The parallels with the PC death march in 1993 are unmistakable
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals now stare oblivion in the face.
Or as a friend put it more colourfully, the byelection loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s “greased the skids.”
The skids to where, exactly?
Quite possibly, to nowhere at all. Powerful political parties can collapse into non-existence. They simply fall off the stage after generations of success.
That could prove optimistic.
In 1993, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives, after winning two majorities, were reduced to only two seats in Parliament.
One was in Quebec, the other in New Brunswick. Western conservative voters swarmed to Preston Manning’s Reform party. Alberta elected 22 Reformers.
The PCs rebounded slightly to 20 seats in 1997, fell back to 12 in 2000 and by 2004 were no longer on the ballot. Their feeble remnant was absorbed as an unloved junior partner into the new Conservative Party.
There were many harbingers of doom before the collapse, including the party’s selection of Kim Campbell as prime minister and ritual sacrifice to the voters.
The PCs had been competitive in every election since their creation in 1940. They traded government with the Liberals through 16 elections.
They had imposed the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Voters saw it every time they bought anything. It replaced the usefully invisible Manufacturer’s Sales Tax.
The loss in Toronto-St Paul’s is difficult to exaggerate. This Toronto territory is as close as you can get to the Imperial court of Trudeau Liberalism.
The Liberals and PCs traded it for many years, but after 1993 it fell into sole Liberal ownership. The party won the riding 10 straight times. Local Liberal icon Carolyn Bennett was the candidate in nine of those victories.
The appointment revealed the arrogance of a government in decay. The Liberals believed they could hand the elected MP a juicy retirement job and casually retain the riding with any candidate they dusted off.
The parallels with the PC death march in 1993 are unmistakable.
Like Mulroney, the Liberals have no leadership saviour in the wings. The cult of Trudeau has stifled the rise of any caucus replacement. The PM does not seem strong on mentorship.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, often mentioned as a successor, represents University-Rosedale — right next door to St. Paul’s. There’s your Kim Campbell for the 2025 election.
Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor, might be an outsider candidate. He’d be uncomfortably similar to Michael Ignatieff, the international public intellectual who led the Liberals to their greatest defeat (so far) in 2011.
A recent Angus Reid poll showed that none of the potential replacements to Trudeau would do better with the voters. And he would do terribly.
Nationwide, there’s great fatigue with governments that have been in office during the pandemic, inflation and the housing crisis.
Conservative support runs wide and deep on the national level, but discontent isn’t always so clearly partisan.
The NDP government in B.C. is weakening. So is Premier Scott Moe’s very conservative regime in Saskatchewan. After years of dominance, Premier Francois Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec government is bleeding support.
People eventually tire of any government regardless of party, most especially if it happens to be a truly bad one.
That’s the epitaph for Trudeau’s Liberals. The voters of Toronto-St. Paul’s suddenly agree. Liberal defeat is now possible in every single riding across Canada.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald