Opinion: Trudeau may have missed his chance to save the furniture

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It seems absurdly clear to all but Justin Trudeau and his inner sanctum of advisers and strategists in the Prime Minister’s Office that the Liberal government is deep into borrowed time. Any extension of this government can be expected to come at loan-shark-level interest rates as a vibrant Bloc Québécois — buoyed by an unlikely byelection triumph on the island of Montreal — ekes out maximum concessions from a deeply unpopular and weak government in the coming weeks and months.

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By all indications the Liberal goose is unquestionably cooked to an internal temperature of 165F as we approach Thanksgiving. The prospect of Trudeau continuing to reside over a miserably fractious and toxic parliament inspires little beyond fatigue in a Canada primed for a wave election.

It need not necessarily have come to this. Back in April I wrote of the similarities between Trudeau and former Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar. The latter had surprisingly just resigned, citing burnout and a personal recognition that he was impeding his Fine Gael party’s electoral fortunes as his coalition government faced a general election in early 2025. At the time, like many observers, I noted FG’s poor prospects for re-election.

Simon Harris, who succeeded Varadkar, may have been rightly assumed to have obtained a hospital pass at best. And yet, close to six months later, the party’s fortunes have dramatically improved with solid European and local election results in June and the latest opinion polling indicates they are once again the most popular party in the state.

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The widespread assumption in Irish political circles is now that Harris will call an early election, likely in November, to capitalize on the dramatic shift in momentum that his energetic leadership has initiated. Thus, unlike Canada’s Liberals desperately clinging to power in the hope that underlying economic indicators improve, grinning painfully as they dutifully repeat the PMO’s line that all they need to do is “continue to deliver for Canadians,” Fine Gael is riding on politics’ greatest natural resource — momentum.

Pierre Poilievre’s Tories are polling comfortably above 40 per cent in average voting intentions, with simply devastating regional numbers in Ontario and British Columbia for the Liberals. As the Bloc increasingly becomes the logical choice for Quebecers who do not see their values in Poilievre’s brand of conservatism, the Grits appear to be staring down something close to an extinction level event.

The PM’s few remaining admirers are running out of road in making the case that he is anything but the chief anchor dragging Canada’s erstwhile natural governing party to the bottom of the ocean. The slow and steady rollout of budget measures targeting key areas such as housing and affordability ahead of the formal tabling of finance legislation in mid-April formed the backbone of the PMO’s strategy to start clawing back support in increments of five per cent every six months. The policies themselves drew strong support in polling but it has become hard to deny that so long as the prime minister is the one communicating the message, otherwise popular policies continue to fall on deaf ears.

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This unsuccessful spring reset was followed by the baffling sight of a summer where the PM appeared to be ducking and diving to avoid his nervous and angry caucus, and embracing Joe Biden levels of denialism about what the defeat to the Conservatives in the June Toronto—St. Paul’s byelection indicated about his leadership. It would seem the Liberal organization has over corrected from the division of the Chrétien-Martin years to the unity of lemmings trotting off a cliff. Trudeau arguably needed to step down six months ago for his party to have any realistic possibility of saving the furniture in the coming election.

The Liberals have clawed themselves out of shallow electoral graves in the past, but the apparent acme of delusion on show from Trudeau amid a country poised to commit a political exorcism suggests that every additional day where he stays on will make the already gargantuan task of rebuilding the party following a Conservative landslide even harder.

Dónal Gill is assistant professor of Canadian politics at Concordia University.

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