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Calls are growing for Justin Trudeau to resign as leader of the Labour Party, which he almost single-handedly pulled back from the brink in the 2011 election.
Despite this, Trudeau remains determined to lead the Labour Party into the next election.
However, while multiple former Liberal poll winners, party loyalists and strategists say it is time for the prime minister to step down because they fear his personal poll numbers are dragging down the Liberal party, many also acknowledge a leadership race would be a dangerous and messy affair.
The Liberals have not chosen a new leader since 2013, when they changed their rules to give ordinary citizens a greater say in choosing who leads the party.
This is part of the board’s “Roadmap to Renewal” plan to rebuild the party.
The changes enabled a political movement to form behind Trudeau, who easily won the election and revitalized the Labour Party after the crisis.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re a Chretien Liberal or a Turner Liberal or a Martin Liberal or any other kind of Liberal,” Trudeau told a cheering crowd after his election.
“The Liberal Party’s era ends here and now, tonight.”
His leadership did usher in a new era of Liberal unity, but Conservative strategist Ginny Ross said the party was also reshaped in his image.
“The Liberal Party was rebuilt around Trudeau, with a bit of a cult of personality, and that worked well when Trudeau was popular,” said Ross, who served as communications director for Pierre Poliev during his leadership campaign.
This is no longer the case, and the essential character of the Communist Party is at stake.
“I think a lot of Liberals are worried about what a leadership contest means because there’s no real establishment.”
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If Trudeau steps down before the next election, the Liberals will not only need to find a new leader before the next election, they will also need to redefine what it means to be a Liberal party.
“Today, the Liberal brand has become synonymous with Justin Trudeau,” said Andrew Perez, a longtime Liberal MP and strategist at Perez Strategy.
He recently called on Trudeau to resign, but he acknowledged that would be a tall order given the next election is less than a year and a half away. He said resigning is a risk, especially under the rules under which Trudeau became leader.
The goal is to make it easier for people to vote for the Liberal leader by getting them to join the party as “supporters,” which allows them to vote without having to pay membership fees.
In 2016, they went even further and abolished membership fees entirely.
At the time, the party said the move was about making the Liberal Party more “open and approachable”.
But some strategists say it also leaves the next leadership race vulnerable to interference by special interests.
“It’s clear that the system can be exploited in a leadership race,” Perez said, focusing specifically on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the divisive impact it has had on Canadian politics.
“I do worry about the role of special interests who can mobilize around an issue and decide who leads the party based on that issue.”
While the party’s board can make some decisions about leadership races, bigger changes about membership would require amending the party constitution, which must be voted on by members.
Currently, there are discussions about holding a party congress next spring – but if the leadership contest is held earlier, it will be too late to change the rules.
The timeline for choosing a new leader before Canadians vote is tough enough, but several Liberals, including Perez, say the time crunch is not insurmountable.
Leadership campaigns usually last at least several months. The one Trudeau won lasted just five months, official data showed, but the candidate had been preparing for it for nearly two years.
It took two years for the Conservatives to choose a new leader after Stephen Harper resigned after the 2015 election. The campaign for Pierre Poilievre to be elected Conservative leader lasted eight months.
All of these people have plenty of time, and time is very short. The next election is at most 15 months away. Any leader who is elected will face an election that will be held almost immediately.
Many in Ottawa point to the example of former Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who replaced the deeply unpopular Brian Mulroney as Progressive Conservative leader and prime minister in June 1993 for just six months.
She suffered a disastrous defeat in the 1993 elections, with the party winning only two seats in the lower house.
Scott Reid, who served as communications director to former Prime Minister Paul Martin, said people were drawing the wrong conclusions from the story.
“People thought Kim Campbell was doomed. But that wasn’t the case,” he said.
He said Campbell’s poll numbers had surged since her leadership bid but she had been unable to sustain people’s imagination.
“Nothing can rule out the possibility that a quick leadership contest could generate significant momentum, attention and energy that carries straight into the general election,” Reid said.
That was the story of Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who went from the leadership race to the general election in 1968 and won one of the largest parliamentary majorities in recent history.
Some Liberals privately believe that given the Liberals’ current chances of winning the next election, the next leader is likely to be just a placeholder for the real leader.
While many potential candidates are quietly organizing themselves in preparation for Trudeau’s exit from the election at any time, some of them may choose to sit out for now, believing that no matter who wins, it won’t last long.
Since Paul Martin’s electoral defeat in 2006, the Liberal Party has gone through two leaders who have governed only once, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
The Conservatives suffered the same fate after Stephen Harper’s government collapsed in 2015, with Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole each lasting just one campaign before failing.
Cabinet ministers Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, François-Philippe Champagne, Anita Anand and Sean Fraser are all in various stages of preparing to run for the leadership. So is former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.
No one is actively trying to sideline Trudeau, and there are currently no polls suggesting any candidate would perform better than him.
Reid said it was most important for the Liberal Party to avoid a defeatist mentality.
“If a party says ‘let’s organize around principles that we are going to lose,’ it will eventually be defeated,” he said.
“Keep swinging.”
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