Toronto-St. Paul's: Trudeau's Inevitable Exit

On The LPC's Future

In an ideal world, I’d want Justin Trudeau to win the next election as Leader of the Liberal Party.

If I was dictator of the world, or just suspended disbelief, that’s what I want. I have a lot of affection not just for the Liberal Party or for progress in a vacuum, but I have a real, genuine affinity for the Prime Minister. His 2015 campaign was a genuine shot in the arm, a clarifying moment for me of what I believe and how I want progressive outcomes to be achieved. I haven’t always loved Trudeau, but part of why he’s disappointed me is that I have genuine affection for Trudeau.

I have long resisted saying he has to go, because I don’t think the upside of him going is anywhere close to being guaranteed. It’s entirely possible that replacing him ends in disaster, and yes, even more of one than the status quo. I am eminently unconvinced any of the other options are actually, definitively better. A leadership change cannot be judged in a vacuum; leaders are defined by their outcomes, and changing for the sake of it is idiocy. And yet, I cannot escape the feeling that all the arguments for Trudeau ring hollow now.

Losing Toronto-St. Paul’s is unacceptable. The fact that it even got close is unacceptable, and frankly the fact that so many people would have celebrated a tiny win as some form of success is laughable. The government is on a collision course with electoral ruin, and at some point the question is not whether you or I want to find some other to blame - be it pollsters or Postmedia or whoever the fuck else - but what do we do with it. This is a result that suggests that the Liberals might win less seats in English Canada at the next election than they did in 2011’s disaster. This is a point of no return. I hate saying this as much as the vast majority of you hate reading it. But at some point we have to be honest.

What the Liberal Party now needs is a bloodletting, a proper conversation about what went wrong with this government and what it needs to fix this crisis. It needs a proper conversation about the role of the state, the extent to which federal dollars should be used to enforce national policy aims, and it needs the sorts of big ideas that leadership contests create. There’s a wealth of policy ideas for Bonnie Crombie in Ontario to use because the OLP held a long, credible leadership race that brought this thinking forward. It’s unclear just how much will end up in the platform, but there’s already been clear evidence that a change can move a party forward. That’s what the Liberals need.

They need to understand that their housing policy that has only recently stopped prioritizing Boomers’ equity over younger Canadians’ costs cannot work. They need to understand that they have shattered the cross-partisan support for the idea that immigration is good unto itself. They need to find a way to articulate a better solution to the crises in health and long term care across this country other than sitting by and sending more money. And they need to find a way to save as many Liberal seats as possible, to stop the Tories from being able to completely destroy the legacy of this government that has been very good for a lot of people.

I defend this government because it has done a lot of very good things, but it’s easily understandable why people don’t value them. Plenty of people have suffered the consequences of the government’s disinterest without sharing the spoils, and as much as we want the public to vote for the best interests of others it’s understandable that they vote for their best interests. The CCB and the child care deals are obviously hugely valuable, but if you’re 27 and childless and forced into an hour long commute because you can’t afford to live where you work, you don’t give a shit if the couple with kids get cheaper child care.

Many others have talked about the generational inequity of the housing policies, but it’s not about that. This government has lost its ability to be heard. The capital gains changes have plurality support across the polls, but the government’s polling is flat or down since the budget. That's not about the budget going over badly, that’s about a government being tuned out. I was in Scarborough in 2016 for the provincial byelection, and after enough days of prolonged exposure to Liberals I started to doubt my own judgment on that government. After hearing the arguments for their re-election so long, I convinced myself that maybe the government wasn’t as hated, and wasn’t on track for such a beating, after all. Then the Liberals lost the byelection and ended up in 3rd place.

The dirty secret is that most governments have a compelling case for re-election if you let them make it. David Cameron brought fiscal order after the Labour government spent all the money, Stephen Harper handled an economic crisis better than most of our peers, and I have even intermittently defended Malcolm Turnbull. Now, those are wildly incomplete pictures of those governments, but that’s the point - you can choose the parts of the resume that fit a narrative and run with it. The fact that I like this government’s positive achievements more than others doesn’t mean it nullifies the problems. It doesn’t, because even if you think the country is wrong about this government, they’re allowed to be wrong.

This result’s a disaster. Winning it by the same amount they lost it by would have been functionally as much of one, and both would have meant that the government’s fucked. But this at least allows us to have this conversation honestly. We lost one of our safest seats. I hate the fact that the government I support is in this place. But it is. And now it’s time to move forward from where we are, not where we want to be. It’s time for a new leader.