Tom Mulcair: Can Trudeau turn things around, or will he pack it in before the next election?

Justin Trudeau is looking, and sounding, less and less engaged as he struggles through his ninth year in power.

Uniformly brutal numbers from every leading polling company reflect a widespread view from voters: they’re just tired of Trudeau’s Liberals.

He is nearly 20% behind Poilievre with less and less runway available to lift off into a potential new campaign.

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Trudeau is very proud. Not the type to wait to be shown the door and always convinced he can take on any adversary.

In my only election against him in 2015, he ran a masterful campaign and triumphed over both Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and the NDP that I then headed.

He’s an outstanding politician and was a godsend for the Liberals for whom he’s delivered three election victories in a row, after their worst result in history under Michael Ignatieff.

File photo: Conservative Leader Stephen Harper, right to left, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Mulcair walk off the set following the Munk Debate on foreign affairs, in Toronto, on Monday, Sept. 28, 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

Any fair evaluation of his overall record will include his strong performance during the pandemic. Not just his daily news conferences, but the public policy tools he put in place to help the millions of Canadian families who lost their livelihoods overnight.

When bureaucrats, doing what bureaucrats do, produced a laborious set of complex rules to determine eligibility, Trudeau boldly pushed them aside. He knew that with fewer hurdles there would inevitably be more abuse but he made the right choice. He made it his priority to ensure that there was food on the table. He put people first and is now letting those same bureaucrats slowly claw back what some had taken illegally.

This is where Trudeau should normally be able to push back against some of the facile nostrums of Pierre Poilievre. When the Conservative leader rails against the massive deficit spending under Trudeau, the question becomes: what would your priority have been during the pandemic? And, more generally, where would you cut?

The problem for Trudeau is that his recent run of bad luck has made that even more difficult. When auditor general Karen Hogan released her withering report on the ArriveCAN app on Monday, her words were as clear as they were brutal for Trudeau’s record of public administration.

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Hogan cited a “glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices.” It doesn’t get much worse than that. With that one very bad apple, the whole bushel of solid Liberal performance during the pandemic was spoiled.

Few will recall all the help that was doled out. Many will remember that Trudeau’s Liberals threw over $50 million out the window because they’re lousy managers.

In international affairs, Trudeau should’ve been able to make easy work of the sophomoric muttering of Poilievre. But it’s on Trudeau’s watch that Canada has been embroiled in disputes with the two largest countries in the world: India and China. Whatever the merits of our grievances against them, the overall impression Canadians are left with is not a good one.

Despite having a kindred democratic president in the White House, the senior American administrators that I’ve spoken with are at their wits end with Trudeau’s stubborn refusal to spend anywhere near the 2% of GDP that NATO members have agreed to commit to defence. We’ve become an embarrassment to an alliance that we helped create.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump, ever capable of dominating a news cycle even on Super Bowl weekend, invited Russia to invade any country that failed to meet its NATO obligations. Other than the fact that he’s once again proven himself to be completely “unhinged,” to quote the White House, he was playing the same theme as Poilievre to the same base.

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When the Conservative leader rails against Trudeau paying too much attention to “far off foreign lands,” he’s on the same page as Trump. He doesn’t seem to care that Ukraine is fighting for its life against a bloodthirsty dictator and Canada is doing its noble part to help.

Poilievre is not only emulating Trump in talking to his base in a way that’s completely out of sync with Canadian values of responsibility and duty, he’s using the same technique.

When leaving the Conservative leadership, Erin O’Toole bemoaned politics by algorithm, a brilliant turn of phrase that describes the deep data, polling and focus group results that can reveal what’s lurking in the psyche of many voters. With the Conservatives’ very deep pockets, they’re able, like Trump, to effectively mine those veins of fear and intolerance and turn them into political gold.

There’s nothing new in politicians telling voters what they want to hear. What is new is the depth of the knowledge these modern techniques can expose and the abject lack of principle with which they’re used as political instruments. Trump’s racist ban on immigrants from some Muslim-majority countries and the Conservatives’ shameless “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line under Stephen Harper are sad examples.

