Dispatch Lite: Have the Liberals crossed the point of no return?
Are we seeing the core of Trudeau's eventual political obituary in the headlines of today? Or do they just need a good barbecue?
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Your Line editors have grown wary of making firm predictions. We’ve been burned a few times before, plus, the last two years have been so wild it’s almost impossible to take seriously any prediction with a time horizon longer than a week or two. All that being said, one of your Line editors did have something of a prediction this week. Honestly maybe something more akin to an intuition or a Spidey sense tingling. But as he watched the news over the last 10 days or so, he found himself wondering: is this it for the Liberals? Is this the start of a death spiral? Is this what we will look back to in years to come as the moment they crossed the point of no return?
The Liberals started to look and feel really burnt out and exhausted this week. Of course they’re burnt out and exhausted. It’s been a hellish two years for everyone, and they were dealing with the Trump circus for years before that. They haven’t usually looked exhausted, though. Even when they have no doubt been running on adrenaline, existential terror, caffeine and digestive bile, they kept running. That's not sustainable forever, though, and sooner or later, a government slips into the terminal phase of democratic politics. We've all seen that before, and we recognize the signs when we see it.
Just think about the stories over the last few days. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino has come in for widespread criticism, and not just from here at The Line, for his handling of the gun control and Emergencies Act files. Chrystia Freeland, for her part, made a wholly uninspiring appearance before the committee investigating the Emergencies Act, and followed that up with a speech to a Toronto business crowd where she rolled out the Liberal plan to help Canadians cope with inflation. It was nothing but a repackaging of previously announced initiatives, some of which are fine on their merits, but none of which, even in total, will make a dent against inflation. Mélanie Joly's office, as noted in greater detail in the full, subscribers-only version of the dispatch, has become a complete clown show of absurdity this week. Karina Gould, normally one of Trudeau’s less trouble-making ministers, had to issue a mea culpa over a minor ethics breach. The Liberals rammed Bill C-11, which would regulate internet content, through the House with unseemly speed, and the Senate is pledging to do the thorough review that the House Liberals clearly wished to avoid.
And then there was the sudden evolution of Liberals’ stand on vaccine mandates, and the pandemic more generally. Facing enormous public pressure over delays at the airports, the Liberals first agreed to "suspend" random COVID-19 testing of passengers landing in Canadian airports from international arrivals. This week, they followed that by suspending the vaccine mandate for air and rail travel. In both cases, the government had been overtly defending both of those measures as absolute necessities just hours or days before scrapping — sorry, "suspending” — them. We won't even try to summarize this better than the National Post's Chris Selley did in a recent column, because we won't do better than his absolute perfection: "By now, the Liberal playbook on untenable pandemic-related policies is clear: They defend each square inch of policy territory like Tony Montana at the top of the staircase until ordered to retreat, at which point they drop their weapons, flee into the night and claim science made them do it."
Yuuuup.
In a political sense, none of these would amount to all that much in isolation. (Some of them should amount to a whole lot, because they’re legitimate issues, but we know how politics works in this country.) When viewed in their totality, though, all these (and more) stories over the last week or two start to look and feel like a government that has basically exhausted itself and run out of gas. When you consider the fact that, if anything, the situation facing the country is getting worse on many fronts — hello, inflation! — not better, it’s not at all difficult to imagine them struggling to ever really recover from this.
We do not make the mistake of underestimating Justin Trudeau‘s political abilities. The federal Conservatives have never been able to look beyond their personal dislike of the man and recognize his formidable talent. Justin Trudeau is a very, very good politician. The Liberal Party of Canada is very, very good at politics. Never count these guys out. We aren't, and won't. They'll fight every election ferociously.
Again, it’s very possible they all just need a break. If the government can drag its carcass across the finish line and make it to the summer, everyone will go home for a bit, see their spouses and children, rest up, hit the barbecue circuit for a while, and come back in the fall recharged. The media will soon shrink to a complete skeleton staff as the dozen or so remaining journalists in this country all try to rotate off onto holidays of their own. So the scrutiny the Liberals are under will tank epically in the next week or so. This will give them time. Maybe that's all they need. It’s possible.
But it’s also possible that the whiff of death will grow into a ranker stench. Again, we make no predictions. Life is way too weird these days to invest much of our credibility, such as it is, in doing that. But we can’t help but wonder as we watch the news of late whether, two or three years from now, if the Liberals are defeated, some of the reporters writing their analyses and columnists writing the political obituaries won’t reflect back on June 2022 as being the moment that things tipped over, and the long, slow glide into the side of the mountain began.
Oh, and one note in closing: the smartest thing this government could do to save itself would be to admit its errors (if only to itself), and do a major reset of both its priorities and its personnel. But these guys are either unwilling or unable to admit when they're wrong and course correct to compensate. Their faith in their own rightness and wisdom is unshakeable. So it's not that we think they have to lose next time. We just doubt their ability to save themselves.
ROUND UP:
Alright! Like we said, a lot going on. Lots more in the full dispatch! Thanks for reading, as always, and have a wonderful weekend. We’re planning on keeping up a normal schedule until Canada Day, and then taking a break, so we’ll see you on Monday, as per usual. If you haven’t joined us, and think maybe we’ve earned it, click below to help us hold the line.
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