In the summer of 1978, against his top political strategist’s advice, Pierre Trudeau called a full slate of byelections to fill 15 vacancies in the House of Commons, including seven seats the Liberals had won in the previous election.
As recounted in John English’s Just Watch Me, the Liberal Party’s own pollster said the governing party’s chances “ranged from slim to dreadful.” And when the results came back on the night of Oct. 16, the Liberals had retained just one of those seven seats, having surrendered the other six to Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives.
Obviously, this did not bode well for Liberal fortunes in a federal election that was by then less than a year away. But Pierre Trudeau insisted he was unbowed.
“I’m not going to be crushed by a few byelections,” he said. “I’d rather wait and see what happens when we fight a general election.”
Comparisons between father and son are a bit too easy to make, but the example of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals in 1978 offers at least one reference point for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2024.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says ‘there’s more work to do’ following the Liberal candidate’s loss in the Montreal riding of LaSalle–Émard–Verdun on Monday. Trudeau says the Liberals need voters ‘to understand what’s at stake in this upcoming election.’
“Obviously it would’ve been nicer to be able to win and hold [LaSalle-Émard-Verdun], but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it,” Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday morning, striking a somewhat more humble note than his father did (even if the younger Trudeau seems no less defiant at his core).
The difference between winning and losing in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was a mere 248 votes. But the fact the Liberals lost the riding — as opposed to narrowly winning it — is less important than the fact that it was close. Two years ago, the Liberal margin of victory in the riding was nearly 10,000 votes.
One can hang any number of caveats on any specific byelection result — turnout is always low, relatively little is at stake and a single data point can tell us only so much about an electoral map that now includes 343 ridings.
But there are very few general election scenarios for the Liberals that don’t include them winning ridings like LaSalle-Émard-Verdun by a decent margin. The same could be said of Toronto-St. Paul’s, where the Liberals lost by 633 votes in June.
The party’s loss of two ridings that previously could be described as “strongholds” only clarifies just how much work Trudeau’s Liberals have to do between now and the next federal election if they want to retain power — or merely to avoid being wiped out by a massive Conservative majority.
Is Trudeau still the Liberal Party’s best option?
Questions predictably — and understandably — will focus on the prime minister’s future. Is Trudeau still somehow the Liberal Party’s best option? A great many people have an opinion on that question, but the only opinions that matter at the moment are in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Liberal caucus.
A Trudeau supporter might say that the most important data to come out on Tuesday was not the Liberal candidate’s final vote tally in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, but Statistics Canada’s finding that inflation has fallen back to two per cent.
Inflation returning to the Bank of Canada’s target rate does not magically solve all the Trudeau government’s problems. But the latest data might give the Liberals further reason to believe voters could be in a more charitable mood by the time a general election occurs.
And the more inflation recedes into the past, the easier it could be for Trudeau to convince voters that — unlike in recent byelections — the next election involves a meaningful choice with big things at stake.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller says he takes the Liberal candidate’s loss in the Montreal riding of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun ‘quite personally.’ Minister of Innovation François-Philippe Champagne says the Liberals need to now ‘redouble efforts.’ Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly says the governing Liberals ‘need to do more to address the question of affordability.’
“The big thing is to make sure that Canadians understand that the choice they get to make in the next election, about the kind of country we are, really matters,” Trudeau said Tuesday when asked what the Liberals need to do now.
But the results in Toronto-St. Paul’s and LaSalle-Émard-Verdun raise obvious questions about Trudeau’s ability to make and win that argument. Is it simply the case that too many voters are now too tired of Trudeau? If so, would the Liberals be better off with someone else as leader?
For the party, either option is a gamble — one in which it has a lot at stake.
In 1978, John Turner was waiting in the wings (having left the government in 1975, he was working as a corporate lawyer on Bay Street in Toronto). But Pierre Trudeau stayed on and led the Liberal Party into a federal election in the spring of 1979. Trudeau still had the advantage of higher personal ratings than Progressive Conservative Leader Joe Clark.
The Liberals actually managed to win the popular vote. But as the byelections seemed to foretell, the Liberals were reduced to 114 seats and Clark’s PCs formed government. Crucially, though, the PCs fell short of winning a majority of seats in the House of Commons.
Before the year was out, the Clark government had fallen on a budget vote. By February 1980, Pierre Trudeau was prime minister again.
No strategist could possibly draw up a plan to pull off the same sequence of events now, nor would they be well-advised to try. If there’s any lesson to be taken from the 1978 byelections and everything that followed, it’s that the future can be unpredictable.
