Canada’s elections show profound changes in the country’s political class are under way

Canada’s government may not look that different to what it did before the snap election but deep changes to the country’s political class have already begun, writes Justin Ling

Canada’s Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, accompanied by his wife Sophie Gregoire and their children at an election night party in Montreal (Reuters)

In Canada, even the post-election suspense was boring. Last year, American voters watched with bated breath as mailed ballots left several states in play even days after the 3 November election, eventually leading to a failed insurrection on Capitol Hill and an enduring conspiracy theory that the vote was rigged.

This week, Canadians waited patiently while their elections body counted nearly 800,000 ballots sent by mail, delaying the final call for a handful of races well into Thursday.

That clutch of seats wasn’t set to change anything significant about the results from Monday’s national poll. The delayed count confirmed that, despite a bruising, albeit short, campaign, prime minister Justin Trudeau would pick up a single seat in Canada’s 338-seat House of Commons. He would go back to Ottawa with the same minority parliament he had before, forced to do something he doesn’t relish: cooperate with other party leaders to govern.

Canada’s government may not look terribly different from before Trudeau called the snap election in August, two years earlier than scheduled, but deep changes to Canada’s political class have already begun.

Firstly, there’s Trudeau himself. Elected six years ago in a surprise landslide, Trudeau quickly became an international liberal celebrity. With his Liberal Party, he got to work raising taxes on the wealthy, legalising marijuana and taxing carbon emissions despite outcry from Canada’s oil-rich western provinces. With Angela Merkel on the way out, he is now the dean of the G7.

But Trudeau’s reputation at home doesn’t quite match his international bona fides as a progressive darling. In the last campaign, photos emerged of Trudeau in blackface that he has never been able to fully shake. He has stood beside his cabinet ministers, members of Parliament and candidates accused of sexual misconduct. He has pledged nothing more than full reconciliation with Canada’s indigenous peoples but has been met with widespread frustration for the slow progress on that front. More than 60 per cent of the country disapprove of Trudeau.

Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign minister, is viewed as a possible successor to Justin Trudeau (Getty)

The conversation about Trudeau’s departure is increasingly not a question of if he will step down before another election but when. The open question is who will replace him. His right-hand woman, Chrystia Freeland, is a former director at Reuters and deputy editor at the Financial Times, an author and a well-known face at the Davos Economic Forum. One member of Trudeau’s caucus told me recently that she’s not interested in replacing Trudeau. Anyone else from the likely list of successors will be a virtual stranger to the Canadian public, much less the rest of the world.

But Trudeau’s departure will be a slow, well-choreographed affair, if it appears in the near future. His party is not likely to push him out the door.

In the meantime, he still has to get back to the business of governing.

Coalitions are a dirty word in Canada, ever since one of Trudeau’s successors tried to cobble together a government with support of the separatist Bloc Quebecois in 2008 and nearly provoked a constitutional crisis. Having governed in a minority parliament for two years, Trudeau has preferred to horse trade with opposition parties to get his agenda through – threatening to trigger an election where he has to.

Conservative party leader Erin O'Toole (Reuters)

His main competitor, however, may be distracted. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is currently trying to grab on to the furniture to stop himself from being dragged out. O’Toole took the helm of the party only after his predecessor was unceremoniously turfed for failing to oust Trudeau the last time. Now, he finds himself in a familiar spot.

O’Toole ran this race angling to be a moderate. He proposed a plan to put unionised workers on boards – a common British and European idea that is rare in North America. He proposed a plan to alleviate the housing crisis. He has conceded that the war on drugs has failed and that the opioid crisis that has killed at least 23,000 Canadians in the past five years must be solved by public health measures, not police.

But he also promised to re-legalise some assault-style rifles – a pledge he would walk back from mid-way through the campaign. He pledged he would not fight a law in the province of Quebec which forbids public employees from wearing religious symbols. But, perhaps most crucially, he refused to support the idea of a vaccine passport for federal workers and domestic travel. He would not even say how many of his own candidates had received the Covid-19 vaccine.

For centrists, his apparent vaccine scepticism and appeals to the gun lobby were off-putting. For more strident conservatives, it was his push to the middle that was unforgivable. Just days after the votes came in, calls for his removal have already begun.

If O’Toole can beat back coup attempts from within his own party and focus, he’s likely to play hardball with Trudeau in parliament. That means Trudeau is more likely to negotiate with the centre-left New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc.

Jagmeet Singh, of the NDP, is by far the most personally popular leader (AFP/Getty)

The New Democrats leader Jagmeet Singh, far and way the most personally popular national leader, has made fighting inequality and expanding Canada’s Medicare system to pharmaceuticals as his top priorities. But Singh has now come out of his second election having failed to graduate beyond a parliamentary rump of a few dozen seats. Despite his popularity, his bargaining power is, therefore, fairly weak. His leadership is unlikely to survive a third poor showing at the polls.

Both the Bloc Quebecois and ecologist Green Party may soon find themselves leaderless after failing to significantly improve their lot in Parliament. The Bloc improved more than any other party, at just two seats, but fell far below expectations. The Greens, meanwhile, were so beset by party infighting in the lead-up to the election that winning two seats nationally was a small victory.

All told, Canada is sure to see some new leadership in the near future. It’s just not clear who will go first.