Voters may find Trudeau’s charm offensive this time around By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, Aug. 16, 2021

Opinion

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This article was published 15/08/2021 (1131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Say what you want about Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s career in federal politics, but it hasn’t been boring.

Trudeau has often followed up many of his greatest victories with many of his greatest gaffes. As a first minister, he’s been a flaming hot mess who far too often finds himself driving the locomotive of a runaway train.

In that context, the snap election he has just called — in utter defiance of the pandemic, less than two years after the last vote — is an appropriate next chapter in the story of Canada’s foremost political adrenaline junkie.

If Trudeau is somehow able to get voters to set aside their concerns about his cynical decision to send us to the polls, and recapture the majority he so desperately wants, then he will cement his legacy as one of the most dominant political leaders in Canadian history.

However, if it goes badly — and there are strong scenarios in which his gambit will backfire — then Trudeau will be remembered as the thrill-seeking political leader whose parachute finally failed to open.

How big a threat does Trudeau face? Many political watchers are howling about the hubris of calling an election while the country still faces a pandemic, just two years after Trudeau suffered an electoral setback when his majority turned into a precarious minority.

There is little doubt that if the election continues to be seen as the indulgence of an entitled leader, Trudeau’s political career would be over. However, it’s just as important to note that throughout his career, Trudeau has shown a tendency to thrive even while on the precipice of disaster.

In 2008, Trudeau won a seat in the House of Commons at a time when the Liberal brand was deeply damaged in every region of the country. In the 2011 election, even though Trudeau’s victory was more comfortable, the Liberal party was disintegrating around him. Jack Layton and the NDP surged to unseen heights in Quebec on their way to forming the official Opposition and knocking the Grits to third-party status with just 43 seats.

Out of the ashes of that humiliating defeat, Trudeau won the right to lead his party, which was on the edge of extinction. Then came the 2015 federal election.

Tom Mulcair and the NDP started a late summer campaign with a lead in most pre-writ polls over both the Harper Conservatives and Trudeau Liberals. However, capitalizing on his youth and refreshed Liberal brand, Trudeau stormed to a majority victory when the NDP stumbled and the Tories collapsed under the weight of an increasingly bitter and desperate campaign.

Trudeau’s first term in office was a true mixed bag as he pursued a number of new and exciting policies, including the historic legalization of cannabis. However, he was haunted by any number of unfulfilled pledges and internal scandals: accepting free trips to a billionaire’s private island; political meddling with a high-profile criminal prosecution involving SNC Lavalin, a Montreal engineering firm with deep connections to the Liberal party.

Oh yeah, and the blackface. Photos surfaced of a younger Trudeau wearing blackface at school functions when he was a teacher in British Columbia. It was a humbling, humiliating experience that could have, really should have, sunk the Liberal ship.

Thanks in large part to underwhelming performances by opposition parties, and his own ability to maintain his cool in a crisis, Trudeau was able to scrape together enough support to win a minority. But he was very close to being a one-and-done first minister.

In some ways, that election provides interesting insight into the current campaign. Trudeau was surely ripe for the plucking in 2019 but a collective failure to mobilize voters by the Tories (under Andrew Scheer) and the NDP (under Jagmeet Singh) gave him just enough room to form government.

Although some parties have won elections simply by avoiding controversy, almost none has triumphed with objectively bad campaigns. In 2015 and again in 2019, the Trudeau Liberals benefited from historically bad campaigning by other leaders and parties.

Voters could punish Trudeau for his decision to prioritize a majority mandate over the nation’s collective well-being. But it’s important to remember that the pandemic has not been a political drag on Liberal support. They managed to find the resources to support millions of Canadians during the worst days of the pandemic, mounted a successful national vaccine initiative and currently sit on the right side of public opinion on controversial issues such as mandatory vaccinations. Even a snap election cannot erase those accomplishments.

The outcome of this election will be determined more by the performance of Trudeau’s Liberals and the other parties, and less by the timing of the election and the prime minister’s naked ambition.

As we saw in 2019, Trudeau uses energy and charisma as an antidote to moral, ethical or political transgressions. However, political performance art that relies heavily on charisma does, eventually, wear thin.

On election day, Sept. 20, we’ll find out whether Trudeau has played the charisma card one too many times.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.

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