Clearly, the scandal is hurting Trudeau, perhaps by forcing Canadians to remember the kind of prime minister he always has been
How the PM squares this clear and apparently widely shared appreciation of the need to tread carefully with his admitted failure to recuse himself from the vote is unclear. Indeed, the more the PM said of his prior understanding of the obvious conflict, the more bonkers his failure to recuse becomes. It’s like a bomb squad technician meticulously defusing the warhead, and in the moment of triumph, lighting up a celebratory cigar and tossing the lit match onto the explosives.
Still, it’s not clear that the testimony accomplished much. Those who wish to see in the PM a man who only wanted what was best but screwed it up in an innocent mistake will have seen that. Those who wish to see in the PM a walking, talking ethics failure who got caught helping out celebrities who were paying off his mom will have seen that. It’s hard to imagine any undecided voter sitting through the full hour-plus of testimony, and even harder to imagine that any made-up minds were changed.
Which isn’t to say he hasn’t been hurt. He has. After holding a massive 20-point lead over the Conservatives for months, polls show the Liberals way down. Over the past few weeks, while WE has been in the news, those leads first shrank, and then basically disappeared. The latest poll, for Abacus, shows the Liberals with a four — yes, that’s right, four — point lead over the leaderless Tories.
So yes, clearly, the scandal is hurting Trudeau, perhaps by forcing Canadians to remember the kind of prime minister he always has been.
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