Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with President Joe Biden at the White House, Nov. 3, 2023/Adam Scotti photo

By John Delacourt

February 20, 2024

It persists as the central question on people’s minds when they think of the Liberals right now: will the Prime Minister stay or will he go? It has become a new ritual, two years on, that through the horse latitudes of December and our endless Januarys in Ottawa, this topic moves into the foreground with Trudeau’s first end-of-year interviews and does not recede into background noise until the House returns and some actual news can be reported on again.

Indeed, such talk is beginning to feel over-thought, if not overwritten. It is an imposition of a narrative based on a hoary dynastic trope, and only burnished by collective memory (“walk in the snow,” anyone?). It is not a notion bolstered by any actual evidence. We can’t seem to reconcile ourselves to the notion that what might happen here in Ottawa could simply be more of one-damned-thing-after-another, until an agreed-upon election date, when we can reshuffle the Tarot cards. This, despite what we can all sense from our new era of polycrisis politics; there are larger disruptive forces weighing heavily on any government’s best laid plans. Indeed, who’d want to lead any government through this, when so little is within one country’s power to tame and control?

Yet when Trudeau sits down for interviews and declares, after more than a decade leading the Liberals, that he’s feeling more comfortable than ever in his role, could he actually mean it?

Yes. This is, I submit, the prime minister’s actual frame of mind. Of course, no one can be sure, but it might be wise to heed the words of one historian who has a few political biographies of note to his name, Robert Caro, who wrote, “although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said … is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. … but as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.” For the PM, like any Gen X Canadian who came into politics later and rues some of the choices made in the nineties (writer feels seen), the thought of camouflage for anything is sure to be tinged with wistful regret. For Trudeau, poised as a committed leader, this is not a glib exercise in positioning. He means it, and he’ll be there for the 2025 campaign.

One overpowering reason for this is how thoroughly the 2015 version of the Liberal party that came into government bears such little resemblance to the one that governed a decade earlier. Reconstruction has its down side; there is no Chrétien-like figure, campaign hardened through years in government and time served on the Opposition benches, waiting in the wings. This central fact rather complicates succession planning. And if much of the leader’s political capital defines the Liberal brand, this was indeed by design and intention, much of it Trudeau’s.

Having been around as a staffer during those before times (and for a while assigned as his critic’s-assistant in the Opposition Leader’s Office), I can attest that Trudeau’s zeal for creative destruction, once he aspired to lead, was entirely understandable. Much of the cynicism and patronizing tone he encountered as a first-time MP was not from the Conservatives and the NDP. No, true to Liberal internal politics for generations, the sharpest knives were pointed inward.

I remember Trudeau attending a meeting with some policy advocates, and he was joined by a fellow critic, who announced in the meeting that he was representing the Opposition’s brains and Trudeau was the beauty. As the PM related in his last year-end interview with broadcaster Terry DiMonte, what he saw of the hard-bitten survivors of the Liberal defeat in 2006 was a brain trust whose Opposition strategy amounted to caricaturing and demonizing Harper and his cabinet, yet the new MP from Papineau could discern little to no vision beyond that, despite these residual talents for “guns in the streets” hyperbole.

Two of Trudeau’s initiatives as a critic in Opposition (for Youth and Multiculturalism, initially) still resonate as to how they would define his future leadership. He convened a workshop on crafting a new policy for Official Languages, inviting all of his fellow caucus members to come and contribute. We booked a large room on the Hill for it, but as the minutes ticked by, only one caucus member eventually showed. Yet Trudeau, unfazed, proceeded to put forth his arguments for what might go into the next Liberal platform.

We took notes for a report back to the Leader’s Office. Surprise, nothing happened. He would not be taken seriously, despite evidence to the contrary. Some months later, with his additional responsibilities as critic for youth, he convened roundtables to promote engagement. I don’t think the Liberal party had seen so many eager and engaged young people in a room in decades – maybe you’d have to go back to, say, his father in ‘68. The kids intuitively got it, long before the OLO did; Trudeau had game.

Given such defining moments marking a first-time MP’s early days in office, was it any wonder Trudeau would look outside the party to craft a new vision? With the help of a few caucus friends and some standout advisors from the McGuinty era in Ontario, revenge for underestimating him was served cold, but it fed a huge room of instant Liberals. To the dismay and grouchy resentment of sundry Ottawa close talkers and Liberal lifers, more than a few of these newcomers became key advisors and cabinet ministers.

Nine years in, many in the background have moved on, and of course, a few around the cabinet table exited, feeling scorched from their orbit near the hot centre of power. Contemplating what years in opposition might be like, given the kinds of careers many of them built outside of politics, it is likely that more than a few Liberal MPs are eyeing the exits as they scroll through the aggregate poll numbers each week. It’s becoming all-too evident that the arc of Liberal reconstruction might actually be closer to something like a bell curve, with the apex long past.

