Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes an announcement outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa on Jan. 6.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Everyone who runs for the Liberal leadership faces a conundrum: They have to portray themselves as the future of Canadian liberalism, when their task is really saving the furniture.
Even with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepping aside, it’s hard to imagine that the Liberal Party of Canada’s support will be lifted so high they can beat Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a spring election. The Liberals’ standing in polls suggests they’ll be fighting to save a stronger rump of seats, based mainly in Toronto and Montreal.
Yet moving on from Mr. Trudeau also has to mean moving away from Mr. Trudeau. Voters clearly want change, and you’d expect Liberal members will hope to find the new face of liberalism.
Those are two different things.
Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc is a skilled political communicator in both French and English, and some Liberals think he might be able to save the furniture. But the lifelong friend of Mr. Trudeau and veteran of his cabinet is not the picture of change. Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney might be able to put a new face on the party, but he has zero campaign experience.
In the United States, the post-mortem of Democrats after Vice-President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election has revolved around the idea that the party needed to change more than the candidate. Democrats seem to have concluded that they came off as too woke, too preachy, or too tied up with the institutional status quo – not policy, but approach.
There are plenty of Liberal insiders who feel their party needs a complete post-Trudeau personality makeover, too: to shed the we-know-best, self-righteous attitude that has cast them as out of touch after a decade in power.
That’s not a policy shift, although there are blue Liberals who like to think that the party will benefit if it shifts to the centre and adopts more business-friendly, lower-spending policies.
But there’s about eight weeks for the Liberals to choose a new leader, and perhaps three more till that person is running in a general election campaign. And the real mission they face is averting disaster: winning enough seats to help the party rebuild from opposition.
Right now, the seat projection model used by the Canada338 website predicts the Liberals would win 35 seats – one more than the disastrous 2011 campaign when Michael Ignatieff led the party to a third-place finish. Such projections are very imprecise, but that means the party could do worse, too.
The candidates who might want to play to Liberals hopes for some new and refreshing centrist politics will be talking to a nervous bunch looking for someone to save them from oblivion – someone with political chops who can break with Mr. Trudeau. That divides the field into three: outsiders, cabinet ministers and Chrystia Freeland.
Ms. Freeland has become a more highly touted contender since her shock resignation in December led to Mr. Trudeau’s. But after five years as his deputy prime minister and ever-present spokesperson, she won’t get away from defending Mr. Trudeau’s record now.
All of the current cabinet ministers, especially the higher-profile ones, share some of that baggage. And some have ministerial jobs that clash with campaigning. Mr. LeBlanc was just made Finance Minister and border czar amid U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly would have to ignore the world for two months to campaign across Canada.
Mr. Carney, meanwhile, can break with Mr. Trudeau’s record and campaign as an outsider – despite the Prime Minister’s repeated attempts to recruit him. But the knock that potential rivals put on Mr. Carney is that he hasn’t proven he has political campaign skills and that he’d lead the party to another disaster like Mr. Ignatieff’s campaign.
Former British Columbia premier Christy Clark will run as an outsider, too, and she can also boast that she has been through tough campaigns before – although she headed a more centre-right BC Liberal Party and lost power in the province’s 2017 election.
All those who run can be expected to portray themselves as the Liberals’ best chance of taking power, but it’s far more likely the winner’s prize will be a chance to rebuild the party in opposition.
In the meantime, the real ballot question for the leadership contenders is how much of the party they can save.