Trudeau makes brief stop in city to shore up support days before election

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This article was published 18/10/2019 (1853 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The last time Justin Trudeau came to Winnipeg he was sombre and contrite, but on Saturday evening, at a rally at the Punjab Cultural Centre, he was energetic and on the attack.

With just two days left before the federal election, the Liberal leader made a brief pit stop in the Manitoba capital to shore up support in a city where the Grits may be vulnerable.

The Liberals hold seven of the 14 seats in Manitoba, including all but one in Winnipeg. With a likely razor-thin difference between victory and defeat, every riding is important.

Trudeau, wearing a white shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up, wasted no time attacking former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s record before launching into assault on his main opponent this time around, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

He spoke of Harper’s “lack of ambition” for the country, contrasting it to the Liberals’ activist agenda, which has seen 1.2 million jobs created and the unemployment rate fall to the lowest level in nearly four decades.

Trudeau derided Scheer’s platform, saying it contained only, “cuts, cuts, cuts.”

On Saturday, Trudeau attended several campaign events in southern Ontario before flying to Winnipeg. Following his Manitoba stop, he was scheduled to hold a late evening rally in Calgary.

Exactly a month earlier, a sombre Trudeau held a news conference in Old Market Square, where he repeatedly apologized to Canadians after it was revealed that he had repeatedly worn blackface or “brownface” in the past.

The Liberal leader cancelled a planned announcement that day and, instead, answered reporters’ questions at length.

On Saturday evening, though, Trudeau was full of fight as he spoke for 15 minutes in English and French to a packed hall that punctuated his remarks with shouts of “four more years, four more years.”

With several of his Manitoba candidates looking on, the Liberal leader spent a large chunk of his address contrasting the Liberal and Conservative positions on climate change.

Trudeau called climate change the greatest challenge of our time.

Scheer would rip up “the only real plan to fight climate change that Canada has ever had,” he told the crowd.

Trudeau also took a swing at conservative premiers who are spending taxpayers’ dollars challenging the national carbon tax in the courts.

Canada needs to invest in clean energy and “embrace the new economy,” he said, to ensure there are good jobs for our children and grandchildren.

“You cannot, in 2019, have a plan for the future of our economy and not have a plan for protecting the environment,” he said.

“This election isn’t just about the next four years, it’s about the next 40 years,” he said.

At the beginning of his speech, Trudeau took a moment to acknowledge the thousands of Manitobans who lost power due to the record October snowfall.

“I know it’s been a tough week for Manitobans, but as always you pulled together,” he said, noting that many had been evacuated.

“You leaned on each other. You supported each other because that’s just what Winnipeggers and Manitobans do.”

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

Larry Kusch
Legislature reporter

Larry Kusch didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life until he attended a high school newspaper editor’s workshop in Regina in the summer of 1969 and listened to a university student speak glowingly about the journalism program at Carleton University in Ottawa.

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