Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the riding office of Laura Palestini, Liberal candidate for LaSalle–Emard–Verdun in Montreal on Aug. 11. In the final stretch of a Montreal byelection campaign widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership, Liberal candidate Laura Palestini wants people to focus on her, not her leader.Peter McCabe/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet pledged to forge ahead Tuesday as they played down the loss of a second Liberal stronghold in three months and returned to the House of Commons in a more politically precarious position than before Monday’s by-elections.
The minority government has decided to quickly put itself to the test. The House Leader’s office said it tentatively scheduled the first Conservative opposition day for next Tuesday, meaning a confidence vote could be held by Wednesday. The NDP and Bloc Québécois have both left open the possibility of propping up the government.
The Liberals’ defeat in Montreal’s LaSalle-Émard-Verdun riding comes on the heels of their June loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s, which marked the first time they lost a seat in Toronto since 2015. The Montreal defeat is only the third time the Liberals have lost the area in the last four decades. The other times were in the 1984 Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservative sweep and the 2011 NDP Orange Wave, led by Jack Layton.
But the message the minority government is taking from the result is not that it needs to change course, but rather that voters haven’t yet realized the options facing them in the next general campaign.
“We need people to be more engaged, we need people to understand what’s at stake in this upcoming election,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters on his way into cabinet Tuesday.
“Obviously it would have been nice to be able to win and hold Verdun, but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it.”
While the government puts on a calm face publicly, behind the scenes Liberals say Mr. Trudeau and his team appear disconnected and do not appear to appreciate just how bad a sign the defeat is. The talking points that the Prime Minister’s Office sent out to other ministers included the line that the results show the next election will be a closely contested race, according to two Liberals.
While the by-election result was close, Liberal support fell significantly from about a 43-per-cent vote share in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun in each of the last three general elections to 27 per cent on Monday night.
Two other senior Liberal sources said they were concerned that the Bloc Québécois win in Montreal and the NDP holding their seat in Winnipeg lead to a bigger risk that the three opposition parties are now all emboldened and more likely to defeat the government on a confidence vote this fall. All three parties, the sources said, now see the benefit of running against Mr. Trudeau in the next election, rather than risking his resignation and a new Liberal leader.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying the five Liberals, who were not authorized to discuss internal party machinations.
Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet said Tuesday his party is open to keeping the Liberals in power if they agree to raise Old Age Security benefits for seniors aged 65 to 74. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh reiterated his position that New Democrats will decide each vote based on what is in the best interest of Canadians.
Both the NDP and Liberals faced must-win by-election races on Monday night, with each acknowledging that losses in their respective strongholds of Winnipeg and Montreal would make things more difficult. The Liberals also publicly set expectations low before the vote to ensure their party didn’t wake up shocked on Tuesday, as it did in the wake of the Toronto loss.
Following a nail-biter race that was only decided after 2 a.m., Bloc candidate Louis-Philippe Sauvé came out on top with 28 per cent of the vote, winning with just 248 more votes than the Liberal, who won 27 per cent of the vote. The NDP, who set expectations high early in the summer that it would win the riding, placed third at 26 per cent. The Conservatives won 11.6 per cent.
On Parliament Hill, the government sought to play down the loss, with Liberal campaign co-chair Soraya Martinez Ferrada telling CTV’s Power Play with Vassy Kapelos that it is “media spin” to call LaSalle-Émard-Verdun a stronghold.
The riding was held by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin for two decades.
The defeat is actually even worse for the government than the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election loss, said Philippe Fournier, the editor-in-chief of the poll aggregator 338Canada.com.
The second by-election loss means the Liberal defeats can no longer be dismissed as a one-off, he said, noting that in Montreal the Liberal vote share fell by 16 points.
“If you apply this swing in Quebec, there would not be much left of the Liberals in Montreal,” Mr. Fournier said.
From a purely numbers point of view, the Liberals should be “extremely worried,” he said.
If the Liberals are losing traditionally safe seats in Toronto and Montreal, Mr. Fournier said it leads to the question, “what else is there?”
Both of those by-elections were triggered by the resignations of Liberal MPs who quit after the Prime Minister dropped them from cabinet.
Sébastien Dallaire, the executive vice-president for Eastern Canada with the polling firm Léger, said Monday’s by-election result is “definitely a big loss” for the Liberals that fits into a longer standing narrative about the party losing steam with voters.
“We see poll after poll that a majority of Canadians are also saying it’s time for change,” he said, adding the by-elections point in the same direction.
“It signals that we might be reaching the end of the life of this government.”
The NDP narrowly avoided their own tough questions on Tuesday by scraping through with a win in a tougher-than-expected by-election in Winnipeg. Elmwood-Transcona has been held by the NDP all but once in the last four decades, but the party was put to the test by the Conservatives, who sought to equate Mr. Singh and Mr. Trudeau with voters in the riding.
NDP candidate Leila Dance won with 48 per cent to the Tories’ Colin Reynolds, who won 44 per cent. The Liberals placed a distant third with 4.8 per cent of the vote.
Despite the close result, the NDP Leader told reporters on Parliament Hill that the win showed voters rejected Conservative cuts. He argued that the NDP was the only national party that was competitive in by-elections in two very different parts of the country.
“We showed Canadians that we can beat Conservatives,” he said. “The Liberals showed that they are no longer something Canadians want.”
With a report from Kristy Kirkup