OTTAWA—Under siege in the polls but fighting for a shot at a fourth term, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to a backbench MP’s podcast to riff on why he thinks he deserves it.
In a nearly hour-long interview recorded Friday and published Tuesday, Trudeau gave more revealing answers to fellow political traveller Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith than he has to any journalist in months.
The prime minister conceded a few mistakes. But only a few. And he expressed little regret.
Trudeau conceded: the Liberal party has given Pierre Poilievre two years to build his political brand instead of immediately running ads against the Conservative leader; that as prime minister he failed to deliver on his promise of electoral reform; that the Liberal party bears some responsibility for two bad byelection losses in Toronto and Montreal strongholds; and that the federal government should have acted sooner on housing.
Yet his abstract responses to Erskine-Smith’s challenge on other questions — on what policies he wants to see through in a fourth term, on why he’s running despite anonymous backbench naysayers and bad polls, or on how he thinks Liberals can win — underscored a bigger issue.
Can the Liberal leader, who has been on the Canadian and American podcast circuit in an attempt to broaden the reach of his message, get through to those he needs to persuade — not least, other Liberal MPs, party volunteers and those voters he’s lost since 2015 that he hopes to bring back onside.
First, the mistakes:
• Trudeau defended the decision not to run political ads against Poilievre as a tactical consideration, that years before an election was too soon and that he’d rebuffed a similar attempt by Conservatives to frame him too early, and more importantly, that he felt it would look petty to voters if the Liberals took their eye off the bigger economic and financial woes then facing Canadians. When Erskine-Smith begged to differ, Trudeau insisted there is still time to paint Poilievre as the risk to the environment, equality rights and social programs that the Liberals believe he is.
• On the broken promise of electoral reform, Trudeau wished he’d had a do-over. He said he should have immediately shut down talk about proportional representation as a viable option. He repeated his oft-expressed view it would have been too divisive and spliced the Canadian electorate into ever smaller pies, but confessed Liberals were deliberately vague in order to appeal to Fair Vote Canada advocates. Trudeau said he wished he’d used his majority to bring in the ranked ballot model he preferred, saying it would not have changed ridings or even the ballot that much — suggesting instead of a check, voters would rank their preferences in order — and would force parties to appeal beyond their bases. But Trudeau said he did not feel there was a broad level of support in the House for what he called “an irreversible change,” so he pulled the plug. Erskine-Smith said the broken promise was his most difficult day in nine years in Trudeau’s caucus. Trudeau said it was “a gut-wrenching day for me.”
• On the byelection losses in Toronto-St. Paul’s and LaSalle-Emard-Verdun, Trudeau said there were “a lot of factors” in each but the Liberal candidates did not have enough time on the ground to campaign ahead of the byelection dates, noting he’d had a year to campaign before winning Papineau. However Trudeau’s answer did not reflect the fact that Leslie Church had been campaigning for nearly a year in the riding before she was appointed, and it did not address complaints that the appointments of her and Laura Palestini as candidate in the Montreal-area riding prevented competitive nomination races and angered some in those ridings. Nor did Trudeau directly address Erskine-Smith’s question about what those losses told him about the bigger changes that are needed.
• On housing and immigration, Trudeau acknowledged that the massive post-pandemic influx of temporary residents — foreign workers and international students — had an impact on housing shortages. But he said his government should have “leaned harder” on provinces and territories to address “NIMBYism” (not-in-my-backyard pushback) in order to build more housing.
But it was the prime minister’s responses to Erskine-Smith’s probing about why he is still running and how he thinks he can reverse the Liberals’ fortunes that underscored the big challenge.
“Obviously your brain didn’t melt on national television the way that Biden’s did,” Erskine-Smith said, but Kamala Harris has given that party a better shot at winning. He asked Trudeau to explain why he thinks he’s the best person to lead the Liberals’ next fight.
Trudeau’s answer was, basically, that he is the one who knows better than anyone “exactly how hard this fight is going to be,” that it is “fundamental to how Canadians come out of or come through” the past few difficult years, and it is “exactly why I got into politics.”
He touted progressive policies that delivered for people and will last over the long term: the Canada Child Benefit, standing up a national child care program, fighting climate change including with carbon pricing, and efforts to tackle housing shortages he said will pay off years from now.
Trudeau pivoted to note, “Nobody is asking Poilievre what … he is fighting for … he hasn’t even begun to articulate what he’s fighting for … other than himself and his desire to be in power.”
However, Trudeau effectively said that there is no new vision for the coming campaign, rather that Liberals are fighting for the same vision he fought for in 2015, to protect the environment and the economy, to lift up ordinary Canadians and improve people’s resilience for the future.
“Yeah, it’s going to be a change election,” he said. “Everything has changed, not just climate change, but the way we work, the way AI works, the way geopolitics happens, the pressures on everything. The world is in a massive pivot moment right now, and we don’t know what the biggest issue is going to be.”
To confront that kind of change, Trudeau insisted that Canadians understand what his “values” are, and what he brings to a crisis, pointing out that the crises he confronted, from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, were not foreseen in any campaign.
Values, he said, are “ultimately the only thing.”
Except in Poilievre, the Liberals are facing a political rival who is promising practical benefits for individual households, with slogan-based promises to “axe the tax, build the homes,” and “stop the crime” and is laying claim to represent “common sense” Canadian values.
Erskine-Smith rightly called Trudeau out on all the high-level talk, and said Poilievre is a better communicator than any Conservative leader in the past nine years. He urged Trudeau to be better at telling the Liberals’ story.
On Wednesday, after it aired, Erskine-Smith said his personal decision not to run in the next election is because he needs to spend more time with his young children, but he still supports Trudeau, at least for now.
