Lack of time and messy rules could hurt Liberal-National leadership race
Calls have intensified for Justin Trudeau to resign as leader of the party he almost single-handedly pulled back from the brink after a crushing election defeat in 2011.
Despite this, Trudeau remained firm in his intention to lead the party in the next election.
But even if several former Liberal elected officials, party loyalists and strategists say it is time for the Prime Minister to step down for fear of dragging the party down with his personal results in the polls, many also admit that a Running for the leadership of the Liberal Party would be a risky and complicated affair. .
The party has not chosen a new leader since 2013, when the Liberals changed the rules to give ordinary citizens more say over who would take the reins of the party.
This was part of the board’s “road map to renewal” plan to rebuild the party.
The changes allowed a political movement to form behind Trudeau, who won the race easily and reinvigorated the party after a period of crisis.
“I don’t care if you’re a Chrétien Liberal, a Turner Liberal, a Martin Liberal or any other kind of Liberal,” Trudeau told the cheering crowd after he was elected.
“The era of the hyphenated liberals ends here, now, tonight.”
His leadership ushered in a new era of Liberal unity, but conservative strategist Ginny Roth said the party had also been remade in his image.
“The Liberal Party was sort of rebuilt around Trudeau as a sort of cult of personality, and it worked when he was popular,” said Roth, who served as Pierre Poilievre’s communications director during his leadership race.
Now that this is no longer true, the very identity of the party is at stake.
“I think a lot of Liberals are worried about what a leadership race might mean because there’s no real establishment.”
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If Trudeau were to step down before the next election, the party would not only have to find a new leader before the next election, but also redefine what it means to be a Liberal.
“Today, the Liberal Party brand has become synonymous with Justin Trudeau,” said Andrew Perez, a longtime Liberal and strategist at Perez Strategies.
He recently called on Trudeau to resign, but he admits it’s a difficult task with the next election less than a year and a half away. It’s a risk, he said, especially given the rules that brought Trudeau to power.
The aim was to make it easier for people to vote for the Liberal leader by allowing them to join the party as a “supporter”, so they could vote without having to pay for a membership.
In 2016, they went even further by completely eliminating party membership fees.
At the time, the party said it was intended to make the Liberals more “open and accessible.”
But some strategists say it also makes the next leadership race susceptible to inference by special interest groups.
“It is obvious that the system could be exploited in a party leadership race,” Mr. Perez said. He is particularly concerned about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the divisive effect it is having on Canadian politics.
“I am concerned about the role of special interests, which can mobilize around an issue and decide, on the basis of a single issue, who will lead the party.”
While some decisions regarding a leadership race could be made by the party’s board of directors, more significant changes to the party’s membership would require an amendment to the party’s bylaws. This would have to go through a vote of the membership.
Talks are underway to hold a party congress next spring – too late to change the rules in the event of an early leadership race.
The timetable would be strict enough to appoint a new leader before Canadians go to the polls, although several Liberals – including Perez – say the crisis is not insurmountable.
Leadership races typically last at least months. Officially, the leadership race won by Trudeau lasted only five months, but the candidates had been preparing for it for almost two years.
It also took the Conservatives two years to elect a new leader after Stephen Harper resigned after the 2015 election. The race that brought Pierre Poilievre to lead the Conservatives lasted eight months.
All these people had the luxury of time, which is currently rare. The next elections will take place in fifteen months at most. Any elected leader would be propelled into almost immediate elections.
In Ottawa, many have cited former Prime Minister Kim Campbell as a warning. She replaced the highly unpopular Brian Mulroney as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and Prime Minister in June 1993 and served only six months in the role.
She was soundly defeated in the 1993 election and the party was left with just two seats in the House of Commons.
Scott Reid, who worked as former prime minister Paul Martin’s communications director, said people had drawn false conclusions from the story.
“People think Kim Campbell was doomed. She wasn’t,” he said.
Campbell’s poll numbers jumped after her leadership bid, but she simply wasn’t able to sustain people’s imagination once she captured it, he said.
“There’s no precluding the possibility that a quick leadership race could create momentum, attention and energy that could lead you straight to a general election,” Reid said.
It’s the story of Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, when he went from a leadership race to a general election in 1968 and won one of the largest parliamentary majorities in recent history, he said.
Some Liberals have privately speculated that the next leader will likely be no more than a substitute for the real leader, given the Liberals’ current chances of winning the next election.
While there are a host of potential candidates who are quietly organizing themselves to be ready when Trudeau pulls the plug, some of them may choose not to vote this time around, expecting that the next winner will not doesn’t last long.
After Paul Martin’s electoral defeat in 2006, the Liberals had two leaders who only held one election, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff.
The Conservatives did the same after the defeat of Stephen Harper’s government in 2015, with Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole each running only one unsuccessful election campaign.
Ministers Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, François-Philippe Champagne, Anita Anand and Sean Fraser are all in various stages of preparation for a possible leadership race. The same goes for Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada.
None are actively pushing back against Trudeau, and at present no polls suggest there is a candidate who would do much better than him, if any.
Reid said the most important thing for Liberals is to avoid a defeatist mentality.
“A party that says, ‘Let’s organize ourselves on the principle that we will be defeated,’ will be defeated,” he said.
“Go down swinging. »
