Trudeau’s Deepening Political Decline

Is luck running out for Justin Trudeau? After years of defying political gravity, the laws of physics, and his own errors, might be beginning to catch up with the Canadian leader. According to an Eksos poll released on September 24, Trudeau’s Liberals are trailing new opposition leader Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by 19 points, 42 percent to 23 percent – the largest margin reported for any party in any poll in 18 years. While that result may be something of an outlier, the polling average on 338.com, a Canadian polling aggregator, has the Conservatives ahead by 9 percent and set to win a majority for the first time in 12 years. This shift is in part the result of a number of scandals affecting the prime minister. But more than anything else, it is a testament to the skill of Poilievre, in tying each of those scandals together into an overarching narrative about how the Trudeau government’s indifference to mass migration has produced a housing crisis and imported social conflict. That skill cannot be underrated as Trudeau’s problems seem diverse and unconnected at first glance, beginning with his family life. The prime minister and his wife announced their separation earlier this year, which was followed by a contest between the two to see who could post the most cringe-worthy photos of their kids to social media. It is unclear who won the contest, but the images of the couple’s son and daughter, both of whom looked as if they were appearing in hostage videos, almost certainly ensured the entire affair was a net loss for Trudeau. If his divorce had dominated the summer, Trudeau and the Liberals would likely be in better shape. But the prime minister’s personal foibles have been overtaken by three major political crises. The first, with India, occurred over the alleged killing of the leader of a Sikh separatist group who had taken refuge in Canada, a situation where Canadian protests were complicated by the fact that the individual in question really should not have been in Canada in the first place. The second, involved the entire Canadian Parliament rising to honor a Ukrainian immigrant who it was later revealed had fought alongside Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Finally, the Canadian government has responded to moves by several provincial governments to require schools to notify parents when children request to socially transition to a different gender by suggesting such defenses of parental rights are an assault on the fundamental rights and freedoms of children. All of these issues have been badly mismanaged in their own way. Having a Waffen SS veteran address the Canadian Parliament was sloppy, mortifying, and displayed a level of contempt for each and every member of Parliament who trusted Trudeau and his team not to expose them to that sort of humiliation. Furthermore, it undermined Trudeau’s high ground in the dispute with India, which he was already losing. Two weeks ago, Trudeau accused the Indian government of involvement in the shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijar, a Sikh separatist activist who India has accused of terrorism. Nijar had two Interpol warrants out for his arrest, had traveled to Pakistan to meet with members of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, and had been considered a figure of sufficient concern that the Royal Mounted Police detained him in 2018. The relevant link between the two cases is not whether India did or did not play a role in the killing of Nijar. Rather, it is that the incident in the Canadian Parliament with the Nazi veteran, the extradition of whom is now being sought by Poland, reinforced the impression that Canada is largely indifferent to who it allows into the country. In a functional system of international law, India should not be launching operations on Canadian soil against wanted fugitives any more than Israel should have been compelled to kidnap Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960. But Argentina should not have been protecting Eichmann, and it has become clear over the last month that Trudeau is indifferent to whether Canada was harboring Nazi war criminals or Sikh terrorists. He is only furious that other parties acted when he did not. Trudeau’s irritation fed into a wider narrative that he resents criticism of inaction more than he likes to act. Trudeau tends to interpret any criticism as politically motivated. The idea anyone might actually be upset over a Nazi being applauded in Parliament or that members of Parliament might feel mortified is foreign to someone who does not seem to understand shame. Similarly, Trudeau seems to have rejected the idea that India might actually be aggrieved by Canada harboring a wanted fugitive, or that someone involved in transnational crime might have violent enemies. He has settled on the belief that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pulling off a campaign stunt. As someone for whom all policy decisions are made on the basis of calculated political advantage, Trudeau assumes all criticisms are political stunts. He treated the truckers’ protest in Ottawa against lockdowns not as a spontaneous outburst of discontent, but as a conspiracy to overthrow the government, one which he alleged the opposition was in league with. He similarly seems to view the current movement for parental rights in schools when it comes to issues of gender identity and sexual education as a political campaign imported by and driven by dark forces originating in the United States. That