For the past few days, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has begun almost all his public statements with the following words: “After eight years of Justin Trudeau…” Although he exaggerates somewhat on the age of the government of the current Prime Minister – elected for the first time just over seven years ago, in the fall of 2015—his strategy has the advantage of reminding Canadians that the current federal government is approaching the average expiry date of governments in our electoral system.
Mr. Trudeau is no longer the standard-bearer of the sunny ways he was in 2015, but a seasoned leader whose personality and policies divide Canadians to the highest degree. After nearly eighty years, a desire to change government inevitably sets in among voters.
Under their support and confidence agreement with the New Democratic Party (NDP), reached last year, the Liberals should be able to count on this support to stay in the saddle until 2025. But, in 2025, Mr. Trudeau will have been Prime Minister for almost 10 years. In other words, he will find himself in the same situation as Stephen Harper in 2015. This is why some federal Liberals would argue for an election call this year. Confident in his ability to prevail against an inexperienced Conservative leader and even more divisive than him, Mr. Trudeau himself has shown signs suggesting that he would see himself doing well with Mr. Poilievre in the election campaign.
However, with the week that Mr. Trudeau has just spent, this idea would arouse less support among the Liberals. An Abacus poll released Wednesday gave the Conservatives an eight-percentage-point lead, the widest gap in their favor since Trudeau took office. With the support of 37% of the electorate nationally, compared to 29% for the Liberals and 18% for the NDP, the Conservatives are neck and neck with the Liberals in Ontario. They are, however, far behind Justin Trudeau’s troops in the Atlantic provinces, and in Quebec, where the Bloc Québécois is hot on the heels of the Liberals.
The other data from the poll are cause for concern for the Liberals. Three-quarters of Canadians believe that the Trudeau government is not sufficiently addressing the major concerns of the day: the cost of living and the housing crisis, by far the top priorities of voters. Half of the people think that the Liberals do not focus enough on economic issues.
Worse still, the Abacus poll was conducted before the controversy surrounding Mr. Trudeau’s appointment of Amira Elghawaby as Canada’s special representative in the fight against Islamophobia broke out. Almost all of the Quebec political class denounced this appointment because of the past writings of Mme Elghawaby. Among other things, she associated support for Bill 21 with “anti-Muslim sentiment” among Quebecers.
But it is not only in Quebec that the affair has offended people’s minds. Without directly attacking M.me Elghawaby, many English Canadians find his appointment to be strong evidence that the Trudeau government is putting too much effort into courting identity politics activists and diverse voters rather than trying to unite Canadians around common values in the name of living together.
The about-face of Mr. Trudeau – who had said at the beginning of the week to support “100%” Mme Elghawaby, to then extend an olive branch to Quebecers who have been “subjected to a religion that did not respect” their individual rights – testifies to the unease within the Liberal caucus caused by the appointment of this anti-racist activist. Amira Elghawaby ended up apologizing to Quebecers, but the damage was done. His credibility, and that of Mr. Trudeau, is damaged. The incident will leave negative traces for the Liberals.
The appearance of the former big boss of the McKinsey firm before a parliamentary committee in Ottawa on Thursday was somewhat overshadowed by the Elghawaby affair. But the testimony, altogether evasive, of Dominic Barton will not have helped the government to put behind him the controversy over the awarding of more than $100 million in contracts to McKinsey since the Liberals came to power. Mr. Barton, who chaired the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, set up in 2016 by the government, denied in parliamentary committee that he had used his position as an adviser to the government to obtain contracts for his consulting firm. consultants. Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus accused him of having had “voluntary memory lapses”.
The week ended on another false note for the Liberal government, with the withdrawal of controversial amendments to Bill C-21 that would have banned hundreds of models of assault weapons, including several weapons favored by Indigenous peoples. and hunters. The political mismanagement of this highly sensitive file does not inspire confidence in the Liberals’ ability to “move the country in the right direction”, as Mr. Trudeau so often claims to want to do. After almost eight years, it seems to be rather treading water.