Broadhurst And The Damage Done

On The Dying Trudeau Government

So, the Liberal National Campaign Director doesn’t even think the Liberals can win.

I don’t know Jeremy Broadhurst, and there is no reason in specific to think his letter explaining the familial toll his life in politics is *a* cause of his departure. But it is also naive to think that this is unrelated to the broader state of the Liberal Party, which is, uh, not going well to say the least. It’s also incredible that this news was communicated to the PM during a key byelection and leaked to the press 11 days before a make or break byelection that the Liberals are about to lose, at which the party is going to knife him.

I’m not going to break Mainstreet’s paywall but the Liberals are down in LaSalle. Sources on the ground have privately put the chances the Liberals finish in 3rd higher than the chances they win, which feels right. And now, the Liberal Party has allowed the news of its National Campaign Director’s resignation to leak 11 days from polling day in Montreal. But of course, everything is fine, because Montrealer Justin Trudeau must be putting his shoulder to the wheel and doing everything he can to help the party win, right? He must be blitzing the seat with campaign events and newsy announcements and doing French-language TV to help turn the ship around, right? Wait, he’s at fucking TIFF.

In ever-so-slight fairness to Trudeau, he did do an event about the new National School Food Program this week, which is something. It’s not his fault that his media conference got swallowed up by Jagmeet’s petulance, but one worthwhile event in a week isn’t enough. But it’s not about TIFF in isolation or the campaign-style tour where he didn’t tell the press where he was ever, so he couldn’t get any good press coverage or the steel worker in the Soo. It’s about seriousness.

The Liberal Party tells us all, every fucking day, that Pierre Poilievre is a radical threat that we must take seriously. The National Campaign Director is quitting, the PM is partying at TIFF, the Ontario Caucus all hate the PM but refuse to do anything other than leak to Althia Raj, and the party is more concerned with managing expectations for LaSalle in the Star than they are in executing a strategy to fucking win it. If Pierre Poilievre is such a fucking threat to this country, fucking act like it. Show us the seriousness that you’re demanding from the rest of us. And if you can’t, then fucking resign and let anybody else do the job.

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It’s been 13 months since the great poll collapse of 2023, and since then I have been slowly losing my fucking mind. This site’s archive since the polls collapsed has seen me go from sceptical of the collapse to a believer in it but a defender in the idea that they could come back, to someone who has admitted defeat. Justin Trudeau will not win the next election. A new Leader of the Liberal Party won’t either, but right now, Trudeau is leading the party off a cliff. They’ve already lost St. Paul’s and they’re about to lose LaSalle. There is no reason for hope.

There is a moral imperative to try and cut the deficit to the Tories, and to save as many good, strong Liberal MPs as possible. Every seat we lose now is a harder lift to win back in 2029, with a Tory or NDP or Bloc MP who has incumbency. For all the bellyaching that the alternatives are worse, who the fuck sincerely thought Kamala Harris would catch fire the way she has? American pundits and Democrats spent months debating how to not just get Biden out of the paint but also Kamala in part because nobody to a person thought she could win. Now she’s in a coinflip race. Changing from Trudeau to Anand or Carney or whoever won’t make this race a tossup, but it’ll help the party a ton compared to the status quo.

Whatever you think of Justin Trudeau, the 2024 budget included a lot of items that polled pretty well. The Capital Gains changes, a national school food program, investments in specific sectors and more money for housing were all popular enough on their own. But the country completely tuned them out because they’re sick and fucking tired of the guy who announced them. In the same way that America wasn’t sick of Democratic ideas, but singularly unwilling to vote for Joe Biden, plenty of the ideas underpinning this Parliament’s worth of liberalism are decently popular. But the man proposing them isn’t, for reasons of his own failure.

