Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to the media during the federal cabinet retreat in Montreal, on Jan. 23.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Liberal MP Ken McDonald is the guy who thinks it’s time to call the fire department because he’s been smelling smoke for days.
The Newfoundland MP has come out in public to say that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should face a leadership review because his popularity has plummeted.
But if you are a Liberal MP thinking about joining the rebellion, there is an important thing to consider: You are almost out of runway.
The trick for Liberals who feel they would be better off without Mr. Trudeau is not just forcing him out but replacing him with someone else and then trying to make voters believe that the new boss isn’t like the old boss. Usually, that takes time.
The next election isn’t supposed to come until October, 2025, but that really doesn’t leave a lot of time for post-putsch rebranding unless Mr. Trudeau resigns this spring.
Even a hasty leadership race would take six months, so if Mr. Trudeau left in March or April, his successor would be installed as prime minister late in 2024. That would leave less than a year for the new leader to try to stamp their identity on the government and turn the Trudeau Liberals into the not-Trudeau Liberals.
It’s debatable whether that kind of renewal is even possible. But certainly those who feel like Mr. McDonald don’t have much time to organize a mutiny – unless Mr. Trudeau wants to quit.
The closer it gets to an election, the bigger the danger that a botched putsch ends in disaster with ugly party infighting and a diminished leader, whether old or new.
There are undoubtedly other Liberal MPs who agree with Mr. McDonald that Mr. Trudeau’s leadership has passed its best-before date. But things have been allowed to go downhill for a while. Did they not notice the evidence of that public sentiment was piling up in 2023?
The Liberals started last year five percentage points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in polls and have been under fire ever since. The party’s numbers started to plummet in August, and Mr. Trudeau’s ratings are worse. It’s not news that he’s got a popularity problem.
In earlier vintages of the Liberal Party, the coup-plotting would have begun years ago, and by now there would be a list of Liberal riding association presidents and backbench MPs ready to roll out their call for change.
But in some ways it was easier to target Prime Minister Jean Chrétien two decades ago when he led a Liberal Party that was ahead in the polls and there was a popular heir apparent in Paul Martin. Now the Liberals have a minority government and they don’t know who or what a leadership race would bring.
That’s the conundrum that the party has faced for over a year. It seemed Liberals had decided they had made their bed with Mr. Trudeau, despite the grumbles. Almost all of the potential leadership contenders would be long-serving ministers in Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, so they’d have a hard time presenting themselves as the face of change.
The counterargument to that is the point that Mr. McDonald made when he spoke to a Radio-Canada reporter: At this point, Mr. Trudeau makes some people see red. “There’s almost a hatred out there right now for Prime Minister Trudeau,” Mr. McDonald told the network.
In case you are gauging the odds of a mutiny, it’s worth noting that Liberal MPs aren’t likely to see Mr. McDonald as a figure to follow out of the trenches. He is a low-profile figure who has broken party ranks before, including voting with the Conservatives last fall calling for the abolition of all carbon pricing. Fellow MPs probably won’t see him as the Liberal who will lead the charge.
The number of prominent Liberals who have been willing to publicly call Mr. Trudeau’s leadership into question is still tiny. Senator Percy Downe, once chief of staff to Mr. Chrétien, called last November for a new leader. Now there’s Mr. McDonald.
It would take a lot more than that to press Mr. Trudeau into leaving if he doesn’t want to go, a movement of a substantial portion of the caucus ratcheting up the public dissent over weeks or months. If there are other Liberal MPs who want to launch a putsch, they have left it pretty late.