A Conservative Election Victory Puts Canada’s Post-Trudeau Era in Sight By Matthew X. Wilson
In news that is sending shockwaves through Canadian politics, the opposition Conservatives claimed victory overnight in a closely watched by-election for a safely Liberal parliamentary constituency in downtown Toronto. The once Liberal “fortress,” known as Toronto-St. Paul’s, is one of the most Liberal-leaning electoral districts in all of Canada — the Liberal Party has carried the seat in the last ten Canadian federal elections, and the Liberal candidate has won by margins of greater than 20 percent in the last three. From an American perspective, this outcome is roughly analogous to Republicans winning a special election for a safely Democratic congressional seat in New York City.
The jolting result, besides an enormous momentum boost for the Conservatives, is a full-throated repudiation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, one of the most unpopular Canadian leaders in history, who is on track to lose the next Canadian election (which must be held no later than October 2025) by spectacular margins.
Canada’s Liberals find themselves in a similar place to Britain’s governing Conservative Party: technically still in government, but facing an extinction-level electoral wipeout when they finally go before voters. But unlike Britain, where the central question with just nine days until the country’s July 4 election is how badly the Conservatives will lose, the Trudeau-led Liberals have 15 months before voters’ verdict must be heard.
The Liberals have some hard decisions to make. The obvious last-ditch play to rescue their party’s fortunes ahead of the next election is to replace their leader, and that is no doubt a possibility that both Trudeau and his rank-and-file parliamentarians are currently weighing. But the most likely successors to Trudeau within the Liberal Party — Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, for example — are closely associated with Trudeau and will have a very difficult time attempting to separate themselves from his tarnished image, especially in such a limited time-frame. And never mind the fact that for this scenario to work, Trudeau would have to agree to the plan and voluntarily step down, since his party is extremely unlikely to force him from office.
Alternatively, the Liberals can choose to delay the election as long as possible, perhaps until October 2025, and hope that the political winds have changed by then. Trudeau could also pull an Emmanuel Macron and call a surprise early election despite the terrible poll numbers (The left-wing New Democratic Party, which currently props up the Liberal minority government in a confidence-and-supply deal, could theoretically also force an early election, but that is unlikely.)
Still, the dramatic (and unforeseeable) changes that would have to occur to endanger the Conservatives’ wide lead (they have a 99 percent chance of securing enough seats to form a government, according to elections forecasters) are highly improbable. Far more likely — and what the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election result foreshadows — is that Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government will be out of power by October of next year, at the latest. The United States should be preparing to very soon engage with a Canadian government led by the charismatic and witty Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who could not be more different from Trudeau on a wide swath of social, cultural, economic, and security issues with deep cross-border significance.
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