Byelection results forecast a wipeout
As of early Tuesday morning, with all polls reporting but at least one recount possible, the NDP has won Winnipeg’s Elmwood — Transcona. That longtime NDP seat will stay orange, despite a strong challenge from the Conservatives. Meanwhile, in Montreal’s LaSalle — Émard — Verdun, the Bloc has squeaked out a tiny win over (in something of a surprise) a close Liberal challenge and a more distant NDP candidate in third.
While the closer-than-expected finish might serve as something of a balm for Liberals, the top-line result is grim. This is yet another once (mostly) safe seat lost by Justin Trudeau.
The Winnipeg riding staying with the NDP was foretold, and will probably be little remarked upon. The Liberals losing LaSalle, though, is a defeat akin to their loss of Toronto-St. Paul’s in June. That earlier loss seemed to genuinely shock many Liberals; the defeat in LaSalle, in contrast, had been gently telegraphed as probable by the party for the last two weeks. Whether the sudden shock or the long wait was more painful is up to them to decide for themselves.
Indeed, the only Liberal who had recently expressed any confidence in the party’s chances in LaSalle was, in fact, the Liberal leader. Toronto Star columnist Althia Raj opened her recent column at the end of the Liberal caucus retreat by noting the PM was confidently boasting that his party would hold both seats, leaving reporters in Nanaimo baffled by his confident claims of imminent victory.
No such victories occurred. But hey, leaders lead, right? No one should have expected Trudeau to solemnly step up to a microphone and bum out all his party’s volunteers by sighing heavily and saying, “Man, we’re screwed. Have you seen these polls?”
But only to a point, because past that point, projecting confidence in the face of imminent catastrophe starts to look, sound and feel less like a steady hand on the wheel and more like having slipped on a banana peel through a portal into an alternate reality. And wondering what plane of existence the boss is currently inhabiting is not something that’ll leave the troops all fired up and confident, either.
Here in this reality, the situation facing the Liberals is increasingly clear and awfully bleak. All three of the recent byelections have broadly confirmed what opinion polls have been telling us.
The Conservatives took St. Paul’s, in the heart of Liberal Toronto. Even though the CPC lost in Elmwood — Transcona, they increased their vote share by almost 16 per cent or so, in line with what polls had suggested. And in LaSalle, we got more proof, as if any was needed, that the Liberal polling collapse is real. For a party that won the last two general elections on the back of “vote efficiency” — winning a lot of ridings by tiny margins — there just aren’t that many places where a 16-point loss can be absorbed.
These byelections, and basically every poll since last summer, are not simply signalling that the Liberals will lose the next election. They’re signalling that they’ll get mostly wiped out, erasing the rebuilding accomplished by Trudeau over the last decade. Many have written off the Liberal Party before, and I won’t do that again here. But gosh. How many other races can they lose, and by these margins, before the party becomes non-functional?
We’re told the PM plans to “unleash” himself. That the party thinks that the cure for their woes is more Trudeau. Well, all right then! Hopefully, for their sake, it works soon. The party doesn’t have much more time, if it has any at all, for soothing delusions. A massive defeat looms. And strangely, the question isn’t whether they can avoid it, but whether they’ll even try.