A by-election loss puts Justin Trudeau on the ropes

Add a political beast to Canada’s endangered species list: Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party. On September 16th the prime minister’s party lost a by-election in his hometown of Montreal, an area that it had represented almost uninterruptedly since the second world war. That was the second supposedly impregnable Liberal fortress to fall in just three months, following the loss of a seat in Toronto in June. The message is unmistakable. Voters are horribly disenchanted with Mr Trudeau and the Liberals. The consequence is less clear: whether Mr Trudeau will resign.

Mr Trudeau himself is the main target of voters’ bile. He has won three successive general-election victories since 2015, but his popularity has been waning for over a year. In part voters have simply grown tired of the longest-serving leader in the G7. But many see him as ignoring their concerns, including over a housing crisis, inflation that exceeded 8% at the tail end of the pandemic, and levels of immigration. Urban constituents who should be strong supporters of the Liberals are telling their MPs that they’ve had enough of the prime minister. “I didn’t hear it from two, three people. I heard it from dozens and dozens of people,” says Alexandra Mendès, a Liberal MP. “He’s no longer the right leader.”

The Liberals are almost certain to lose at the next general election, which must take place by October 2025, though not to Bloc Québécois, the regional separatist party that narrowly won the seat in Montreal. A recent poll suggested just 26% of Canadians would vote for Mr Trudeau compared to 45% of voters who would back his Conservative rival, Pierre Poilievre. (Quebec, home to Montreal, is the only area where the Conservatives do not have a lead in the polls.) Since winning the leadership of his party in 2022, Mr Poilievre has done a good job of appealing to voters by talking about their woes.

The first Liberal by-election loss in June caused some lawmakers, who realise their fate is linked to an unpopular leader, to call for Mr Trudeau to step aside; more may now follow. But Mr Trudeau will be hard to dislodge. Prior to the vote in Montreal he said he would lead his party into a general election whatever the by-election result. Canada’s Liberals are one of the most successful political parties in the Western world. A Liberal prime minister has been in power in Canada for 92 of the past 128 years. But it was Mr Trudeau who single-handedly resuscitated it from irrelevancy a decade ago. Others interested in leading the party, including Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, are loth to openly knife him.

Economic issues are not the only ones bedevilling the Liberal party. It is wracked by bitter divisions over the war in Gaza. They were laid bare during the Montreal by-election, when dozens of campaign workers quit in the middle of the election effort, criticising the prime minister for not condemning Israel strongly enough. A Liberal leadership campaign would almost certainly be dominated by a destructive debate about the conflict in the Middle East. The day after the result Mr Trudeau again vowed to stay on in the job, and to “work harder”. But restless lawmakers stoked by angry voters may soon take the matter out of his hands. ■