Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in deep trouble. His Liberal Party is getting rocked by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party with little sign of an electoral recovery in the offing.
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According to one Canadian polling site, “Demographically, the Conservatives lead across all age groups. They lead by 12 among 18 to 29-year-olds, 21 among 30 to 44-year-olds, 23 among 45 to 59-year-olds, and 20 among those aged 60 and over.”
Although Trudeau doesn’t have to call for an election before 2025, it’s possible that under the right circumstances, he might do so. In his way of thinking, he has a secret weapon: Donald Trump.
Poilievre is no Trump — not even close. But Trudeau has already tried to portray Poilievre and the Conservatives as the second coming of MAGA.
This was made clear when the Conservatives voted against a bill that would have would have reauthorized a Ukraine-Canada trade deal.
“I’ve actually boasted . . . that it’s not a political debate in Canada, all parties in Canada stand with Ukraine,” Trudeau said at a press conference recently. “So it is particularly troubling to see — even though we are seeing a rise of right-wing rhetoric in the United States with MAGA conservatives, across Europe, in certain corners of right-wing politicians and parties — starting to pull their support for Ukraine. Starting to parrot Russian disinformation and misinformation and propaganda.”
That’s a bald-faced lie. The Conservatives voted against an update to the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement not because they were parroting Russian propaganda, but because Trudeau tried to sneak a carbon tax into the bill.
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Trudeau said that was “an absurd excuse.”
You can see where Trudeau may be readying the electorate for an early vote. And he will almost certainly use MAGA and Donald Trump as a whipping boy to gin up hysterical outrage against Poilievre and the Conservatives.
Poilievre, a career politician, has fashioned himself as an outsider to the country’s political elite. When he won the party leadership in 2022, the Liberals did not bother to try to define him or launch a major ad campaign to slow his momentum — strange to many Canadian political insiders.
These days, Trudeau’s Liberals keep repeating that Poilievre is “not worth the risk.” They say he’s “reckless” and “unhinged” with moves “straight out of the Republican playbook” in efforts to link him to the Trump arm of the party.
They recently mashed up Trump and Poilievre clips in a compare-contrast video, showing both politicians attacking the press as fake news and going after woke censorship and political correctness.
Pierre Poilievre: What are you talking about? What page? Can you give me the page? Give me the page!
The page: pic.twitter.com/JedejAQFVl
— Liberal Party (@liberal_party) October 30, 2023
Canada’s Liberal Party has obviously taken lessons from the left in the United States.
Another Liberal lawmaker, Ken Hardie, was forced to apologize for controversially linking Poilievre and hard-right rhetoric to a shooting in Winnipeg that left four dead — aiming to draw a link between the unintended consequences from escalated rhetoric.
Conservatives have a word for this: desperation. And they think the gambit will backfire when voters look at Trudeau’s record.
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Kory Teneycke, former communications director in former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, said, “They’re flailing around for arguments and ways to try to pull their numbers up and pull Poilievre’s down,” and it doesn’t ring true.
“The Conservative Party is leading with female voters, with new Canadian voters,” he said. “It’s a party that embraces those new Canadians as opposed to having undertones of nativism and xenophobia. That’s why it doesn’t work.”
Trying to compare Canadian Conservatives with the U.S. conservatives just doesn’t track. The Canadian right isn’t much less “conservative” than the Liberal Party. That’s probably why the Trump comparison will fall flat and fail to give Trudeau and the Liberal Party a boost.