Ottawa fixates on Trudeau’s future

OTTAWA, Ont. — Bad polls, grumpy voters and a patchy record on climate commitments have overtaken Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's eighth year in power. Canada's political class is awash in speculation about whether he'll survive a ninth.

Liberal lawmakers and anxious operatives are whispering that it's time for Trudeau to think about throwing in the towel. The prime minister's opponents delight in amplifying the angst.

Trudeau, the Liberal leader since 2013, has for months trailed his arch-rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, by double digits. This fall, Canada’s Supreme Court hobbled one of the prime minister’s key environmental laws.

And now he’s taking heat for walking back his signature carbon tax — a surprise move many say was designed to buttress his support in Atlantic Canada, a reliable Liberal bastion where the party is leaking support to the Conservatives.

Trudeau, 51, is relatively young, especially compared to recent White House residents Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Still, the question lingers: Has he overstayed his welcome?

Geoff Norquay says the scene reminds him of the months leading up to the dramatic defeat of his former boss, Brian Mulroney. The Conservative prime minister was first elected in 1984.

"Every prime minister arrives at year seven, eight or nine basically in the same condition," the consultant and former senior Conservative aide tells POLITICO. "The government is tired. It's losing focus. It sometimes looks arrogant, or not in charge. And the policy failures are piling up."

When Mulroney's popularity sank in 1992 and 1993, his eighth and ninth years in power, David McLaughlin had a front-row seat.

McLaughlin, now the president and CEO of the Institute on Governance, traveled the world with the Conservative prime minister as a senior aide, and served as his final chief of staff.

He observes several parallels between Trudeau’s current circumstances and Mulroney’s final months in power, including persistent personal unpopularity and a "spent agenda" after nearly a decade in power.

Few outside the inner circle were aware what Mulroney was thinking on the timing of his resignation. Senior staff never convened formal meetings on the topic, McLaughlin insists.

But as soon as Mulroney’s inevitable exit became the elephant in the room, governing became more complicated.

"You know it's on [the PM's] mind. You know [he's] not unaware. They have to present themselves as being not fussed by it," says McLaughlin. "That would become an open invitation to the sharks in the political waters."

Trudeau's father, Pierre, stepped down after a now infamous walk in the snow — and an announcement on Feb. 29, 1984. Gossips are keen to observe that 2024 is also a leap year, a potentially juicy parallel.

But the PM has offered no indication he intends to step away. His government still wields control over the timing of the next election, buoyed by a governing deal with the left-wing New Democratic Party that could put off an election until as late as the fall of 2025.

Trudeau has repeatedly insisted he'll lead his party into a fourth campaign. Only two prime ministers have ever won four in a row. The odds aren't in the Liberals' favor.

Angus Reid Institute polling shows mixed results for the sitting prime minister.

In October, 57 percent of Canadians told the pollster that Trudeau should step down before the next election. His own supporters are split: 44 percent of Liberals say he should stay, 41 percent say he should go.

Several apparent contenders regularly pop up in conversation, including Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Housing Minister Sean Fraser, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Treasury Board President Anita Anand, former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Carney, a rumored Liberal candidate for years, tends to emerge as leadership material when Trudeau's standing at home or abroad takes a dip.

But any serious talk of succession fades quickly in Liberal land.

Shachi Kurl, Angus Reid's president, doesn't see voters coalescing around any of Trudeau's potential successors. Three-quarters of Canadians know "a lot or a little" about Freeland. Only half said the same about Joly, with that proportion dropping to one-third for Champagne, Carney and Anand.

"The Liberals have built an entire party brand around their leader," Kurl says. "Justin Trudeau is the Liberal Party. How do they rebrand in time for the next general election?"

Trudeau recently batted down calls for his resignation from Percy Downe, a restive Canadian senator and former senior adviser to Liberal MP Jean Chrétien. When confronted by reporters, the prime minister dismissed Downe and his musings: "Who's that? Who? Oh, Percy, yeah. How's he doing? Oh, well, I wish him all the best in the work that he's doing."

McLaughlin said Trudeau deserves credit for extinguishing that gossip.

"If you give into it publicly, and say, 'let's have a conversation about this,' then you run an immediate risk of your agenda and your government being completely destabilized," he says. "Resignation becomes inevitable, and then maybe even your government loses."

Downe's rebuke of Trudeau, published in a Hill Times newspaper op-ed, credited the prime minister's role in leading the party to power — but said the party's fiscal hawks misjudged their ability to "educate" the Trudeau crowd on economic management.

"That naiveté was replaced with the realization that they were not a serious government when it came to the economy, that they simply didn’t care and would throw money at anything that crossed their mind," Downe wrote, omitting any mention of broadly popular emergency spending on Covid relief measures. "The resulting interest rate hikes, increasing cost of living, and huge debt didn’t seem to concern them."

Only another centrist, he concluded, can save the next election for the Liberals.

Downe is not a rebel leader bent on replacing Trudeau, nor a senator often in the news. But most major news outlets wrote about his critique, which fueled more speculation, which produced more stories.

Trudeau's apparent downward drag on his own party is all at once a mainstay of political commentary. The Toronto Star recently published a spate of polling data to demonstrate the extent of the problem, quoting Abacus Data CEO David Coletto's stark framing of the stakes:

“After eight years in office, too many people are just finished with him. He’s a big part of the problem and there’s little faith he can get focused on the things they care about.”

That's the kind of quote that powers a rumor mill.

When everybody in town is talking about the prime minister’s future, even uninformed chatter can put staffers on edge. Gossip can become "very debilitating," says McLaughlin, for aides who wonder if they should keep working on projects that may not interest the next leader.

People love to talk at the booze-fueled bars and receptions adjacent to Parliament Hill, where rumors are currency for the chatty mix of politicians, staffers, lobbyists and journalists dining on free poutine and house wine.

Scott Reid, a director of communications to former prime minister Paul Martin who lived through a protracted fight over the Liberal Party leadership in the early 2000s, witnessed years of "Ottawa bubble" chatter.

"At the best of times, Ottawa is crammed to the lid with people soaked thoroughly in cocktails and self-assurance, who insist they know all and they know best," Reid says. "When you're genuinely on the ropes, and the soaked-in-gin crowd is all amped up, it can sometimes be hard to ignore."

But Trudeau's fate is unlikely to be decided by those who fill the booths at the city's modest bar scene.

When the prime minister does decide to step away, Reid says, it'll be because he has problems elsewhere in the country: a sluggish economy, personal unpopularity, and no reasonable prospect of a comeback.

For now, Trudeau's hold on the party is strong. The conventional wisdom is he's earned one more run if he wants it. Trudeau resurrected the brand after a catastrophic defeat in 2011, and many lawmakers — and even his potential successors — still owe him their jobs.

No one is sharpening their knives — at least not in public.

"They are not rivals. They are not alternatives. They are not people who are organizing to usurp," says Reid. "That's just not happening. And it's not gonna happen."