American politics has been radically reformed. Could it happen here? John Delacourt writes:
It was just a few weeks ago that the prospects for progressive governments in North America were trending in a similar downward direction. And perilously so. If there were wake-up calls necessary for just how bad it might be for both President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau, both parties received them at full volume. Biden’s barely coherent June 27 debate performance against an unhinged but resurgent Donald Trump sent the Democrats’ campaign into a tailspin.
As for Trudeau’s Liberals, the results of the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election three days earlier, a loss in what had been a Liberal stronghold, seemed to confirm what the dreadful poll numbers had been signaling for months. In both instances, party faithful were compelled to go through that ritual of ensuring message discipline was strictly observed, and that the most, um, colourful responses to these five-alarm incidents stayed behind closed doors as much as possible.
The Liberals have not responded as the Democrats did:
Nobody within the Liberal party seemed to have thought through what kind of process answer could at least serve to put this brush fire out (one regular outlier from Liberal caucus messaging, Nathan Erskine Smith, offered one by way of a kind of a plebiscite involving all party members, but that went nowhere quickly). The official response in the aftermath of Toronto-St. Paul’s seemed to be something about listening to constituents and disaffected former Liberal voters and then … reflecting. Those were the outputs; outcomes TBD.
It's hard to be the incumbent after COVID:
Incumbency is more than just a stigma; it’s emerged as the fundamental challenge of governments that bear the scars and road miles of the pandemic years. Biden’s fragility only made his presence on the campaign more evocative of those before-times. Trump’s maundering incoherence has served to transfer that dark lockdown mantle onto his padded shoulders. Rishi Sunak could not put up much of a fight against it in the UK; no bold campaign platform or strategic foregrounding of any star players were going to scrub away the brand corrosion the party accumulated, both during and since Johnson’s time as PM.
Liberals can't simply hand the baton off to the Deputy Prime Minister. Breathing new life into the party will be much more complicated.
Image: The Japan Times
10 comments:
The party discipline that defines our system is so different from the American structure that a change in leadership would not likely have much of. an impact here, Owen. If things go as polls seem to indicate, after the next election, Trudeau will be gone and the Liberals can spend time rebuilding their party while they are sitting on the bench.
That's probably what will happen here, Lorne.
Changing a prime minister in the Westminster system is much easier than replacing a US president. Of the four UK Tory PMs since Brexit, only Sunak was voted out of office in a general election. The others were forced out by their own party. Chretien faced the same fate in Canada.
I can only conclude that the Liberal caucus is either blind to the likelihood of a wipeout in the next election or they haven't got a viable replacement.
I suspect they haven't got a replacement, Cap.
i suspect that their is much infighting within the Liberal caucus we don't know about.
Comparing ourselves to the US system is a path to self destruction .
Doing so suggests we could or should change our values!
Our Canadian consumption of US media, and pop culture, will be our downfall!!
TB
We should be eternally grateful, TB, that there is no
Electoral College in our constitution.
I sense that Lil'PP is tolerated rather than embraced, by the CPC folk. (Fewer hard core crazies north of our border.)
If the media and/or the opposition can expose him during the campaign when more people are paying attention, his support (currently based on the CPC brand/desirefor change) could collapse.
And I predict a walk in the snow.
Timing is a big factor.
NPoV
I'm not sure about that walk, PoV.
Well, that sounds a lot like your reply a few weeks back: 'There will be no new nominee PoV'
Touche 😉
I don't see Justin following Joe's example, Touche.
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