with appealing to French speakers blunted the Tories’ ability to build a national party across linguistic and religious lines. The Liberals became, partly from their own efforts, partly from their opponents’ difficulties, the party of distance from Britain, pan-Canadian social programs, the Canadian flag and echoes of Laurier’s inflated boast that the 20th century would belong to Canada. As Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien used to say, “Canada is No. 1.” He knew that patriotism remained the high card in the Liberals’ hand, and although the media and highbrows cringed at what they considered his corny appeal, audiences loved it.
Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper knew the importance of patriotism. He tried therefore to pin patriotic sentiments on Conservative breasts. He talked up the War of 1812 (fought largely by the British) and had a monument to Canada’s “victory” built on Parliament Hill. He had the military march through the streets of Ottawa after the Afghan War. He was never one for flowery or emotional rhetoric, but as prime minister he tried in his own way to appeal to patriotic sentiments.
But patriotism remained the Liberals’ high card. Until Justin Trudeau started down the trail of finding many of Canada’s past mistakes and raising them in the public consciousness above the country’s accomplishments. The contrition for past and present abuses against Indigenous people never ceased, but to that list of failures Mr. Trudeau and his team seemed eager to find just about everything else for which to apologize because for them virtue meant atoning for past mistakes rather than celebrating past accomplishments. Long gone was Justin’s father’s warning that “we can only be just in our time.” Now English-speaking cultural institutions – universities and schools, arts institutions such as publishers, museums and galleries, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, government-funding agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts – paint the past in unrelievedly dark colours. Canada’s historical narrative has been reshaped by the English-Canadian cultural elites from pride to shame, from accomplishments to failure, and the Liberal Party joined in the reshaping.
The Trudeau Liberals see a country of particularisms rather than as some kind of organic whole. They were correct, of course, in recognizing how demography was changing the country (see immigration above) but instead of appealing to something beyond particularistic attachments based on gender, ethnicity, race, Indigeneity, they stressed these attachments rather than anything beyond them, reflecting what Mr. Trudeau had once observed: that Canada had no national identity. If Canada had any identity, it often seemed, in listening to the Trudeau Liberals, that it consisted of an overweening, enveloping sense of virtue – which, when articulated abroad, made other countries cringe within NATO or vote against Canada at the United Nations.
Having thrown away the high card of patriotism, thereby altering the party’s image, the Trudeau Liberals also changed another of the party’s historic identities. Previous Liberal governments had reflected a balance between social reformers and business-oriented ministers. That combination had been a winning strategy for the Liberals. The business wing of the Liberal Party has now atrophied to the point of one or two ministers so that the most prominent Liberal with experience in and connection to the business community works outside government: Mark Carney. That the party should turn to him for advice on economic policy in this last year of the mandate bespeaks desperation that, under current political circumstances, is understandable but unnerving for all those inside government (read: the Finance Minister) who ought to be shaping policy.
There are undoubtedly other explanations for the long slide of the Trudeau Liberals, but these four “I”s should be at least near the top of the list at the forthcoming reckoning, with voters and among the Liberals themselves. A week, it has been said to the point of cliché, is a long time in politics. There have been, however, many, many weeks during the Liberals’ slow slide. Nothing to this point has arrested it. The imprint of past decisions, the intellectual repositioning of the party, and the weariness with existing leadership make a return to power harder to imagine with each passing day.
Federal politics: More commentary from The Globe and Mail
Campbell Clark: Why Trudeau can’t open the door Canadians have locked
John Ibbitson: Why Doug Ford won his by-elections and Trudeau lost his
Andrew Coyne: A unity crisis awaits us on the other side of the election
