Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could have called an election any day up until Sept. 15, the deadline under Canada’s 12-year-old fixed-date election law. He decided Sept. 10 to make the announcement on Sept. 11, and the timing proved particularly poor, and not just because 24 Canadians died on the terrorist attacks that day 18 years ago. Most of the front page of the national Globe and Mail newspaper Wednesday was taken up by a scoop that the prime minister was stonewalling the investigation into the biggest scandal of his four-year tenure.
“I would say it’s very encouraging to see the election kick-off accompanied by a front-page Globe story about the RCMP investigating the prime minister for obstruction of justice in the SNC-Lavalin scandal,” a grizzled Conservative Party veteran of federal and provincial politics told the Washington Examiner.
“We’ve done a lot together these past four years, but the truth is, we’re just getting started,” Trudeau, the 47-year-old son of late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, said Wednesday in Ottawa as he announced the federal election will take place Oct. 21. His Liberal Party’s slogan for the 40-day campaign is “Choose Forward,” and it seems the prime minister would prefer Canadians look ahead than examine the recent past, which saw two cabinet ministers resigning over Trudeau’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair.
The Parliament’s ethics commissioner found earlier this year that Trudeau improperly directed his justice minister to intervene and seek a deferred prosecution agreement for Quebec construction company SNC-Lavalin to save jobs in the province. The firm had been charged with bribing officials in Libya, including in the government of dictator Moammar Gadhafi, for construction contracts between 2001 and 2011.
The Globe and Mail reported Wednesday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been hampered in their investigation into whether Trudeau committed obstruction of justice by the government’s refusal to waive cabinet confidentiality for all witnesses. Trudeau deflected questions on the stonewalling at his campaign launch, saying only that his job was to protect Canadian jobs. He was asked twice what mistakes he thinks he’s made in handling the affair but remained silent both times.
“He has lost the moral authority to govern. What today shows is you just cannot trust Justin Trudeau,” Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer declared. He pointedly made the decision to kick off his campaign in Quebec.
But Trudeau didn’t mention Scheer Wednesday, though polls show their two parties neck and neck.
“How do you respond to millennials disappointed you promised to be different but turned out to be just like any politician?” a young reporter from HuffPost asked Trudeau, who responded, “Millennials see that we’ve transformed the country in four years.”
Trudeau, in fact, seemed to be running the same campaign he did four years ago, when he defeated incumbent prime minister and Conservative leader Stephen Harper and was declared “Canada’s hope” by gushing journalists around the world. He mentioned Harper’s name multiple times in his launch, saying Canada was a mess in 2015 “thanks to a Conservative government that believed cuts and austerity were the answer to everything.”
“This is one of the worst campaign launches I’ve ever seen,” tweeted former Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella. “It’s a main-message-free zone. They sent @JustinTrudeau out there without something to say. Incredible.”
A contender in the Conservative leadership race in 2017, which Scheer won, told this reporter off the record that big names, such as former Foreign Minister John Baird and former Finance Minister Joe Oliver, didn’t run because they didn’t think Trudeau was beatable. They might be kicking themselves now.
“The Liberals are slightly ahead in most recent polls but I think the general feeling in the pundit class is that any outcome, including a Conservative majority more or less like Harper’s in 2011, is possible,” National Post columnist Colby Cosh told the Washington Examiner. “Like any election this one will be a referendum on the incumbent, a touchy-feely moralizer who has proven enormously cynical on SNC-Lavalin and other files. (Remember, when Trudeau was found to have transgressed federal ethics law in pressuring the Attorney-General over SNC, this was his second such violation; his vacation gift from the Aga Khan was the first one.)”
The ethics commissioner ruled in 2017 that Trudeau broke four sections of the Conflict of Interest Act when he accepted a family vacation in the Bahamas on a private island during Christmas 2016 from the Aga Khan, a billionaire business magnate.
And Trudeau hasn’t just broken ethics rules; he’s broken campaign promises.
“An important question is whether Trudeau’s brutally violated promise to deliver electoral reform will come back to haunt him. He is also ducking out on some television debates, again in a somewhat cynical way,” Cosh notes.
Trudeau vowed during the 2015 campaign that if he won, it would be “the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.” Two years later, he said he’d decided that proportional representation would be too divisive.
It might be to avoid answering questions about such broken promises that Trudeau has refused to appear in all the debates to which Canada’s other party leaders have committed.
The Conservative Party veteran, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed anything could happen in October: “At this point, it looks like a toss-up.”
“If the Conservatives succeed in persuading enough voters in swing ridings in the 905 that Trudeau is a lying, cynical, privileged bully who is either too arrogant or too dumb to recognize that he’s not above the law, Scheer will win,” he said, using the area code for the Toronto suburbs. “If that narrative doesn’t get enough traction and instead the Libs manage to demonize Scheer as a racist, sexist, homophobic, climate change denier, they win.”
He pointed out that the changeable Canadian fall might have an effect, too.
“Conservatives should pray for calm weather during the campaign so Liberal-NDP-Green climate fearmongering doesn’t trump their demonization of the carbon tax,” he said.
The Green Party has been facing questions not about its environmental platform but its candidates’ views of Quebec separatism, often a factor in who wins seats in the population-heavy province. Responding to a reporter’s question on the latter, Green leader Elizabeth May said Wednesday that “first and foremost we are Earthlings.”
