Justin Trudeau lost frontrunner status as soon as he called a hasty summer election. But don't count him out just yet.
That same August afternoon, Trudeau's government was hastily repatriating diplomats from Afghanistan and closing the country’s embassy. Covid was spiking in some parts of Canada, mostly among the unvaccinated. British Columbia was fighting more than 250 wildfires. And prairie farmers were struggling mightily against a punishing drought.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, came out steady and focused. They released their 162-page platform on the second day of the campaign,The document was stuffed to the gills with policy. "He over-delivered," Graves says. “People said… ‘by the way, this O'Toole character doesn't really seem nearly as bad as we had expected.' ”
But O’Toole’s numbers kept rising. The Tories reached as high as 37 percent in one poll, only a few points shy of the kind of popularity typically required to win a majority government. Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau both won recent majorities with just 39 percent of the vote. “Honestly, I think it’s as simple as an election that those who follow politics probably expected, but [one] many Canadians who are busy with their own lives did not expect. And the reason for the election was not adequately articulated at times." he told POLITICO. "It’s a question we’ve certainly gotten at the doors quite often."
"Do you bring in some fresh faces who may have been a bit more rested? Or do you keep the [same] people around because of the level of trust that has been established over the previous 18 months?" Win or lose, said MacEachern, those questions will preoccupy Liberals long after the ballots are counted.A veteran Liberal insider told POLITICO that Trudeau's advantage heading into the election was his experience in the political arena.
The pollster measured little disturbance in Quebec's polls in the aftermath, but a key exchange between Trudeau and O'Toole reset the campaign's dominant narrative — and changed the course of the election. On the afternoon of the next French-language debate, with Trudeau preoccupied with the final hours of closed-door prep, a pair of his candidates held a press conference. Mélanie Joly and Mark Holland accused O'Toole of "saying anything to special interest groups to get himself elected." They were back to playing offense.
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