Dumping Trudeau won’t save the Liberals

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Toronto-St. Paul’s isn’t really “one of the safest Liberal ridings in the country.” Safe it certainly is, having voted Liberal in every election since 1993. But 19 other ridings are as safe or safer by that measure.

Vancouver Quadra has been electing Liberals since 1984. The Toronto riding of Humber River-Black Creek, the former York West, last elected a candidate from another party in 1958. Mount Royal, on the Island of Montreal, has been solidly Liberal since 1940. Ottawa Vanier has been a Liberal riding since its creation, in 1935; in its former incarnation as Russell, since 1887.

What distinguishes Toronto-St. Paul’s is more what it used to be: a bellwether. It was one of those ridings – affluent, educated, metropolitan – that historically could vote either Liberal or Conservative, depending on the prevailing political winds, but which, since the collapse of the Mulroney coalition in 1993, have remained alien territory for the Tories.

It wasn’t so much a matter of ideology, I think, as culture: The generation of Conservatives that grew out of the old Reform Party – harsher, less compromising, more populist – was almost literally incomprehensible to the genteel professional classes that populated these ridings. If they are now willing to give them a look, something genuinely is up.

It isn’t the Conservatives that have changed – under Pierre Poilievre they are if anything more remote from metropolitan sensibilities than they were under Stephen Harper. It is the growing disaffection of these voters with the governing Liberals.

It’s easy to say that it was just a by-election – an opportunity for voters to take a free kick at those in power, without risk of actually bringing down the government. But the results in Toronto-St. Paul’s are hardly a one-off. They confirm a trend in the national numbers that has been clear and constant for the past 12 months.

A significant percentage of former Liberal voters, that is to say, have turned on the Liberals. They want the Grits out – so much so that they are willing to hold their nose and vote Conservative to get it done.

And not only former Liberal voters. Look at the results in Toronto-St. Paul’s. The Conservatives turned a 24 point deficit versus the Liberals in the 2021 election into a near two-point margin in their favour. Yet only a part of that swing was due to movements between the two parties. The Liberal vote fell nine points, yes, but the Conservative vote rose by 17.

Much of the difference came from the NDP. The Liberals lost the riding in Monday’s by-election with a larger share of the vote than they won it with in 2021. It was the collapse of the NDP vote – and its apparent swing to the Conservatives – that did them in.

Still, the implications are obvious. If Toronto-St. Paul’s is within reach for the Conservatives, then so are dozens more ridings like it. The Conservative vote has grown so large, and spread so wide, that the greater efficiency of the Liberal vote is no longer enough to save them. If the trend holds, they are headed for catastrophic defeat in the next election.

How did we get here? More important, where do we go from here? I’m struck by the universal pundit consensus that the only possible response to the Toronto-St. Paul’s disaster must be the resignation of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister and party leader – as if the results could simply be put down to his personal unpopularity; as if the Liberals’ unpopularity were all about messaging, image and leadership.

No doubt that is part of it. It was evident 11 years ago, when the Liberals, in the devastating aftermath of the 2011 election, seized on the son of a former prime minister as their saviour, that they were leaving themselves exposed. Rather than address any of the fundamental weaknesses in the party’s appeal that had seen its average share of the popular vote fall from over 40 per cent in the last half of the 20th century to barely 30 per cent since then, they bet the farm on the dynastic principle and “sunny ways.”

It worked for a time. But popular infatuation, so easily sparked, is as easily dissipated. All the little things – the smiles, the simpering poses, the ostentatious progressivism – that people found so charming in the first couple of years were bound to grate after a while.

But good gracious: the record of the Liberals in office must surely also have something to do with it. The notion that the Liberals’ woes can all be remedied just by jettisoning Mr. Trudeau as leader is the same quick-fix mentality that elected him.

As Prime Minister, he must of course accept a large share of the blame for the government’s current odium, the more so given the near-total centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office – by all accounts greater now than it has ever been.

