SAINT-SAUVEUR, QUEBEC -- The TVA “Face-à-Face” leadership debate will take place on Thursday. That’s the one that gave Andrew Scheer fits in 2019.
Trudeau landed punches at will and Scheer was left gasping for breath. His inability to be clear on the issue of abortion cost him heavily in Quebec and with it, his hopes nationally.
Full disclosure: I provide analysis and commentary at TVA and related all-news network LCN.
This lightning-fast election campaign has been as unpredictable as it has been unusual. I don’t know too many people who thought that as the third week of the campaign began, Erin O’Toole would be neck and neck with Trudeau for preferred Prime Minister.
Even fewer would have predicted that several national polls would have the Conservatives in the lead at this point.
Ontario will of course play a crucial role in determining the election outcome and the Liberals are starting to concentrate on that electorate and going hard after their Conservative target. Expect universal public healthcare to be a key issue.
Everyone who’s ever led the NDP will tell you that Jagmeet Singh’s main job at this point is to hold off the inevitable Liberal attempt to get their votes.
The Conservative lead makes that already tough job even tougher. Soft NDP votes may be tempted to switch to the Liberals in order to block the Conservaives, seen as the greater evil.
Through arrogance or hubris, or perhaps a little bit of both, the Liberals appear to have believed that they only had to show up to win. Trudeau still gives the impression of having been caught off guard by an election that he himself called. He hasn’t even produced a platform yet!
O’Toole, on the other hand, was ready. His team had done their homework and it’s paying off.
Unused to being in second place, the Liberal Cavalry has been called in. Their A-team seems to have wrested control from the amateurs who have apparently run the campaign thus far. The real battle is about to be joined.
Over the weekend, Radio-Canada did a set of interviews with party leaders. The consensus view is that Erin O’Toole did very well. There was one problem: both during that interview and at a campaign event in St. Hyacinthe earlier in the day, he’d been dogged by questions about the conspiracy theories espoused by candidate (and longtime MP) Cheryl Gallant.
O’Toole tried to figure skate around the question which only made the problem more obvious. You can’t fire a sitting MP in the middle of a campaign but this isn’t the first time Gallant has seriously embarrassed her party.
O’Toole simply lacked the ascendancy to have her dumped prior to the election call and now it’s too late.
Having failed in their opening gambit to paint O’Toole himself as a right wing crackpot, the Liberals were starting to find their mark by going after the kooky views of a Conservative candidate. It’s a very rich vein to be mined and O’Toole has to find better answers than the ones he gave about Gallant.
Of course there’s lots where that came from and the Conservatives dutifully rolled out an old quote from sitting Liberal MP Marci Ien that appeared to give some credence to 9-11 conspiracy theories. What’s sauce for the Conservative goose is sauce for the Liberal gander!
Trudeau had to cancel an event Friday because of unruly protesters and even using his “campaign superpower”, i.e. talking about his father, seemed contrived. By Sunday, as another event was being compromised by the Zombie Apocalypse of wing-nuts who brought their kids out to swear and help make obscene gestures, Trudeau was starting to score some points.
He artfully tied O’Toole to the nutters but not too brazenly, just with the back of his hand, suggesting that since they won’t listen to him, perhaps the Conservative leader could help the protesters understand how offside they are on climate change and vaccines!
If the Liberals are now concentrating on Ontario, the Conservatives know they have to spend more time and money in Québec, if they hope to finish ahead of the Liberals.
Quebecers are following closely and Bloc Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet covered himself in ridicule last week as he claimed he could make a new traffic tunnel an “ecological” project.
His provincial Parti Québécois political allies were furious with him for pandering to Premier Legault’s pet project because they’ll be fighting Legault on the issue in next year’s election. Lots of votes could shake loose and O’Toole knows that if he plays his cards right, many of them could come his way.
Debates are always important but this time around, they will be crucial. There will be two French debates that will be the first real chance for many to meet and assess O’Toole. Dozens of swing seats will be in play both in Québec and in the francophone regions of Canada.
The English debate will be all-important. Trudeau’s best hope is for a strong performance where he can talk to Canadians in a way he hasn’t been able to so far in this campaign.
O’Toole hopes to continue to surprise and present his values as the guarantee that the more extreme views espoused by some in his party won’t define him, his leadership or his potential government.
Canadians have never seen a campaign quite like this one. The conventional wisdom and the pre-campaign polling have been turned upside down in two short weeks.
The real test is about to take place. Are the Conservatives sufficiently well-equipped to stave off the full-bore Liberal onslaught in seat-rich Ontario? The answer to that question may well determine the election result.
Tom Mulcair was the former leader of the federal New Democratic Party of Canada between 2012 and 2017.
