Weekly Writ 1/8: Election countdown begins
Justin Trudeau's resignation kicks off four months of intense political jockeying.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Wednesday morning.
Strap yourselves in.
When Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, he kicked off a chain reaction of events that should give us littel respite straight through to May.
First, there will be a leadership race — the first time there has been such a contest to pick a prime minister in over 20 years. We don’t yet know the rules of this race, but with Parliament prorogued until March 24 it seems likely that the next leader of the party will be selected at some point in the first half of March.
With such a short timeline, that means the leadership contest has, for all intents and purposes, already begun. Potential contenders need to start putting together a team (if they haven’t already) and get their organization in order, as the sprint could be extraordinarily short.
It’s unclear exactly what leeway the Liberals’ national board has to re-write some of the leadership rules, but the party’s constitution stipulates that to be eligible to vote members have to be “registered Liberals” for 41 days before the leadership vote is held. That doesn’t leave much time to sign new members up, as holding the leadership vote as late as the day before Parliament returns would require new members to be signed up by February 10. Assuming the Liberals want to give the new prime minister at least a couple of weeks to get their affairs in order before presenting a throne speech, that puts the cut-off day to somewhere in late January — roughly two or three weeks from now.
Considering the (very legitimate) concerns about foreign interference in party leadership races, perhaps a short window for new sign-ups is not a bad thing. But it does mean that prospective candidates for the leadership will have to make up their minds fast so that they can hit the ground running.
That list is already growing by the day, and includes about a dozen current or former cabinet ministers and a few outsiders like Christy Clark and Mark Carney. As is usually the case, not all of them will run, some unknown long-shots will throw their hats in the ring and the final ballot could turn out to be rather short. Much will depend on the rules of the contest, including the entry fee and the timeline. But it appears the Liberals will use the same system that elected Justin Trudeau back in 2013, with each riding across the country weighted equally regardless of how many members that riding has. This means having regional bases of support as well as a robust organization to fill in the gaps in the rest of the country will be important factors for any serious contender.
Once the leadership is done and dusted, we will then enter a second phase as parties begin their pre-electoral jockeying. The new prime minister might not bother waiting for the return of Parliament before dropping the writ, but they would probably be better off draping themselves in the trappings of power for as long as possible. And, though the prospects look dim, they might use the time before March 24 to try to broker a deal with one of the other parties to keep themselves in office for a few more months — though why either the Bloc or the NDP would take the bait and go back on their word is beyond me. There’s not much difference between a May and October election.
And May is when the election is almost certainly going to take place.
Whether it be on the speech from the throne, a supply bill or an opposition motion of non-confidence, the new prime minister will face a vote in the House of Commons during the week of March 24 that would defeat the government if the three main opposition parties stick to their current pledge to bring the government down. Elections must be held on Mondays and have to last between 36 and 50 days, so a writ drop at some point during the week of the 24th will force an election to be held on either May 5 or May 12. The choice of either of those two dates will come down to the prime minister — does he or she want the longest election campaign that is legally allowed, or the shortest one?
(One other note on the calendar: a federal byelection has to be called by March 2 to fill the vacancy in the riding of Halifax. Unless Trudeau decides to call it earlier than that, it is likely that the byelection call will be superseded by the federal election. That means the byelection campaign could officially begin on or before March 2 and merely get folded into the federal campaign once that begins.)
And, of course, there is still the possibility that Ontario Premier Doug Ford will try to squeeze in an early provincial campaign before the writ drops federally. He had ample opportunity to rule out an early election in a press conference on Monday. Asked multiple times, he pivoted to the issue of U.S. tariffs. He could’ve said it’s not the time for an election, but he didn’t. It’s very likely we could find ourselves in a federal campaign mere weeks after Ontarians have voted provincially.
So, that’s what the next four months have in store — and it is going to be intense. If you haven’t already, now would be a good time to subscribe to The Writ!
I plan to keep a close eye on whatever data will be available for the Liberal leadership race and will bring together a panel of Liberal insiders for some periodic discussions on The Writ Podcast. I’ll also be keeping the seat projections behind the Poll Tracker updated for subscribers. (I might also do the same for the Ontario election, if it takes place.) Once the federal writ drops, The Writ will move to a daily format. I’ve got some big plans!
