Montreal: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party should be a shoo-in for a parliamentary seat at the southern point of the island of Montreal.
The district has been a stronghold for his party for more than half a century. It was home to another Liberal prime minister a generation ago. The base for a former Liberal justice minister. An easy drive to Trudeau’s own redoubt in the city.
And yet, days before a special election Monday to choose the district’s member of Canada’s Parliament, polls show a tight three-way contest. For many lifelong Liberals, the problem is clear: It is Trudeau himself.
“I am a Liberal supporter, but it’s almost like enough is enough,” Michael Altimas, 79, a retired city bus driver, said during a walk on a sunny day along the district’s long pedestrian commercial street. “For the most part, he’s been a good prime minister.
“But he’s had nine years,” Altimas added, “and people are hearing often enough that he messed up and they don’t want to support him anymore.”
The election to fill a vacancy in the district has become a referendum on Trudeau, the once golden boy of Western leaders who is now fighting for his political survival. His own Liberal Party members are increasingly calling for him to step aside, worried that the party risks a drubbing in the next general election under the deeply unpopular leader.
Public grumblings about his leadership grew louder over the summer after his party lost a special election in Toronto in June — in another stronghold — and after President Joe Biden’s decision to step down as the Democratic candidate in the US election suggested a path forward for Canada’s Liberals.
The stunning loss in Toronto has raised the stakes for the election in Montreal. Underscoring Trudeau’s cratering popularity is his near total absence from the local campaign.
His face does not appear on posters in the Liberal campaign office’s storefront windows or on the district’s lampposts. He appeared once to introduce the Liberal candidate, but hasn’t been back since. Other party leaders, by contrast, have been visibly present.
“Right now, Justin Trudeau has no political coattails,” said Nik Nanos, a leading pollster in Canada. “He’s become the lightning rod for the general disaffection directed at the Liberal Party.”
When Trudeau was first elected in 2015, he enjoyed “one of the strongest brands in the polling history of Canada,” Nanos said. But Trudeau’s approval ratings are now stuck just above 20% and trail by double digits those of the main opposition Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre.
For the past year, Poilievre has set the national political agenda through relentless attacks on Trudeau’s handling of issues most concerning to voters, including the economy, housing and immigration. The Liberal government has often reacted to Poilievre’s criticisms with hurried policy tweaks.
Trudeau has vowed to run for a fourth term in the next general election, which must be called by the fall of 2025. But a string of recent developments has amplified the pessimism of Liberals and former allies: the abrupt resignation of the Liberal Party’s campaign director; the labor minister’s resignation and the transportation minister’s public angling for a provincial post; an exodus of senior government employees; and the sudden decision by the New Democratic Party to abandon an agreement to support Trudeau’s party for fear of being tainted by the association.
A loss in Montreal’s special election could embolden internal opposition and further undermine Trudeau’s public image.
The district, called LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, has been redrawn a few times but has been a Liberal fortress since the 1960s. Its traditionally working-class and immigrant residents backed the Liberals, as have newcomers to its gentrifying neighborhoods.
In the last general election in 2021, the Liberal candidate won by 20 percentage points over his closest rival. Today, polls show the Liberals with a slight edge but locked in a tight battle against two opposition parties, the Bloc Québécois, a national party that supports Quebec independence, and the New Democratic Party.
Many voters interviewed on Wellington Street in Verdun — a long pedestrian street filled with restaurants, cafés and neighborhood stores — singled out Trudeau for influencing their decision.
“It’s hard to imagine a world in which Trudeau gets reelected,” said Christopher Gaudreault, 28, a classical pianist, who has voted for Liberals, Greens and New Democrats. “What I’ve been hearing in my circles is that pretty much everyone across the board is fed up with Trudeau for various reasons.
“People are just eager for a change and hope for something better,” he added.
So far, Trudeau has wielded the extraordinary powers conferred on Canada’s political party leaders to quash internal dissent.
Last November, Percy Downe, a senator who served as chief of staff to a former prime minister, became one of the first Liberals to suggest publicly that Trudeau step aside for a fresh face before the next election. Few Liberals followed suit — at least publicly.
Downe, in an interview, explained that most senators — who, under Canada’s Constitution, are appointed rather than elected — have been named by Trudeau. At the same time, the more powerful members of the House of Commons fear questioning Trudeau, who, like all Canadian party leaders, enjoys near total control over individual party members’ electoral prospects.
“You won’t be allowed to run in the next election,” Downe said, pointing out that no candidate can run in a district without the party leader’s endorsement. He called party leaders’ absolute power over their members “a fundamental weakness in our democratic system.”
After the Liberals’ loss in the Toronto race in June, the Canadian news media was filled with anonymous Liberal criticism of Trudeau’s leadership. Only one Liberal member of Parliament — who has announced that he was retiring from politics — openly called on Trudeau to step down. Other Liberal lawmakers called for an emergency national meeting to discuss the party’s future.
Trudeau brushed away those calls.
Royce Koop, a political scientist at the University of Manitoba, said Trudeau had succeeded because time was running out for the Liberals to change leaders before the next election.
“If you’re Trudeau and you’re trying to hang on, delay is a good tactic,” Koop said.
Even though Trudeau has largely stayed away from the LaSalle–Émard–Verdun race, his grip on the party is still evident. Trudeau hand-picked the candidate, a city councilor named Laura Palestini, in mid-July — angering three other Liberal candidates vying for the candidacy.
One of them, Christopher Baenninger, an entrepreneur, said Liberal Party officials had reassured him that the candidate would be elected by members in an open race. He said he had spent five months gathering support, knocking on doors seven days a week.
Among Liberal supporters, he said half were committed “no matter what.” But he said the other half were “tired Liberals, who were, like, ‘Trudeau’s been in power for nine years now. We’re looking for something fresh.’”
The open nomination had made Liberals “feel like their voices are heard,” said another former candidate, Eddy Kara, a Liberal organizer and a filmmaker. But the last-minute decision to close the nomination and parachute in a candidate risks leaving Liberals feeling disenfranchised and “exacerbating people’s negative perceptions” about politics, he added.
Parker Lund, a Liberal Party spokesperson, said in an email that the selection of Palestini was “fully in line with our national nomination rules.” He did not respond to requests to interview a senior party official about the state of the Liberal Party.
At Palestini’s campaign office, campaign manager Marie-Pascale Des Rosiers said the candidate was not granting interviews and declined to let a journalist accompany her while campaigning.
A few doors away, at the New Democrats’ campaign office, the excitement about a possible upset victory was palpable. The party’s leader, Jagmeet Singh, whose own electoral district is in a Vancouver suburb, has visited Montreal about a dozen times to campaign with the party’s local candidate, Craig Sauvé, a city councilor.
The Bloc Québécois, whose candidate is Louis-Philippe Sauvé, has also expressed optimism about winning.
The New Democrats’ candidate, Craig Sauvé, said he was knocking on doors two to three times a day.
“There is a generalized fatigue,” he said, “with regards to the Liberal Party.”