Trump’s hard core support is America Firsters, people who don't want their country embroiled in conflicts in ‘far off foreign lands,’ like Ukraine. Poilievre’s base is less well-defined but he knows that anything Trudeau does he can safely oppose.

A Trump supporter says America first to Ukranian supporters before the second Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2023. (Sarah Reingewirtz/The Orange County Register via AP)

Poilievre haplessly tried to make the case that the free trade deal between Canada and Ukraine, that Ukraine enthusiastically sought, had a hidden agenda of a carbon tax and that was why he opposed it. That argument was easy to debunk and it exposed the paucity of Poilievre’s foreign policy thinking.

The Soviets used to have an expression for Westerners who supported their hopelessly failed regime, they referred to them as “useful idiots.” The Trump and Poilievre approach to Russia’s illegal invasion of an independent country merits a similar epithet for both, but Trudeau is incapable of profiting from it due to his own weak record in foreign affairs.

On the environment, Trudeau talks a good game but his government spent over $30 billion to build a new pipeline to help Alberta pump more oil from the tar sands. Despite that, he doesn’t have any hope of increasing his seat count there.

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In Trudeau’s telling, the Liberals are the guardians of the Charter of Rights. When Doug Ford mused about using the notwithstanding clause, Trudeau hit him hard. So, too, with Randy Boissonault, his Alberta minister. When Danielle Smith used gender identity as a political weapon at the expense of young peoples’ health and futures, he was withering in his critique of her threat to use the notwithstanding clause.

Trouble is, in Quebec, Francois Legault has been systematically using the notwithstanding clause to attack the rights of religious minorities and of the English-speaking community. Neither Trudeau nor Boissoneault, nor anyone else on Team Trudeau, has ever said a word.

So much for his record on rights.

If you go down the list, from the huge deficits prior to the pandemic to the unprecedented increase in the federal civil service, Trudeau’s record in terms of basic management is extremely weak.

He has done a great job recruiting good people and getting them elected and many of his ministers are top notch. In fact, they’re clearly superior to the baying horde that cheers Polievre’s over-the-top pronouncements in question period but it matters little.

Even Jagmeet Singh appears to be tiring of constantly supporting Trudeau, knowing it’ll hurt his own election fortunes next time around.

Pushing back against Singh’s insistence on a single payer pharmacare system, run exclusively by bureaucrats, could actually help Trudeau. The most extensive plan in Canada is Quebec’s and it’s a hybrid model that actually works. Private plans were integrated and the result has been there to prove the wisdom of that choice. Singh is of course also playing to his base, that includes most public sector unions.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh speaks at a health-care rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle

Many observers equate the possible end of the Liberal-NDP confidence and supply deal with an election. It should be borne in mind that the Bloc has more than enough votes to pass the next budget if push comes to shove between Singh and Trudeau. The Bloc is unlikely to be pushing for an early election.

It remains to be seen whether Trudeau will have a moment of lucidity and decide to pack it in before leading his party to a likely drubbing at the polls. It would appear, with his new hires in communications, that he wants to give himself the spring session to see if he can turn things around.

If he can’t, there is plenty of talent around his cabinet table and in the wings to make a go of it against Poilievre. Of the five parties in the House of Commons, only the Liberals have never had a woman as leader. Trudeau would almost certainly try to help Chrystia Freeland win the top prize. Problem for her is that she wears all of the missteps of the Trudeau era. The exceptional Mark Carney would make an excellent choice but he’s been sending few signals he’s interested.

No one runs an election campaign on a promise of “good, competent public administration.” It’s just too dull. The problem is, without good management, there’s a slow accretion of errors and miscalculations. Taken separately, they don’t always amount to much in the public mind and can usually be swept under the rug. When piled up after nine years, they make for an elephantine lump that voters can’t ignore.

Trudeau is facing that reality now. His emoting about how wrong Poilievre is on so many key issues won’t change the perception that Trudeau hasn’t paid attention to actually running the country competently.

That his regime has been mostly about bolstering his own image. That’s going to be hard to shake as the ramp-up to the next election begins in earnest.