Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a speech during an event welcoming France's President Emmanuel Macron in Montreal, on Sept. 26.Evan Buhler/Reuters
During Pride in Toronto early this summer, Kathleen Wynne, the former premier of Ontario, was wandering the crowds with her family when she spotted the tall, familiar figure of Justin Trudeau nearby.
One of the Prime Minister’s entourage noticed Ms. Wynne – there is much shared political DNA between her era at Queen’s Park and Mr. Trudeau’s generation of federal Liberals – and walked over to give her a hug. After he saw her, they strolled a bit together.
“He said to me ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently,’ ” she recalls. “And I said ‘so have I been thinking about you.’ ”
She’s quick to say that she doesn’t equate the grim end of her tenure as premier in 2018 to this fraught moment for him as Prime Minister, because the scale and specifics are different.
But still, there is this tiny, terrible club to which they both belong: politicians who, despite boiling public antagonism, remain at the helm of their parties and slog through each day fielding questions about why everyone dislikes them so much and when they might take the hint and go.
“There just aren’t that many people who have been in that situation,” Ms. Wynne says.
She always feels the need to explain to people why, facing deep public animosity, she stayed on as leader to fight the 2018 election, which ended with the Liberals reduced to seven seats and Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives with a thumping majority.
At the time, the Liberals had been governing Ontario for 15 years, though Ms. Wynne had been premier for only four. There was no obvious successor, nor any indication in the polling that anyone else would fare better with voters, and there wasn’t a big caucus mutiny shoving her out the door.
“I wasn’t at all certain that if I left, we wouldn’t lose anyway,” she says. “So I felt a bit like, is it my obligation to stay and if we are going to lose, then I take that on?”
Mr. Trudeau, similarly, is running an old government with which the public appears fed up. Key cabinet ministers are organizing for eventual leadership runs, and Mark Carney might yet be tempted in with a bowl of warm milk, but there’s no heir apparent.
And aside from a few disgruntled mutterings that have filtered out of caucus, even in this diminished state, Mr. Trudeau has mostly drawn vows of loyalty rather than the sound of knives sharpening.
I asked him for an interview to discuss how he sees things, but his office said he was not available this week.
In the run-up to her own election, Ms. Wynne was not exactly oblivious to her unpopularity. Her scrums with reporters were almost funny because they were so repetitive and ruthless. She’d come out, and they’d ask how her numbers were, and the answer would be that they were horrible, and the unspoken but obvious question was, why don’t you get out of the way?
Once, a reporter approached her afterward and said, “We have to ask the question, I’m so sorry.”
Ms. Wynne recalls: “What made me laugh was just, ‘What exactly do they want me to say?’ I would say this to some of my team. ‘Do they want to see me bleeding on the ground, like is that what they actually want?’ ”
A week and a half into the 2018 campaign, someone working on one of the local campaigns called Ms. Wynne with advice designed to save a little furniture. “This guy said to me, ‘Okay, Kathleen, the only way this is going to work is if you say you know you’re gonna lose and you take yourself out of the race,’ ” she recalls.
Indignant, she asked Andrew Bevan, her chief of staff and principal secretary – now chief of staff to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland – whether he thought that was a good idea. Ms. Wynne can recall his response now with perfect clarity, but she didn’t quite take it all in at the time.
“He said, ‘Well, no. No, we’re not doing that. Not yet,’ ” Ms. Wynne says. “So in his gentle, non-effusive way, he was warning, he was foreshadowing for me what was coming. I just wasn’t there.”
It took three more weeks of brutal campaigning to get there. A week before voting day, with her party at risk of a total wipeout, Ms. Wynne delivered an unprecedented speech conceding the election in advance and asking Ontarians to vote for Liberal candidates to keep the Conservatives and NDP in check. She still tears up when she talks about it.
“That was the hardest thing I had to do politically,” she says.
