OK, you’re Justin Trudeau. Just pretend you are.
We know, we know: you’d rather not. If we’re all playing dress-up games – one of Justin Trudeau’s favourite pastimes, as is well-known – you’d rather play the role of someone else. Someone less unpopular, say.
Because, God knows, Justin Pierre James Trudeau, PC, MP, 23rd Prime Minister of All of Canada, is pretty damn unpopular. Even that friendliest of friendly Ottawa opinion-sampler firms, Abacus, says so.
Said Abacus, a few days back: “Public feelings about Prime Minister Trudeau had been deteriorating through our surveying over the Summer…The Prime Minister’s negatives still stand at 50 per cent – the second highest negative reading we’ve seen during his time in politics.”
The reasons are myriad and multiple, because — in politics — it’s never just one thing that kills you. It’s an accumulation of things, over a long period of time. Big political graves are dug with tiny shovels, this writer always likes to say.
In Trudeau’s case, there’s no shortage of things about which to dislike. There’s the WE scandal, and the Aga Khan one. There’s his obstruction of justice in the LavScam thing – which would’ve gotten him impeached, had we been like the Americans.
There was the egregiously racist blackface incidents — incidents, plural, because Trudeau did it so many times, even he wasn’t sure how many. There’s was the groping of the reporter at the beer festival in B.C., which constitutes sexual assault, as defined in no less than the Criminal Code of Canada.
Any of those — obstruction of justice, blackface, groping — were disqualifying. Had Justin Trudeau been a garden-variety aspiring Liberal candidate, had he been a regular person, those things would’ve prevented him from being “green lit” to be an actual candidate.
But he isn’t a regular person. He’s a Trudeau, a millionaire, and a charter member of the lucky sperm club. He breathes a different, rarefied air. He orbits in a different stratosphere than the rest of us mere mortals do.
But we mere mortals want him gone for the most politically-fatal wound of all: we’re sick of his face. We’re tired of him, even those of us who voted for him before. We want him gone.
Few Liberals know where he hangs out, these days. Fewer still are consulted by him. If you’re a Liberal MP, you’ll be lucky to be granted a minutes-long audience with him once every year.
So, as Justin Trudeau lingers somewhere, pondering what to do – pondering whether to stay or to go, per the Clash – there are pros and cons.
The cons: Trudeau could lose the next election. The Conservatives are about to give Pierre Poilievre 110 per cent of the vote. Poilievre could get a bit of bump. The fresh face and all that. Stranger things have happened.
Another con: there’s no issue to manipulate, there’s no pretext, to justify an early election call. Trudeau used COVID in 2021, and it very nearly blew up in his face. What could he use this time?
This con, too: the polls — including the aforementioned Abacus — continue to show Trudeau’s Liberals and the Conservatives where they have been for years: tied. If an election was held now, the Grits would win — but it’d be another minority. No change.
But there are pros, too, associated with staying and fighting. Chief among them is Pierre Poilievre himself. The Ottawa-area MP is hard to like. And his Bitcoin fetish – and his WEF conspiracy theories, and his links to far-right convoy types, and the civil war he’s fostered within his own party – are big, big liabilities. For the Liberal war room, it’d be a target-rich environment.
Another pro: the Tories are again — again! — underestimating Trudeau. After being beaten by him three elections in a row, you’d think they’d learn. But, once again, they have underestimated Trudeau’s main strength: his ability to fight. He loves a good fight. And he rarely loses.
Pros, cons. Negatives, positives. As he sits somewhere, eyeballing his phone, alternating between poll numbers and pictures of Himself on Instagram, Justin Trudeau isn’t letting on what he’ll do. Stay and fight? Shrug and leave?
So: if you were Justin Trudeau, what would you do?
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