Don Newman

September 14, 2021

The final week of this election campaign, like the home stretch of every campaign, will include a lot of interesting things to watch for as the cases made by all the leaders are crystallized and wavering voters find a home. That will likely include sparring between Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh over progressive voters who shift their support between the two parties.

Trudeau and the Liberals have been in a life-and-death struggle with Erin O’Toole and the Conservatives over who will form a minority government — based on current polling — after the September 20^th election. After eroding through much of the campaign, Liberal support is suddenly tracking upward again. Now, Trudeau needs to attract more of the voters who may have been thinking of voting for the NDP if he is to save the minority government he thought he could boost into a majority four weeks ago.

Singh needs to hold onto to everything he has and more to prevent a continuing slide of the NDP, which went from over one hundred seats and official opposition in the 2011 election, down to forty-four seats in 2015 and just twenty-four in 2019.

The polls started moving after the English-language television debate last Thursday evening. It is hard to understand why. The debate was the worst in a history of uninspiring debates that have been in decline since the 1980s, when there were only three candidates debating and one moderator to manage the exchanges.

In the debate, Trudeau had tried to argue that Singh was pretending a Liberal minority government would be no different than a Conservative one led by Erin O’Toole. From the NDP leader’s point of view, that’s relatively true as long as he holds the balance of power.  But the fact that many NDP voters can switch between the two parties on the left illustrates how much easier it is for them to work together than it would be for the party farthest to the right in the House of Commons and the party farthest to left to cooperate.

Trudeau and his Liberals will be working hard to convince progressive voters that they have to come to the Liberals if they want to prevent a Conservative government, even a minority one.

As the possibility of the Conservatives forming a minority government grew during the past two weeks, Singh tried to dodge the question. When asked about cooperation with the Conservatives, he replies that when he is prime minister, he will cooperate with every party. No one has challenged him on the improbability of a party polling at around twenty per cent in public opinion surveys having any chance of forming a government and making him prime minister.

That’s partly because no one takes anything Singh says too seriously, as he has no chance of coming first on election day. Instead of carrying on with that charade, he and his party would be better in the final week to concede there is going to be a minority government that is not NDP, but that a minority Parliament would work better with a good representation of New Democrat members.

In the meantime, Trudeau and his Liberals will be working hard to convince progressive voters that they have to come to the Liberals if they want to prevent a Conservative government, even a minority one. They will do that the way they’ve been doing it throughout the campaign, by lambasting O’Toole on day care, gun control, vaccinations and anything else they can think of.

It will be an interesting final week.

Contributing Writer and Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a lifetime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, and author of the bestselling Welcome to the Broadcast. He is Executive Vice President of Rubicon Strategies in Ottawa.