It’ll be a hectic few months — but they will be important ones. Not to be overly dramatic, but history is being written! I’ll do my best with the first draft.
One more thing! Before moving on to the rest of the week’s newsletter, let me remind subscribers you still have until January 16 to get your predictions in for the 2025 Prediction Contest! The winner gets a free year-long subscription to The Writ for themselves and a lucky friend. Get your predictions in here.
Now, to what is in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
News of another MP not running for re-election, Naheed Nenshi’s bid for a seat and the resignation of a minor party leader in Saskatchewan. Plus, how do Trudeau’s election results rank among past Liberal leaders?
What happened in the polls after Chrystia Freeland resigned and what we’ve seen so far post-Trudeau resignation. Plus, what to make of leadership race polling.
Who would win if provincial elections were held today.
The Alberta Liberals pick a new leader in the #EveryElectionProject.
Upcoming milestone for Jagmeet Singh.
IN THE NEWS
How Trudeau stacks up to past leaders
It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of politics and move quickly on from Trudeau’s resignation to what comes next. But we should take a moment to put Trudeau’s leadership into some context.
The debate over Trudeau’s legacy as prime minister will undoubtedly be waged over the next years and decades to come. Our views of the tenures of past prime ministers are still shifting as the country changes. The way Brian Mulroney’s legacy was discussed when he passed away last year bore little resemblance to how he was viewed when he resigned in 1993. John A. Macdonald’s legacy is viewed today very differently from how it was only a few years ago, let alone 130 years ago.
The same will happen with Trudeau. Will he be remembered for reducing child poverty, legalizing marijuana, bringing in a childcare and dental care program and leading the country through the first Trump presidency and the COVID pandemic? Or will he be remembered for the country’s soaring deficit, the cost-of-living and housing affordability crises, the various controversies and scandals from his time in office and how it all ended for him?
As devoid of insight as it might be, we really can’t say much more than “time will tell”.
But, we do have electoral performances by which to grade Trudeau’s time as leader of the Liberal Party. And, by that measure, Trudeau stacks up pretty well against his predecessors.
Below are the average seat share and vote share performances of each Liberal leader in the elections in which they led the party. Because of incomplete data, I’ve left it to seat share only for Alexander Mackenzie and Edward Blake.
Trudeau is only one of two Liberal leaders to never lose an election, the other being Jean Chrétien. Though, of course, Trudeau was very likely to lose the next election, which Chrétien wasn’t when he resigned in 2003.
But since he never lost an election, Trudeau’s average seat share of 49% puts him behind only Chrétien, Louis St-Laurent, Mackenzie King and Wilfrid Laurier and ties him with his father, Pierre Trudeau. Not bad company to keep. His one majority and two minority governments put him above Lester Pearson, who lost two elections and never won a majority but nevertheless tends to be remembered fondly as one of our more impactful prime ministers.
Trudeau’s average 35% share of the vote is less impressive. Pearson managed 38%, while Laurier, King, St-Laurent, Pierre Trudeau and Chrétien all averaged more than 40% of the vote in their elections.
Altogether, Trudeau ranks about sixth in the Pantheon of Liberal leaders, putting him roughly in the middle. By length of service, Trudeau will finish fifth all-time among Liberals behind Laurier, King, Pierre Trudeau and Chrétien, while he’ll be seventh on the all-time list of longest serving prime ministers, behind those four as well as John A. Macdonald and Stephen Harper (he needed to stay on until August to beat Harper).
His crowning electoral achievement was his majority government in 2015, when he led the party to 184 seats and 39.5% of the vote. He had taken the party from near oblivion after the 2011 debacle back to Chrétien-era levels of support, proving wrong (or, at least, premature) the predictions of the end of the Liberal Party.
And his victory in 2015 was broad-based. The Liberals swept Atlantic Canada, won a majority of Quebec’s seats for the first time since 1980 and was the party that won the most seats in British Columbia for the first time since 1968. Even the 12 seats the Liberals won in the three Prairie provinces was a high-watermark last surpassed in 1993.