So how, as Liberal leader, does Trudeau bend that curve back up again? The fail-safe cliché of any insta-pundit thriving in the X-verse of hot takes without consequences is that 2025 will be a “change election.” They’re all change elections, kids, but I digress. Trudeau’s plan for change is, in many respects, already out there.

There’s an interesting moment, at 54 minutes in with the PM’s 2023 conversation with DiMonte, where he explains it: it is all in the foundations of the first Trudeau campaign, back in 2015. Roughly paraphrased, he states that when he and his team began talking about climate change, about gender equality, inclusion and diversity, reconciliation and ambitious immigration targets, these were – and remain – the foundations for long term economic development. He then goes on to say that the world is noticing (even if Canadians haven’t quite twigged onto this yet, deluded and demented from too much social media consumption, disinformation stoking fear in their hearts and minds): we’re number three in the world for foreign investment, take that to the bank.

The fail-safe cliché of any insta-pundit thriving in the X-verse of hot takes without consequences is that 2025 will be a ‘change election’. They’re all change elections, kids, but I digress. Trudeau’s plan for change is, in many respects, already out there.

So, by the time the election date finally rolls around – in 2025, he repeatedly says – Canadians will start to pay attention and realize how good we’ve got it. We’ll be reaping the benefits of these progressive policies and these pesky affordability issues won’t seem so burdensome (earlier in the interview, Trudeau also mentions housing as a foundational plank – at that moment I had to erase from my memory the hissy fit one Liberal MP got into in the 2016 Budget lock-up, when he didn’t see any significant housing funding as a line item).

And here is the thing: even if I weren’t a Liberal and simply someone who chooses to live in the reality-based world, I actually believe he’s right about those planks. Investment flows for clean energy transition, the long term-viability of those sectors and enterprises that do move forward with gender equality, inclusion, diversity, to me it all does translate into prosperity and a better country. As for ambitious immigration targets for a rapidly aging Canada, or as for reconciliation as a linchpin for virtually any energy or resource project of scale and scope, the proof points are all but inarguable. As Canadians remain angry and pessimistic about their prospects and our economy, the Trudeau plan to bend that arc back upwards for his candidacy is: just wait with me. You’ll see the economic benefits eventually, and you’ll probably vote for it.

As I write this, the negotiations between the NDP and the Liberals regarding pharmacare, fundamental for the Confidence and Supply agreement, are imperiled. If we do indeed go to an early election this year, I’m trying to think of any significant advocates for diversity, equity and inclusion, reconciliation, immigration, even clean energy transition, who are speaking of how we’re turning our economy around. Nobody’s saying it’s the economy, stupid.

In fact, many of those voices seem to have no interest in contributing to any hopeful, positive narrative of how transformative the government’s efforts have been for them. So, in their absence, in a denuded media landscape, it’s incumbent on the government to craft that narrative. A few days ago, Trudeau’s team changed the name of the Climate Action Incentive Payment to the Canada Carbon Rebate. So, there we are; I can feel the arc rise already, just in time for the next confidence vote in the House.

Perhaps more telling, in the final minutes of the DiMonte conversation, Trudeau speaks of the Conservatives wanting to take Canadians back to the 50s. His take on the Poilievre momentum is in line with the Trump-lite framing that the Liberal brain trust is arduously pushing out through all media channels. It was as though the Prime Minister had forgotten what he was saying about twenty minutes into his conversation with DiMonte about the Liberals of 2006 resorting to demonization and caricature in lieu of a real vision.

And more worryingly for Liberals, this framing allows Poilievre to do what Harper did in his first victorious campaign: simply not talk about any of those flashpoints or wedge issues, just look and sound like a “regular” Canadian – one who might have spent too much time watching Jordan Peterson fulminate on YouTube, okay, but someone who’s not quite Trump’s kid brother. It’s the minority strategy, and it was working for O’Toole in the last election campaign until one wedge issue, gun control, turned it around for the Liberals, just in time. To hope for another turnaround moment is not quite a strategy.

The Trudeau I came to know in opposition would be acutely aware of this, I believe. If Caro’s right, a more focused political strategist, intent on the long game for what he called the Liberal movement, will reveal himself once more. Timing, as usual, will probably be everything.

For someone doggedly still believing in that 2015 vision, I can only hope it’s within Trudeau’s power to control. Yet such hope, as we know, does not make for a strategy, either. And only one thing will be certain: the next federal election will be markedly different from 2015, no matter how constant, and confidently resistant, the Trudeau Liberal brand might appear to be.

Contributing Writer John Delacourt, Vice President at Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa, is a former director of the Liberal research bureau. He is also the author of four novels, including his latest, Provenance, about the Nazi looting of European artwork, and The Black State, a political thriller which will be published here in Canada in April.