Challenging times ahead for Trudeau, Poilievre, and Singh

HALIFAX—After the first week back in Parliament, it is obvious that all three leaders of the national parties have their work cut out for them. The prime minister has the most obvious problem. Justin Trudeau's press these days reads like a savage review of a Broadway flop. Maybe he’s playing rope-a-dope with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, letting him flay away until he succumbs to rage fatigue. Then—and only then—will the PM fire back. If so, it is not a universally popular strategy in the Liberal caucus. It is no fun watching your numbers plummet, but it’s even worse to go down without a fight. Only time will tell if Trudeau is being wily or politically foolish. In the meantime—or should I say, in these mean times—Trudeau is committing one of the cardinal sins of politics: letting his opponent define him. Poilievre isn’t painting a pretty picture. Trudeau has given the country terrible inflation, out-of-reach housing prices, and just isn’t “worth the cost”—a slogan repeated ad nauseum by Poilievre’s backbench bobbleheads. This, of course, is the sequel to “just not ready.” Until last week, Canadians probably never knew how much the Conservatives cared about vegetables. Trudeau is apparently keeping Canadians from eating their veggies because the price of carrots and lettuce has exploded. From now until the next election, Poilievre will try to make it look and sound as though Canada is broken, and that Trudeau broke it. Poilievre’s great advantage by leading the "Party of No" is that it plays into the oceanic sense in the land that things are headed in the wrong direction, and it is time for a change. When that mood sets in with the electorate, it is harder to reverse than Niagara Falls. Never mind that Canada has recently been described as the second-best country in the world to live in, behind Switzerland. Never mind that we continue to have one of the best inflation-fighting records in the G7. Most important of all, never mind that Poilievre, like former U.S. president Donald Trump, says that he can fix all of it. Apart from a flimsy housing policy, he just doesn’t tell Canadians how he would make Canada great again. It is true that Poilievre and the Conservatives have created momentum for the view that Trudeau is beyond his best-before date. Depending on whether the PM can rediscover the fire in his belly to lead the country, that momentum could easily grow. Trailing a hard-right party by 14 points in a country like Canada is nothing to ignore, especially when there is so little time to get it right for the Liberals. But there is also an inherent danger in the Conservative strategy of portraying Canada as going to hell in a handbasket. In politics, it always pays to ask the “what if” question before setting your battle plans in stone. The Conservative Party has obviously not done that. When your entire pitch is based on how bad the country is doing based on the numbers—the cost of housing, fuel, and even carrots—the game plan falls apart if the numbers change. If the next election is two years from now, what does Poilievre do if the Trudeau Liberals manage to bring food costs down by reining in price-gouging in the grocery industry? The Liberals have already read the riot act to that industry's big players, all of whom are aware of what government can do if they get too greedy. None of the big food companies want to face new taxation, nor changes to the Competition Act. The same is true of housing costs. The government has already announced dropping the GST on new rental builds. It is a plan aimed at the middle class, and it could result in significantly lowering housing costs. In other words, if things get better on the very issues the Conservative Party uses to make people feel aggrieved, what does Poilievre do? Applaud? Ignore? Deny? Doesn’t it follow from the Conservatives' own logic that if Trudeau lowers inflation across the board, he has done a good job? If we can all afford to start eating carrots again, isn’t that success by the party's own metric? The set piece in this parliamentary session will be the implacable battle between Trudeau and Poilievre. It will be performance politics rather than a rational exercise. It will be about engineering that clip from Question Period that makes the evening news. Poilievre will use every issue at hand to show that Trudeau should go because he and he alone is responsible for the tough times people are facing. While he’s doing that, Poilievre will be hoping the bad economic news keeps coming, and he'll be on the lookout for a wedge issue that might break the supply-and-confidence agreement between the Liberals and the NDP. A sooner-than-later election greatly increases the Conservatives' chance of winning, and would deprive the Liberals of the time needed to make a credible comeback—assuming they can. While Poilievre trashes him, Trudeau will do his best to persuade Canadians that the issues are far more complicated to fix than Poilievre’s simplistic answers. The Liberals will not only play for time, but they will also use it to blunt the worst of the Conservative attacks. But they can’t fake it. To shift the momentum back their way, they will have to deliver real relief to Canadians where it counts most: their pocket books. In a curious way, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has the hardest political task of all three main party leaders as Parliament gets back to work. On the one hand, the NDP is the only thing standing between a government and prime minister who are currently out of favour from having to go to the polls. Singh’s reward for supporting the Liberal minority government was supposed to be sharing credit for progressive legislation, like the NDP’s successful push for child dental care. But the results of the most recent byelections suggest voters have not rewarded the NDP for compelling the government to do more on social issues. If the NDP were to opt out of the supply agreement and vote with the Conservatives to bring down the government, it would damage the party’s progressive credentials. There would be a very good chance that NDP voters would move to the Liberals to avoid their worst-case political scenario: Poilievre as prime minister of Canada. The two guys in the octagon are going to be getting most of the attention in this session. But Singh bears watching. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times