140-ish walks in the snow

Trudeau's staying. Over to you, Liberal incumbents

Leslie Church, second from left, play-acting in 2015. Photo: PW

4:13 am UPDATE:

Everything that follows may end up being a bit of a time capsule, because at this writing, Conservative Don Stewart has pulled ahead, based on strong advance polling numbers that came in late. The latest full numbers are here. We’ll see what the (later) morning brings. Menwhile, here’s a whole column I wrote on Monday night, before the strongly Conservative vote from advance polls was counted — pw

In 2015, in rehearsals for a national party leaders’ debate I was helping to organize, a young Google Canada executive named Leslie Church role-played for half a day, at my request, as Elizabeth May. I’ve known the new Liberal MP for Toronto—St. Paul’s for longer than that, since she was working in Ottawa for Michael Ignatieff, and I know she’ll put her whole heart into her new role.

Church’s margin of victory over Conservative candidate Don Stewart bounced around 10 points all Monday night. As I get ready to hit Send on this post, it’s closer to 6 points, and I have no way of knowing whether it will shrink or expand as more results come in. But if it were 10 points, that would be 9.9-ish points more than you need for a victory. I’m especially pleased to report that the result constitutes yet another glorious victory for Wells’s First Rule, which holds that for any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome. In particular, in the last several days, I’ve been telling friends that this would be a particularly solid Wells’s Rule victory if the night ended with Tyler Meredith boasting on X. Et voilà:

If you slice the returns finely enough, pace Tyler, they might yield more omens and portents. Ten points would be the Liberals’ narrowest margin in TSP (as I’ll call the riding for short) since 2011, and the second-lowest in 31 years. In 2008, when the Liberals under Stéphane Dion were reduced to 77 seats out of 308, the Liberal margin of victory was more than twice what it was in Monday’s by-election. A 10-point margin of victory in TSP is what Liberals get when there’s almost no water left in the pool.

But so what. A win’s a win. By-elections are a blunt measuring tool. Paying subscribers will fill this post’s comment board with theories to explain away the night’s results, and for all I know, some of them might even be correct. Besides, for a few weeks I’ve believed that even if the Liberals had managed to lose TSP, there would have been no public or organized effort within the party to remove Justin Trudeau as leader. You can’t teach an elephant to dance, or a Trudeau Liberal to abandon the internal loyalty that has been one of the hallmarks of his leadership.

So if I’m a Liberal MP — humour me, it’s a thought experiment — I now know what the next year looks like. Justin Trudeau has spent his adult life waiting for the rest of us to realize he was right all along, as we saw in a book that was published last month to extravagant praise. The returns from Toronto will comfort the big guy’s belief that the scales have again begun to fall from Canadians’ eyes, and that therefore this is absolutely the worst time to mess with a winning formula.

He’ll stay. Katie will stay, Ben will stay, Chrystia will stay, Mélanie and Seamus and Max and Clow and all the cats will stay, and the Trudeau team will show new spring in its step as it prepares to get, once more, off the ropes and back into the fray.

Which means everyone else in the caucus has a choice to make. Close to a dozen Liberal MPs have already announced they won’t run in 2025, along with smaller numbers from other parties. It’s an honourable choice. Leaving politics is as legitimate a path as entering it. And it’s definitely a choice over which each incumbent MP, from any party, has real influence. You might not be able to affect Justin Trudeau’s career choices, but you can make your own.

That’s a conclusion Scott Brison, Navdeep Bains, Catherine McKenna and others have already reached, one I wrote about eight months ago:

The temptation of BMO

That post ended with this question:

If you’ve been slogging through this swamp for six or eight years and you’ve got a decade left in your professional life to make the most of your experience, as far away from all of this as you can get, why would you stay?

There are many answers to such a question. “Because I think we’ll win.” “Because it’s worth doing even if we’re not the government.” “Because my life was never this exciting.” “Because when the Dark Ages came, some monks set to work copying Bibles.” The answer will be different for every MP. But you can bet the question will be raised in the home of every MP this summer, and that each will make a decision based on the one thing they can know with greater confidence on Tuesday than they did on Monday: that they can’t spend any more time hoping Trudeau will do the walking.