has led to some mortifying tweets, opening the way for rebuttal from Poilievre. Trudeau and the Liberals initially welcomed Poilievre’s elevation to the Conservative leadership. Poilievre is a nerdy libertarian, an Americanophile who, despite his last name, does not speak fluent French, normally the mark of death for a potential Prime Minister. His refusal to condemn the trucker protest was seen by Trudeau and the Laurentian elite (the term for the insular intellectual bubble of politicians, PR executives, and newspapers that dominate Canadian political discourse) as a sign of extremism. He has been labeled “MAGA.” Poilievre, however, by refusing to play the traditional game of Canadian politics, has upset the apple cart. Canada is a 1.5-party state. The Liberal Party governed for 33 of the last 102 years, and the Conservatives are traditionally expected to spend a decade or more insisting they are not dangerous before being allowed to “take power,” usually under disastrous circumstances such as the Great Depression. This was the approach Poilievre’s two predecessors adopted, and he became leader in a party-room coup after his predecessor condemned anti-lockdown protestors and tried to force every Conservative MP to vote for a ban on “Conversion Therapy” which would have opened up parents who did not affirm their children’s gender identity to charges of child abuse. The traditional Liberal approach has been to define genuine ideological opposition – whether it is dissent on transgender issues, multiculturalism, COVID-19, Quebec nationalism, or anything else – as extremism, and then call upon the Conservative leadership to join them in condemning it. If they agree, it reinforces the Liberal position that they represent the consensus. If they reject it, they are painted as extremists. Occasionally, opposition leaders have tried to challenge the consensus on one issue or another, such as gun rights or energy, but no one has ever attempted what Poilievre has: A general opposition on everything. Poilievre, however, has focused his general opposition to the core question of governance. Rather than fighting on other issues such as education, crime, or foreign policy, he has tied each issue to Trudeau’s failure of governance as a whole. The core of Poilievre’s challenge is how he has related everything back to the cost of living, which in Canada is dramatically more expensive than even America’s most unaffordable cities. Poilievre has crisscrossed the country promising to override local “NIMBY” (“not in my backyard”) policies to build new housing. He has also successfully tied another major issue to the cost of living – immigration. Debates about mass migration have often involved economic arguments about growth along with arguments about assimilation or whether native workers should be prioritized. Poilievre has flipped the script by tying mass migration directly to the cost of housing. Trudeau’s government has allowed anyone, anywhere in the world, who enrolls in a Canadian university to effectively remain in the country. The results are astounding. Already in 2021, immigrants represented 23 percent of Canada’s population. In 2022, Canada’s immigration rate topped 1 percent, and is on track to top 1.5 percent in 2023. For comparison, that would be the equivalent of over 5 million new immigrants arriving in the United States, legally, in 2023. Poilievre has not challenged immigration in general. Rather, he has argued that it is negligent for the Liberal government to allow uncontrolled migration and then have no plans to build houses to accommodate the newcomers, with out-of-control rents and housing shortages a natural and predictable result of the lack of control. That “lack of control” line is what has allowed Poilievre to appeal to groups outside the traditional right. Younger voters, who can blame the Liberals for refusing to build houses to accommodate immigrants, not immigration itself for the problems, are more likely to support the Conservatives than older voters, in contrast to the pattern most other places in the world. Meanwhile, the charge that the Trudeau government not only has no control over immigration but is entirely indifferent to who comes in is reinforced by revelations that it is allowing Nazis to live freely and wanted Sikh separatists to operate openly within Canada’s borders. This allows even pro-immigration constituencies to view the lack of control as dangerous and Poilievre to appeal to Hindu voters. Poilievre has also cleverly tied Trudeau’s positions on social issues to hostility to specific groups. He has been quick to play up attacks on Muslim parents for their opposition to sexual education in the schools, and his housing-first approach has allowed him to rally existing immigrants behind him. More than anything else, Poilievre’s success in tying together Trudeau’s foibles and failures into a coherent narrative explains why the Canadian Liberals are in so much trouble. It means Trudeau, the Liberals, and their media allies cannot find some local Conservative politician or even American Republican who has said something embarrassing to run against. Conservatives’ charge is that all of the Liberals’ individual failures are representative of wider personal and governmental failings. The Republican Party could learn from the approach. Andrew Camman is the pseudonym of a regular writer on current affairs who has taught history at the University level for eight years. He has worked on Capitol Hill and is familiar with the historical development of the American and British political systems.