Trudeau still has a chance to win in 2025, but he'll have to stop holding back.
He got his only majority by out-flanking the NDP on the left, and that may be his only chance to survive.
The Conservative victory in Toronto—St. Paul’s is indisputably the worst black eye that the Liberal Party has been dealt since Michael Ignatieff led them to the edge of oblivion in 2011. Indeed, many in the Liberal Party foresee this as a portent of a far greater calamity than that of the Ignatieff era. As a result, we are now drowning under an incessant pile of nonsensical punditry over whether Trudeau must resign, or should resign, or even will resign.
All of this, again, is pointless nonsense. As Shachi Kurl makes clear in this Angus Reid survey conducted from June 14th to 17th, every single potential replacement for Trudeau polls notably worse than Trudeau does with undecided voters. However, the Angus Reid data does reveal the single-largest issue by far, preventing those non-committed voters from choosing the Liberal Party, and this is an issue that Trudeau has the power to fix himself while remaining Prime Minister.
For uncommitted survey respondents who would consider voting Liberal, Angus Reid asked “What’s holding you back most from supporting the Liberals in the next election?” The top answer, with 48% of the votes, is that uncommitted voters are upset with “the Liberal government’s lack of progress on issues I find important.” Angus Reid then drills down on what those specific issues are, stating that survey respondents are prioritizing cost of living, health care, housing affordability, and climate change.
The problem is explicitly clear: voters think the Liberals aren’t following through on their core campaign promises, and that’s why they’re upset. Obviously, this is a problem that can easily be solved by the current Trudeau government, but it’s also a problem that a new Liberal leader may not solve, because the problem is not the leader at all, but rather the attitude of the Liberal Party towards keeping their own promises.
Voters are upset with Trudeau because he has campaigned in both 2019 and 2021 on doing things that he either has not done, or has watered down into oblivion. Prime Minister Trudeau can fix this problem, by simply using his confidence and supply agreement with Jagmeet Singh’s NDP to pass substantive legislation on the issues that he promised Liberal voters he would fight for.
There is no messaging or communications strategy that the Liberals can adopt to cure a lack of substance. The Liberals passed much substantive policy between 2015 and 2019, but we are now several elections past those days, and voters are rightfully more concerned about what Trudeau is doing for the future than what he’s already done in the past.
The NDP have repeatedly pointed out that the Trudeau government has not come close to restoring the Federal government’s role between the 1960s and 1990s as a massive contributor to the construction of public housing, ended after Chrétien cruelly defunded social welfare at the whim of the wealthy and powerful. And Trudeau has undermined his own carbon tax with the home heating oil exemption, backing down from the fight on climate change while Toronto boils alive under sweltering heat domes.
Voters have full legitimacy in their anger that the Liberals did not include dentalcare and pharmacare as part of the Canada Health Act’s universal coverage. While the NDP repeatedly demanded this publicly in negotiations, their lack of leverage in the House of Commons forced them to concede the issue. Now, rather than the universal programs that voters expected, dentalcare will only be available to a small subset of the population, meanwhile “pharmacare” will solely cover diabetes medication and birth control.
Obviously, the government covering those things is a great thing, and I would never be unhappy that Canada is making sure that children, seniors, and the disabled have access to dental healthcare. I have no complaints that our government is funding medication for diabetics, and funding birth control in an age where abortion rights are under attack.
My problem is that we know for a fact that universal programs are resilient against political change, while means-tested programs are easily cancelled by Conservative governments once they come into power. We are whittling away our own policies until they mean nothing, and as a result giving voters no reason to care when the Tories unilaterally erase those programs.
Whether it’s right or wrong, Canadian voters mainly care about things that benefit them, and don’t care nearly as much as they should about benefitting others. Universal programs are thus more popular with the voting public, because voters are much more likely to support a program they benefit from, and oppose a politician who attacks their own personal interests.
If Prime Minister Trudeau wants to improve his popularity with voters, he has to stop trying to appeal to Conservatives who will always hate him, and start winning back the Liberal and moderate NDP voters who delivered his sole majority in 2015. It’s no surprise that Liberals have become unpopular with our own voting base, when we’re trying to act like Tories more than we’re trying to be true to our progressive Liberal selves.
Voters are tired of Liberals who resent the fact that they’re in a centre-left, progressive party. The age of Chrétien slashing away at welfare programs, and openly tolerating homophobic and anti-choice MPs in the Liberal caucus, is thankfully an age long past us, and an age that must never return.
It is time for the Liberals to embrace the progressive, left-wing policies that have delivered their largest electoral success in the past twenty years. It’s time for the Liberals to stop pretending they are incapable of passing laws for the very things we know from the historical record they already have passed before.
The NDP are right there in Parliament, with a confidence and supply agreement that will allow Trudeau’s government to pass substantive legislation on progressive priorities like universal healthcare, public housing, and climate change. With the Liberal and NDP votes combined in the House of Commons, Trudeau and Singh can use time allocation to rapidly pass as much progressive legislation as possible in this final year before election day.
If the Liberals want to not only survive, but thrive as a political entity, then they need to actually fight for the things they were elected to fight for. Voters elected Trudeau’s Liberals on the promise of pharmacare, on the promise of fighting climate change, and the promise of housing affordability.
The Prime Minister has one year left to deliver on those progressive policies. If Trudeau doesn’t act now, with the fullest of haste, then it won’t matter who succeeds him as Liberal Party leader, because the brand will be tainted beyond any individual.
Voters are tired and angry of the same politicians repeatedly promising change and then breaking those promises. The result in Toronto—St. Paul’s should make their perspective emphatically clear for every Liberal politician, staffer, and organizer:
The voting public has run out of patience. This is our last chance. Act now.