It’s tempting right now to look at the unforgiving landscape in which Mr. Trudeau stands like it’s a board game, and to wonder with impatience why he can’t or won’t grasp the inevitable. But it’s worth remembering that the last big decision someone makes in their political career is almost certainly the hardest, and decisions like that usually have to be dragged out of you.
By the time the ugly end is approaching, everything that allowed you to make it this far in the first place whispers in your ear that maybe the naysayers are all wrong and you can pull it off this time, too. Even when facing the surest defeat, political survivors often manage to find a destructive ray of hope.
“Of course you do – it’s called hubris,” says Allan Gregg, who ran polling and communications for the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 federal election. “Because you’re good at one thing, you think you’re good at everything.”
Before that campaign, the “big blue machine” had seemed to be incapable of losing. The party won in 1984 in a romp – even in supposedly impossible Quebec. And then in 1988, it managed to reverse two separate trends – in favour of John Turner’s Liberals and against free trade – to pull off another majority.
But in the months before the 1993 election, Brian Mulroney’s approval figures were in the teens, and while the party enjoyed a bump when Kim Campbell took over as leader, it didn’t last. In the end, the PCs were carved down to just two seats.
Even now, 30 years later, Mr. Gregg lays out with great enthusiasm the sophistication of the polling models he built for that campaign. And somehow, he looked at what his careful work told him was going to happen, stuck his fingers in his ears and hummed loudly.
“I remember doing modelling – where you take your regional polling and then translate it on a riding-by-riding level – and looking at it and saying, ‘Perrin Beatty can’t lose his seat! That’s impossible, that’s just not going to happen. We’re not gonna lose all those seats in friggin’ urban Alberta,’ ” he says. “And, lo and behold.”
At a certain point, all of this blind, baseless hope is more a human thing than it is political, but politics makes it much worse. As Mr. Gregg sees them, political leaders are basically grown in a lab to be creatures who avoid hard truths: they’ve won big fights already; they’re isolated from everyone except a cabal of close advisers; and they wield tremendous power.
Those characteristics sketch a perfect outline of Mr. Trudeau – a man who’s vanquished three Conservative leaders in a row and now keeps telling people that he can’t wait to take a run at the fourth.
Mr. Gregg learned one more harsh lesson in 1993 that seems relevant here: Time for a change is “maybe the best campaign slogan ever written in political history.”
“When it is time for a change, you just don’t have a chance any more,” he says. “The incumbent is done.”
Alex Marland, Jarislowsky Chair in trust and political leadership at Acadia University, has done extensive interviews with all manner of politicians to understand what makes them tick. He has no case to make about what Mr. Trudeau should do, but he thinks he knows what he will do, based on facts he lays out like puzzle pieces.
Being Prime Minister is an extraordinary job – once you leave, you’ll never have anything like it again – and no one relinquishes that lightly, he says. And there’s always the possibility that some big, unexpected event could suddenly tilt the political landscape, so it makes sense to wait as long as possible.
The moment Mr. Trudeau says he’s stepping down, all the attention shifts to the palace intrigue of a leadership race, and he becomes yesterday’s man. But political leaders care about their legacies, Mr. Marland says, and no one wants theirs to be that they drove their party into a ditch.
So to him, it seems self-evident that Mr. Trudeau will step down, but also that he’ll push it off as long as he possibly can, until he feels like he’s run out of potential plot twists.
And that means that all of this – the journalists asking if he’ll go, the party grandees urging him to do so, and Mr. Trudeau insisting to all of them, with a pasted-on grin, that he’s not going anywhere – is just a pantomime everyone is putting on together.
“There’s something about us just kind of assuming that what he’s saying is true,” Mr. Marland says. “But then more than that, he has to say what he’s saying, because if he did say what’s really on his mind, that would be political suicide.”
So the Prime Minister insisting that he’s staying on is true until suddenly one day it isn’t, and in a way, that means it was never true in the first place, and everyone involved knows that, but they all keep playing along anyway, because what else are they supposed to do?
This is about where it all starts to feel like one of those existential riddles you contemplate to clear your mind for a golf swing. If a Prime Minister falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does he make a sound?