If O’Toole is so dangerous, why did Trudeau call election?
The election looms. But with less than two weeks until voting day, it is still not clear what it’s about.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has tried numerous explanations.
First, he said the opposition parties were making it too difficult for his minority government to pass necessary legislation.
However, this explanation didn’t jibe with reality. In most cases, one or more of the opposition parties supported the Liberal minority government. Its throne speech passed the Commons handily, as did its budget.
Trudeau then said that he needed a new mandate from voters. This might be true if the Liberals were planning to do something dramatically different. But they are not. The party’s platform for this election is virtually identical to the one it ran on in 2019.
Trudeau briefly appealed to the virtue of democracy, arguing that elections in general were good things. Fair enough, I guess. But his explanation didn’t speak to the specific question: Why now?
For a while, it seemed that Trudeau was planning to define the election as a faceoff between reason and the forces of anarchy.
He was helped in this by anti-vaccine protesters who disrupted Liberal campaign events, including one in which gravel was hurled at the prime minister.
But the decision by Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole to immediately disavow these protestors robbed them of any political significance, making it more difficult for the Liberals to use them as foils.
There’s also precedent. Hurling things at politicians is not unheard of in Canada. In 2000, one protester famously hit then prime minister Jean Chrétien in the face with a cream pie. Chrétien dealt with the incident by ignoring it.
After a brief feint against the antivaxxers, Trudeau seems prepared to ignore them. Instead, the prime minister is returning to a tried and true strategy: Demonize your opponent.
In paid ads and on the hustings, the Liberals are trying to define O’Toole as right-wing, shifty and untrustworthy.
They have been helped in this by O’Toole himself, who has indeed been shifty in his approach to gun control.
He has also been deliberately vague about medicare, noting that he supports a universal public health-care system but noting also that he supports the right of provincial governments to run this system.
What does O’Toole think of controversial medicare reforms instituted in Alberta by Premier Jason Kenney? Do they run afoul of the Canada Health Act, the federal law governing medicare?
He hasn’t said. But then neither has Trudeau said anything about these specific reforms.
But then that’s the thing about demonization: You don’t have to be specific
— you just have to leave an impression.
The impression the Liberals hope to leave is that if O’Toole wins, Canadian institutions ranging from medicare to old age pensions will be at risk.
The only way to prevent this from happening, the Liberal storyline goes, is to defeat the Conservatives and re-elect a Trudeau government. The message to voters is both clear and weird: O’Toole is a dangerous man who must be stopped. He can’t be allowed to win power.
Yet for some reason, the Liberals are giving him a chance to do exactly that.
If an election at this time is dangerous, why hold one? Trudeau has never satisfactorily answered this question. It remains the central contradiction of the campaign.