Trudeau to remain party leader as Liberals demand urgent changes after stunning by-election loss

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will stay on as leader, his government signalled Tuesday as Liberals demanded the party make urgent changes in response to an unexpected by-election loss in a stronghold Toronto seat.

The Conservative upset in Toronto-St. Paul’s, a riding that was Liberal for three decades, left the party grappling with what it means for the minority government’s prospects in a Canada-wide election campaign and Mr. Trudeau’s future. But with the Prime Minister’s Office and Liberal Party headquarters caught flat-footed by the outcome, sources said there is no immediate plan in place to respond to the loss of a seat that they held even during their worst-ever general election result in 2011.

Liberals were so certain of victory that the party president pre-emptively declared a win for their candidate Leslie Church, with only about half the ballots counted.

Instead, Conservative candidate Don Stewart won by 590 votes.

Mr. Stewart, a marketing and finance professional, got 42.1 per cent of the vote, with all of the polls reporting around 5 a.m. on Tuesday. Ms. Church was second with 40.5 per cent of the vote. The NDP also lost its vote share, with candidate Amrit Parhar winning just 10.9 per cent.

The result in Toronto-St. Paul’s even surprised Conservatives, who for weeks have said they were not expecting to win the long-shot seat.

“I am beyond humbled for the trust you have put in me and I will never take it for granted,” Mr. Stewart said in a social-media post. “The results sent Justin Trudeau a loud and clear message: He is not worth the cost.”

Conservatives take Toronto-St. Paul’s riding in major upset for Liberals

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre congratulated his newest caucus member, calling the result a “shocking upset.”

The win has buoyed the already surging opposition party, with Conservatives now seeing a much wider path to victory. For the Liberals, the result is just as significant but because of what it says about how bad the party’s prospects have become.

The Globe and Mail spoke with 10 Liberals, including MPs, staffers and senior operatives. They described a party in shock, with no road map for how to change its position with the electorate. They also questioned how the party so badly misread the mood in one of its safest seats, wondered if headquarters still knows how to run an effective campaign, and worried about a disconnected Prime Minister’s Office.

The Globe is not identifying the sources who were not permitted to publicly discuss internal party dynamics.

All of them said change was needed but differed on what it should be. Some said the loss confirmed the Prime Minister has to resign, others expected someone other than Mr. Trudeau to take the fall, while some said they thought significant changes in cabinet, staff or policy were enough to course correct.

The Prime Minister’s Office spent much of the day calling Toronto MPs and listening to them as well as to others in caucus, two sources said. But the public message from Mr. Trudeau and his top cabinet minister, Chrystia Freeland, was that the minority government would double down on what it has already been doing.

“I want to be clear that I hear Canadians’ concerns and frustrations,” said Mr. Trudeau, in a sombre and brief statement to press in Vancouver. “It’s clear that I and my entire Liberal team have much more work to do to deliver tangible, real progress.”

“This is obviously not the result we wanted,” he conceded.

Opinion: Regardless of leader, the Liberals are at risk of a worse fate after Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election

Earlier in downtown Toronto, Ms. Freeland, the Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, told reporters Mr. Trudeau is still the right person to lead the party.

“He does not need to quit,” she said. “The Prime Minister is committed to leading us into the next election and he has our support.”

Ms. Church was Ms. Freeland’s chief of staff until she quit to run for the nomination for the by-election last year. The Finance Minister had herself spent a lot of time campaigning for Ms. Church.

It is a massive win for the Tories, said Ginny Roth, a partner at Crestview Strategy and previously a senior adviser to Mr. Poilievre in his leadership campaign.

“To me, that means the Liberals are under 15 seats in a general election,” she said. The party currently holds 155 seats and, in 2011, it kept 34.

For the Liberals, it is a “bolt of political lightning,” said Scott Reid, a Liberal strategist and principal at Feschuk.Reid.

“There is no language too hyperbolic to describe the significance of this failure,” he said. “If you can lose in St. Paul’s, then the Liberal Party can lose anywhere, and that means it can lose everything.”

Mr. Reid said the result is particularly stinging for the Prime Minister because it confirms that “his leadership harms his own party.”

Liberals have for months said if Mr. Trudeau does leave it will be his decision, with no one expecting an internal revolt. That sentiment largely held on Tuesday, with Liberals pointing out that the party has no internal mechanism to remove him, leaving the only option a public campaign that they were skeptical Liberals had the stomach for.

The Liberal Party’s former president Alfred Apps called the by-election result “a very clear wake-up call.”

“I’m not saying that Justin Trudeau has to resign,” Mr. Apps said. “What I’m saying is the party needs to wake up to the fact that we have lost touch with ordinary Canadians and their agenda.”

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Greg MacEachern, a former Liberal staffer and principal at KAN Strategies, said the election results are a “tangible, real-world example of how Canadians are feeling about the Liberal Party right now.”

“It’s just kind of confirms for everyone what exactly the challenge is,” he said.

Nik Nanos, the founder and chief data scientist of Nanos Research, said the by-election loss is “seismic” for the Liberals and it is clear from the results “the country is in a mood for change.”

Turnout in the by-election was higher than typical for such races, with 44 per cent of voters casting a ballot. In comparison, a recent by-election in Durham, Ont., in March had just 28-per-cent turnout.

Toronto-St. Paul’s has more progressives than conservatives but the New Democrats failed to take advantage of voter dissatisfaction with the Liberals and placed a distant third.

New Democrats tried to make the case Tuesday that the riding is always a red-blue race, but the orange team holds the seat provincially. The federal party has agreed to prop up the Liberals in the minority Parliament in exchange for policy concessions.

NDP spokesperson Alana Cahill said the by-election results show “after nine years of Justin Trudeau, people are worse off.” She said NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is already in campaign mode for the next by-election expected to be called for La Salle-Emard-Verdun.

That seat was left empty when Liberal MP and former justice minister David Lametti stepped down. The NDP won it in the 2011 orange wave.

With a report from Nancy Macdonald