The Liberal Zone Of Disinterest is real and the housing failures are absolutely shameful, but the real problem is the cult of Trudeau is stopping people from having an even remotely honest conversation. To non-Canadians, the simple facts of the polling lead and the Toronto-St. Paul’s results baffle them. Progressive friends who only pay a cursory glance to Canadian politics because they see one in every 7th tweet of mine are befuddled that JT is still in power. It’s a delusion so strong that people have decided to invent a new person they can paste over Trudeau, one that isn’t vainglorious and horrifically out of touch.

The notion that the leader who decided to prioritize a family vacation over the first ever National Day Of Truth And Reconciliation isn’t concerned with himself is laughable. This is a man who has done great things, but is also incredibly tone deaf. His accepting free trips from the Aga Khan in his first year in office, for one example, was the kind of thing no sane Prime Minister would ever think acceptable. None of this is to deny the idea that he’s done great things (for some Canadians), but the problem with Trudeau is that it’s too hard to defend the real version of him that they end up defending a caricature that is so obviously false.

The thing about Justin Trudeau is that he, and his people, have generally had better political instincts with their backs up against the wall than they get credit for. The decision to back C-51 in the aftermath of the 2014 Ottawa shooting was a much attacked decision that arguably won Trudeau the 2015 election. In 2019, the tactic of tying Andrew Scheer to the pro-life, homophobic, or racist comments and views of his candidates allowed the Liberals to consolidate their base around a common enemy after months of disillusion after SNC. And in 2021, despite the fact that I don’t really buy that the Liberals were ever down like Mainstreet and EKOS said, the Liberals were in borderline majority territory before the debate question and (much more importantly) Legault’s endorsement of the Bloc. Their instincts have served them well until now. They’re failing now.

This government is stuck in neutral. It’s drifting, unable to make a decision about anything. The cabinet shuffle that wasn’t? The Carney endless flirtation? The fact that the party keeps picking dumb dumb talking points about Poilievre being Trumpian instead of pointing out to Canadians in any sustained way that Ford is blocking needed housing reforms because suburban Cabinet Ministers, and the Premier himself, don’t want to risk their seats from angry homeowners? The fact that we aren’t using advertising - either party or governmental - to point out the number of Canadians who have received dental care since the Dental Benefit launched? The fact that we have an Immigration Minister who very clearly doesn’t support the restrictions he’s having to enact which means the Housing Minister is the one who had to soft-launch the TFW tightening at the Cabinet retreat? Can we fix any of that shit?

The Friday after St. Paul’s - 10 weeks ago yesterday - I wrote a list of 6 ideas this government could do that would make their position better. They’ve done about half of one of them, and they had the Housing Minister do what Marc Miller should have done. I’m not arrogant enough to think that I should be running this country, but it should be clear to everybody that what the government is doing isn’t working. So whether it’s my ideas or somebody fucking else’s, the government needs to rejuvenate.

It’s long past time for the Liberals to get their heads out of their asses. LaSalle is about to rebuke Trudeau, and nobody seems to care. I’d ask that the last Liberal to leave the sinking ship that is the HMCS Trudeau to turn out the lights but it feels like everyone left a long time ago, content to leave us drifting to slaughter, one byelection loss after another.

I refuse to accept this is good enough. I refuse to accept that this absolute shambolic state of affairs is somehow the best the Liberal Party can do. I refuse to accept that we have to accept the PM showing up in LaSalle once and then getting to fuck off until we lose. I refuse to accept that mass failure is inevitable.

I also refuse to accept that somehow I am less of a Liberal or a liberal for wanting more from my party. The Liberal Party is not The Justin Trudeau Party. More importantly, Justin Trudeau has an obligation to the Liberal Party and its wellbeing that he is failing right now. But the amount of people claiming that I have suddenly become a Conservative is ridiculous. Hell, I even got called a Russian asset a couple of times last night, because to some people the idea of a Liberal holding their party to account is unacceptable. Well it really fucking shouldn’t be.

The Liberal Party owes it to the people who voted for it to do better than this. It owes us everything. And if even Jeremy Broadhurst thinks the Prime Minister can’t win again, then for the love of God, let someone who might limit the damage try to clean up your mess.