You know me, I respect most traditions.
In the media world, we say what we are going to watch for in the coming year.
Everything will revolve around two fundamental questions.
Can Justin Trudeau right the Liberal boat?
The PQ’s breakthrough: flash in the pan or not?
Trudeau
The Prime Minister can wait until 2025 before calling an election if the NDP continues to support him.
Objectively, things are going very badly for him.
Canadians are tired of his escapades and his emptiness. Liberals are making eyes at Mark Carney to convince him to replace him.
Poilievre
The conservative lead is considerable.
Skillful, Poilievre stays away from polarizing topics like immigration and talks about consensual topics, like housing and inflation.
But Trudeau still has two trump cards in his game, and perhaps a third.
The economy will improve in 2024.
And he hardly needs more than 35% of the vote to stay in power.
He won with 32.6% in 2021 and 33.1% in 2019 (39.4% in 2015), and the liberal vote is better distributed than the conservative vote.
Perhaps its third asset lies south of the border.
Trump
If Trump is the Republican nominee and has a real chance of winning, Trudeau will say that nothing would be worse than electing a Canadian version of the phenomenon.
It’s crude, you might say, but Justin Trudeau has never overestimated the intelligence of the electorate and this has worked very well for him.
P.Q.
The PQ has climbed to first place in the polls… three years before the elections.
He obviously won’t complain about it.
It’s rising among young people and in the Quebec region, something we haven’t seen for ages.
If it owes a lot to the performance of its leader, it is also largely due to dissatisfaction with the CAQ.
When discontent benefits a single party, as is the case now, instead of spreading, it is because people are looking for an alternative to government.
But the PQ does not simply want to govern a province. He wants independence. However, support for it remains stable.
Lots of Quebecers say they would vote to bring the PQ to power, then vote no in the referendum it wants to organize.
Franchise
Old, old dilemma, film seen a thousand times, which can only be navigated – if one has two cents of knowledge of the past – by playing fair: a vote for the PQ is a vote for a party which will not hide not its reason for being and will try to make it happen.
The PLQ asks for nothing better. He would find his only paying horse.
QS and the CAQ would experience terrible tensions.
Until then, if the PQ remains in first position, 2024 will see the return of all the classic questions – all raised in the past, but memory is so short – linked to the sovereignist project.