But these are nevertheless decisions for which the government must be held to account, no matter who leads it:

• the fixation on distributing income, rather than growing it – an error a decade ago, a crisis today
• the runaway spending and endless deficits, long before the pandemic and ever after
• the obsession with narrow questions of identity rather than the broader public interest
• the casual corruption and endemic abuse of office, from cash-for-access to SNC-Lavalin to WE Charity – as if the Liberals’ moral vanity made it impossible for them to conceive of themselves doing wrong, even as they were doing it
• the broken promises, earlier in their government, on everything from deficits to electoral reform to, God save us, two billion trees.
• the multiple policy failures of the later years, from the bungling of pandemic preparation to the loss of control over immigration to the housing crisis
• the autocratic disdain for Parliament, on display in the use of such procedural weapons as omnibus bills, time allocation and prorogation – the very things for which the Liberals had attacked the Harper government, and which they had promised to curtail
• the seeming breakdown in capacity, on matters as basic as issuing passports or appointing judges – a sense that the handful of aides in the Prime Minister’s Office, having achieved a monopoly on power, were overwhelmed as a result
• the utter indifference to national security – the continuing failure to adequately supply the Armed Forces, even as war clouds gather, coupled with the strange unwillingness to confront foreign interference, if not active complicity in it
• and the rest: the baleful trio of internet regulatory bills, each more illiberal and ill-considered than the last; the inertia in the face of provincial lawlessness and oppression; the mishandling of the climate change file that has turned a rare policy success, carbon pricing, into a political liability; etc., etc.
• in all, a rare trifecta of cynicism, ideology and incompetence, for which the leader must take responsibility but which is broadly reflected in the party that elected him, the officials who assist him, and the caucus and cabinet that support him.

So yes, the public has ample reason to want to toss the Liberals – as the Liberals, in hopes of avoiding that fate, have ample reason to want to toss the Prime Minister. Before doing either, however, it is important to ask: what is the alternative?

There will be time enough to consider whether the Conservatives, or any other party, would represent an improvement over the Liberals. For now, the question is what – strictly from the standpoint of Liberal self-interest – to do about the Prime Minister?

Or rather, what can be done about him? He shows no willingness to go, even after Toronto-St. Paul’s. (His response: “I hear people’s concerns and frustrations,” but “my focus is on your success and that’s where it’s going to stay.”) And there is no mechanism to remove him if he does not. The Liberal Party constitution provides for a mandatory leadership review after an election defeat – not before it.

The party did not sign onto the provisions of the Reform Act that allowed the Conservatives to dispatch Erin O’Toole with such ruthless efficiency. The prospect, rather, is for an endless shadow war, between those terrified at facing the electorate with Mr. Trudeau as leader and those terrified at facing them without him, with no rules of engagement and no clear criterion for deciding the matter.

Suppose they do force him out. What then? Late-term leadership races, held in the shadow of impending defeat, are divisive, debilitating exercises. All the cracks in the coalition, so long suppressed under the former leader’s rule, start to show. All that money spent, all those fingers pointed, and for what, in the end? Quite probably, to see the shiny new leader mowed down in the general election. See Campbell, Kim; also see Turner, John.

Not only is there no obvious alternative to Mr. Trudeau, no prohibitive front-runner around which the party could rally. There is also no one offering the party clearly superior prospects of holding onto government. Unpopular Mr. Trudeau may be – his approval rating is now negative 26 per cent by one measure, negative 38 per cent by another – but a recent Angus Reid poll showed even less public enthusiasm for any of the most commonly mentioned potential candidates.

If you are going to go down to defeat, it is arguably better to do so under the old leader, and let him wear it, rather than taint the new leader as a loser. Defeat may be more certain under the old leader than the new, but it may also be less catastrophic, with less risk of fragmenting the party’s existing base. Put it this way: had Brian Mulroney stayed on, the Tories would still quite probably have lost the 1993 election. But they would not have been reduced to two seats.

So here’s a suggestion for the Liberals, as an alternative to panic and regicide. Why not try, in the time you have left, governing better – a more pragmatic government, and yet a more principled one, with less focus on optics and more on outcomes; one that makes a serious effort to correct its past mistakes, starting with the public finances, economic growth and national security.

It probably won’t save your government. But you will have more to rebuild with afterward: more seats, yes, but also more integrity and more dignity.