Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at a Liberal Party fundraiser event in Halifax on Aug. 27. Trudeau will face a fretful and strained caucus in British Columbia Monday, who will be looking to him to finally reveal his plan to address the political free fall the party has endured for months.Kelly Clark/The Canadian Press
The campaign director quit. Five chiefs of staff to cabinet ministers are leaving. A Liberal fundraiser was appointed to the Senate. A senior minister quit and another is thinking about it.
Justin Trudeau insists he’s not going anywhere but his Liberal government keeps acting as if it’s nearing the end.
There are just a lot of things happening in Liberal Ottawa that fit the patterns of fin de régime.
Jeremy Broadhurst, the Liberal Party’s campaign director, said last week that he was stepping down, citing family reasons after one newspaper reported that he told the PM he didn’t think he could win a fourth term.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Broadhurst has been a senior adviser to Mr. Trudeau, or to Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, or sometimes to both – or the person running the Liberal Party HQ or organizing Mr. Trudeau’s election campaigns. Before that, he worked for Liberal leaders Michael Ignatieff and Stéphane Dion.
People leave. But the campaign director is leaving just as the NDP is abandoning the deal to support the Liberals in the Commons – making it a lot more likely that a general election will come next spring, rather than October of 2025.
Others are leaving now, too. The Globe and Mail is reporting that five chiefs of staff to ministers, including the senior staffers for Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, are leaving the government. For whatever reason, they have decided that now is the time to go.
There are always comings and goings among political staffers, to be sure. There sure seem to be a lot of goings now.
And there are the other things that seem to happen more near the end of a government’s life, such as the appointment of partisan loyalists.
Mr. Trudeau, the leader who told us in 2014 that there were no more Liberal senators and once in power embarked on an experiment with an independent Senate, moved in August to appoint a long-time Liberal fundraiser from Alberta, Daryl Fridhandler, to the Red Chamber.
That’s just one Senate appointment, of course. Or two, if you go back to last October, and count former Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner.
Still, it’s a strange thing to do now. Mr. Trudeau spent most of July facing calls for major changes or his resignation from elements of his own party after a shocking loss in a June by-election in the Liberal stronghold of Toronto–St. Paul’s. He left for vacation in late July without answering the calls for renewal, and came back in August to appoint a partisan to the Senate.
Just before he left, his friend Seamus O’Regan quit his job as Labour Minister, depriving the government of a popular point man with unions at a time when the Conservatives and NDP are scrambling to fight for the votes of unionized workers.
While he was away, talk emerged that his Quebec lieutenant, Pablo Rodriguez, is considering leaving federal politics to run for the leadership of the Quebec Liberal Party, an outfit that is currently running a distant third in opinion polls.
Maybe it’s not strange that Mr. Rodriguez wants a change. He has been an MP for Montreal’s Honoré-Mercier for most of the past 20 years – although he felt the sting of defeat when he lost his seat to the NDP’s Orange Wave in 2011, before regaining it in 2015. But a key player in Quebec, now the Liberals’ strongest electoral hope, is thinking of leaving to sit in opposition in the provincial legislature.
That’s not the kind of change Liberals have been clamouring for. And it recalls the pre-election departures in other long-in-power governments. Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper lost his foreign affairs minister, John Baird, eight months before the 2015 election. Three months later, Peter MacKay, a co-founder of the modern party, said he wouldn’t run for re-election.
Mr. Trudeau’s statements tell us that there’s nothing to see here. He keeps saying he’s focused on “delivering for Canadians,” and at his cabinet retreat in late August he said his Liberals will be “putting a very clear choice for Canadians.”
But the vibes don’t seem to match the words. Taken together, the behaviour sends a different impression, of a government that feels its time is coming to an end.