Benefit of hindsight

Feel free to start coming back any time, big guy

Well, of course I saw it coming all along. What kind of fool could have imagined the Liberal in Toronto — St. Paul’s had any chance?

Hang on. I’m just getting word that I didn’t see it coming. In fact, as recently as Monday night I wrote a post I’ll be hearing about until the cows come home. Sorry about that!

Here are the actual final results, barring any recounts, which may not happen because Conservative Don Stewart’s margin of victory, while slim, is too large to trigger an automatic recount.

Congratulations, Don Stewart! I never doubted you’d win. Hang on. I’m just getting word that I doubted you’d win as recently as last night.

Things will now start to happen quickly. Expect Liberals to work their way through four of the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief before lunch. Denial will come easily, benefiting as it does from long practice. Acceptance may take longer.

In part this is because on paper there isn’t that much to accept. The day’s news is not earth-shaking and, in isolation, should not be taken as definitive. It’s true that by-elections are strange events, though if you add them together they do have some predictive power. It’s true that Leslie Church’s long service as Chrystia Freeland’s chief of staff turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help, a data point whose implications the Deputy Prime Minister won’t want to think much about today. It’s true the Liberals didn’t even try all that hard, if by “didn’t try all that hard” you mean “they tried as hard as they possibly could, my God they tried so hard, my God.”

But a single off-season defeat in a riding the Liberals have, in fact, previously lost during the Paleozoic era is not a larger thing to accept than, say, a punishing loss to Ireland and Norway in a Security Council vote at the UN. Or the loss of two senior cabinet ministers in a controversy in which the ministers who quit were radiantly, obviously in the right. Don’t take my word on that, incidentally: ask David Lametti, who agreed with Jody Wilson-Raybould but managed to keep his job anyway. For a while.

A single by-election defeat is not a larger thing to accept than the prime minister’s documented history of slapping on dark makeup for social occasions, a habit that stretched from junior college to young adulthood. It’s not a bigger deal than firing your finance minister during a global fiscal calamity so you can replace him with somebody who knows less about money. It’s not evidence of poorer strategic thinking than the choice of Parliament as the venue for dismantling a new Conservative leader, given that Parliament has long been where Justin Trudeau and most of his government perform worst.

It’s not a bigger deal than mocking monetary policy during an election campaign. It’s not a big new development, compared to the Prime Minister’s reluctance to meet his own cabinet ministers to discuss business, an oddity of his management style that’s been documented in a growing number of books (look out for Marc Garneau’s this fall!).

The prime minister has been on the ropes before, so to speak, and all those trials have made him the man he is today. Or rather, I suppose, his response to them has. I have no particular advice for Justin Trudeau today, or to the party he leads with the unstinting consent of its members. I screwed up last night by sending a column before the facts were in, so I’m feeling a little sheepish this morning. I’ll let Liberals decide what to do next.

As recently as two summers ago, I used to give them advice. It amounted to this: Notice when something you’re doing isn’t working. Change it. Make sure people see you changing it, so you don’t look quite so full of yourself. Rinse and repeat.

That post from 2022 ends:

“Don’t worry. He won’t take this advice either. Whatever the Liberal leader does on his return from the sunless south, it probably won’t resemble anything we’ve mentioned today. He’ll probably keep doing what he’s been doing. With the same results.”

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Let me read to you

My excellent short bestselling book, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times, is now an audiobook, narrated by the author, who is me. Here it is on Audible. Other platforms soon.

Here’s the story of the book, if you’re just catching up. Here’s an episode of my podcast with guest host Vassy Kapelos interviewing me about the book. Paper and ebook editions remain easy to find and buy, for yourself or friends.

We decided to make the audiobook some time after we published the, uh, more booky formats. It’s a response to surprising and gratifying demand. It’s also a promissory note: If this belated audiobook edition finds an audience, it won’t be my last.

There’s a school of thought that says there’s not much demand for nonfiction Canadian audiobooks. Here’s your chance to confound the skeptics. Thanks as always for your support.