The longest weekend
A quick update in case things get weird
I wanted to write about this op-ed in the Washington Post by New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger, but events closer to home compel my attention.
Justin Trudeau spent part of the summer receiving visitors, old friends who would, and in some cases, have, taken a lot of heat to help him do this job. The message from a few of them was similar: you will not do well in an election. You need to quit, if not precisely while you’re ahead, then at least before the voters can put their dissatisfaction on the record. This is not new advice he is hearing. I talked to an old friend of Trudeau’s in January 2023 who said he was already telling the big guy to get out.
Of course nobody has to take anyone’s advice. And I’ll bet money that Trudeau is getting other advice, besides what I’m hearing from sources I seek out. There will be people telling Trudeau they’ve never seen a better political performer than him. Especially because, every year, there are more people working in politics who have never seen any other political performer, at least not one leading their team. And many will continue to believe that the surest path to a relatively soft landing is to let the most experienced leader run a campaign, which many Liberals believe is what Trudeau does best.
I usually have sympathy for this argument. Stephen Harper had worn out much of his welcome with swing voters by 2015, but the Conservatives won 99 seats all the same with Harper as leader. You see versions of this elsewhere, such as the soft landing by Jean Charest’s deeply unpopular Quebec Liberals in 2012.
Just on the face of it, these comparisons have become shaky. Harper’s Conservatives routinely polled near 30% through 2015. And neither of Charest’s opponents, Pauline Marois and François Legault, had been as popular for as long as Pierre Poilievre has this year. Sometimes incumbents drive big defeats despite the fickle advantages of incumbency. See the craters left by provincial Liberals in Ontario and Quebec in 2018.
But all of this is the backdrop for the specific events of the week. On Wednesday Jagmeet Singh announced he is taking back at least the theoretical option of voting to defeat the government. On Thursday the Liberals’ national campaign director announced he’s quitting.
The Liberals, or at least the ones the Star was able to canvass, responded to Broadhurst’s departure with Olympian feats of looking on the bright side.