EDITORIAL: Trudeau doesn’t know when it’s time to leave

“While it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”

— U.S. President Joe Biden

You’d think he could see the signs.

Last June the federal Liberals lost the party stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul’s in a federal byelection — a seat that the party had held for more than three decades.

In many parts of the country, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are soaring in the polls, with the great likelihood that they would win a large majority of seats if an election were held right now. A July poll by Abacus Data had the Conservatives 20 points ahead.

Down in Montreal where voters in the riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun will be heading to the polls in a byelection on Monday, the Liberals are feeling significant pressure from the NDP and the Conservatives, but particularly from the Bloc Québécois, which leads in the polls. As the Montreal Gazette reports, the Liberals remain “stubbornly competitive” in Quebec strongholds, but their support continues to crumble across the country.

So if the Liberals end Monday night with yet another election loss, it should be the clearest signal yet that the party and its vexing leader, Justin Trudeau, have overstayed their welcome as the head of government.

Last February, Globe and Mail writer John Ibbitson concluded that the Liberals faced political oblivion with Trudeau at the helm.

“The Liberals under Mr. Trudeau face a historic drubbing, one that could rival the calamities of 1958, 1984 or 2011. And polling analyst Philippe Fournier at 338Canada.com believes the assertion that there is still time to turn things around increasingly looks like ‘naive wishful thinking,’” Ibbitson wrote. “Even the most die-hard Trudeau loyalist must be starting to wonder whether it’s time for a change at the top.”

The situation has not improved — and in fact the odds are far more obvious now of the damage Trudeau is doing by not taking that long walk in the snow that his father took so many years earlier.

A Toronto Star headline from Sept. 9 suggests that an “emboldened” Justin Trudeau was shrugging off naysayers as he headed into Tuesday’s Liberal caucus retreat in Nanaimo, B.C., insisting that he will lead the party into the next federal election.

He clearly is not getting the message.

Just last week The Canadian Press was actively musing about what would happen if Trudeau made the decision to step down in the wake of the dissolution of the NDP-Liberal supply and confidence agreement.

One of his own party members, Quebec MP Alexandra Mendes, just this week decided to say the quiet part out loud, telling CBC Radio-Canada on Monday that she’s heard from “dozens and dozens” of constituents over the summer that it’s time for the prime minister to step down.

“He’s no longer the right leader,” she told the French-language service.

It’s the same for New Brunswick Liberal MP Wayne Long, who first called for a change of leadership after his party’s humbling loss in Toronto last June.

“I haven’t changed my position one iota. The prime minister does need to step down for the good of our party and for the good of the country,” Long told the National Post. “We are not the Justin Trudeau Party of Canada. We are the Liberal Party of Canada.”

Trudeau is not the first leader to stay past his best-before date. Known as a “competitive street fighter” by writers of the day, the fortunes of former Manitoba PC premier Gary Filmon were already falling when he lost to then NDP leader Gary Doer in 1999. He would resign as Tory leader in May the following year.

Sixteen years later, Manitoba NDP leader Greg Selinger resigned as party leader after Brian Pallister’s Tories’ historic win in 2016, marking the end of the NDP’s 17-year stint in government. The later years of the Selinger government were fraught with party infighting, leading to a very public revolt of members of his caucus who sought Selinger’s ouster from leadership.

And after nine years and eight months in office, Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s abrasive brand of politics was so disliked by a majority of the public, he lost his government to a political upstart who ran the Liberal campaign like the coming of an heir apparent, with “sunny ways” at the tip of his tongue and his so-called emotional intelligence to guide him.

Unlike U.S. President Joe Biden — who pulled himself out of the 2024 race for a second term following a poor showing in a debate with Donald Trump — some leaders simply don’t know when it’s time to leave. Their ego prevents them from understanding that their time is up, and they get caught believing in the lies that they keep telling themselves.

To be frank, it was Harper’s own hubris and callous attitude that caused his downfall. In Trudeau’s case, it will be his inability to read the room.

– Brandon Sun