Canada’s Tories target Trudeau as they seek seismic shift in political landscape

Canada’s Conservative party will make its first bid to unseat prime minister Justin Trudeau this week, the latest attempt in its decade-long aim of restoring the Tories to power.

Buoyed by favourable polls, a cost of living crisis and an increasingly unpopular prime minister, the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, will introduce a motion of non-confidence in the minority government: a long-shot bid to force the government to call an election.

The move, which lawmakers will debate on Wednesday, is doomed to fail, with smaller parties agreeing to temporarily support the incumbent Liberal party.

But the attack underscores the fragile state of Canada’s governing party and the raw political calculation leaders are making as they jockey for position before the next federal election, which must occur before the fall of 2025.

One polling aggregator has the Conservatives winning a strong majority, relegating all other parties to “also-ran” status. Another has Poilievre’s Tories at 42% support, with the Liberals at 24%.

When Trudeau eked out an electoral victory in 2021, his party was forced into its second consecutive minority government, meaning the Liberals lacked sufficient representation in parliament to pass legislation on their own. In order to implement their agenda, the Liberals were forced to make a “confidence and supply” pact with the leftwing New Democrats (NDP).

But earlier this month, the NDP withdrew from the agreement, saying the Liberals “don’t deserve another chance”. The move cast the country in political uncertainty and reflected a political landscape that has changed dramatically since the agreement was first made.

In his ninth year as prime minister, Trudeau is deeply unpopular and facing calls within his party to step down to avoid a deeply embarrassing electoral loss that could push the party to a distant third-place finish.

“I think you are only here for another year,” a steelworker told Trudeau in a recent exchange that captured the fatigue and frustration many Canadians feel towards the prime minister.

Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, has failed to convert his own political popularity into electoral success and also faces evergreen questions over the relevance of a party whose legislative aims seem indistinguishable from those of the Liberals.

“They don’t want to run to election anytime soon,” said Lori Turnbull, director of Dalhousie University’s school of public administration. “They still have to prove that they got something out of this deal and he needs to show that party has its own agenda, apart from what they’ve done for the Liberals for the past two and a half years.”

Poilievre, the combative Conservative leader, has found immense success in his laser-focused attack on Trudeau’s handling of a protracted cost-of-living crisis.

The chief target of Poilievre’s attacks has been Canada’s nationwide carbon tax, a levy once heralded as a global model that is now all but doomed by national politics.

Poilievre’s attacks on the tax have landed him unlikely allies: Singh recently backed away from the carbon levy, after supporting it for years, incorrectly suggesting the revenue-neutral tax put an unfair burden on “working people’s shoulders”. Economists and political scientists agree that lower-income Canadians come out ahead under the scheme, with nearly 80% of residents receiving more in quarterly payments than they pay in tax. Poilievre has also targeted Singh for propping up a Liberal government which Singh himself has suggested is captive to corporate interests.

“He is a fake, a phony and a fraud. How can anyone ever believe what this sellout NDP leader says in the future?” Poilievre said to Singh during a sitting of parliament last week.

Singh’s withdrawal of support for the Liberals might have harmed his own electoral prospects, but inadvertently benefited another leader: Yves-François Blanchet of the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois.

Blanchet has stepped in to fill the void left by the NDP’s exit from the confidence and supply agreement, but he has been open about the hardheaded political calculus behind the move.

“It’s not [about] supporting the government. It’s [about] not having them fall, soon,” Blanchet told CBC News. “First, I will let this vote instigated by the Conservatives go through. They will lose it, and by the way lose face, and this is what they deserve presently because they are not doing politics in a clean way … I ask for things and if I don’t get it, [the government] will fall. And that’s the end to it.”

The Bloc’s rise, in tandem with the renewed popularity of Quebec’s sovereigntist movement, has also come at a cost for the Liberals.

In a surprise byelection defeat last week, Trudeau’s party lost the riding of LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, a district that had been held almost exclusively by Liberals for more than 50 years. It followed another defeat in June, when the Liberals lost a safe seat in downtown Toronto.

The two losses reflect a souring public opinion of Trudeau’s government: the cost of living has surged alongside a housing shortage and policy failures and mismanagement have eroded strong support for immigration.

Despite such setbacks, Turnbull said that the Liberals were still in a position of comparative strength.

“As much as the Liberals look to be in a very weak position – because of the polling, because of the byelection losses, because ministers are leaving and staffers are leaving – even though it’s a complete mess, they still have a really significant minority in the House of Commons,” she said. “In order for there to be a loss of confidence, all three opposition parties would have to agree. And I don’t think we’re there yet.”