Many of those gains were whittled away in the 2019 and 2021 elections, as the Liberals were largely driven back to their traditional strongholds. They are likely to be driven back even further in the next campaign. It’ll take another few elections before we can really put the 2015 election into proper context — maybe they’ll never do so well again, maybe they will do just as well when the ebb and flow of Canada’s electoral cycle puts the Liberals back in favour. But, at a time when the obituaries of the Liberal Party were being written, Trudeau showed that the Liberals could still be a force to be reckoned with. The scale of that achievement will be coloured by what comes next for the party, but it is a feather in his otherwise dishevelled cap.
ELECTION NEWS BRIEFS
Marco Mendocino announced over the last week that he will not be running for re-election in 2025. The Conservatives are projected to win his riding of Eglinton–Lawrence by a margin of 24 points in my seat projections, so he would have had a tough time winning again had he decided to run. Presumably, Trudeau will also not be running for re-election in Papineau, which could open it up for the NDP. With Trudeau’s leader bonus still in the model, he is projected to win it by just 11 points. He won it by 28 points in 2021.
More certain are Naheed Nenshi’s chances of winning in Edmonton-Strathcona. The Alberta NDP leader announced he will run to fill the seat’s vacancy left by former leader Rachel Notley’s resignation. Notley took 79.7% of the vote in the riding in the 2023 election, making it the safest NDP seat in all of Alberta.
After he led the Saskatchewan United Party to 3.9% of the vote in the October provincial election, Jon Hromek has announced his resignation as leader of the upstart right-wing party. The SUP did not come close to winning any seats in the election, though their share of the vote was the most for any third party since the Saskatchewan Liberals took 9.4% of ballots cast in 2007.
THIS WEEK’S POLLS
Freeland’s resignation hurt the Liberals. Will Trudeau’s resignation help?
There were a flurry of polls conducted in the aftermath of Chrystia Freeland’s resignation as finance minister on December 16. They all showed that the Liberals had taken a hit, largely to the benefit of the Conservatives. Here are all the polls that were conducted entirely after Freeland’s resignation but before Trudeau’s.
This is a range of 43% to 47% for the Conservatives, pushing them to their highest-ever level in the Poll Tracker. The Liberal range of 16% to 21% pushes them to their lowest. These six pollsters showed an average loss of 3.2 points for the Liberals compared to when they were last in the field, with the Conservatives showing an average gain of 1.7 points. The NDP showed a small drop of half a point, another indication of how the New Democrats have been unsuccessful in taking advantage of the Liberals’ slide.
The seat projection now puts the Conservatives on 227 seats, with the Liberals and Bloc Québécois vying for official opposition status at 44 and 41 seats, respectively. The NDP is in third with 29 seats. You can see by the range of likely outcomes below that there is a lot of overlap between the Liberals, Bloc and even the NDP for that second place in the seat count.
Freeland’s resignation in December was the catalyst for Trudeau’s resignation this week, but the further deterioration of the Liberals’ polling numbers showed there was no coming back for Justin Trudeau.
But could the Liberals come back without him?
More data will be forthcoming soon, but Pallas Data was first out of the gate on Tuesday morning with a poll conducted in the hours following Trudeau’s resignation. The early indications are that the Liberals might have gotten a bump from Trudeau’s departure, as Pallas put the party at 25%, 17 points behind the Conservatives. While the movement isn’t huge, that is a five-point reduction in the gap between the two parties since Pallas was last in the field in October. Wide as it is, 17 points is also the smallest gap we’ve seen from any pollster since the end of November.
If other polls confirm this small bump for the Liberals, it would suggest not only that Trudeau was part of the problem but also that the Liberal Party is still carrying a lot of the prime minister’s baggage. The difference between a 22-point Conservative lead and a 17-point Conservative lead might be academic from Pierre Poilievre’s perspective — both are guaranteed landslide majorities — but it does make a Bloc or NDP official opposition more unlikely. The Liberals finishing with a more respectable 25% of the vote and 55 to 75 seats gives the party (and Trudeau’s successor) a better chance of survival than would a fall to third or fourth place.
Freeland the early “front-runner”, but it’s mostly name recognition
With another leadership race in the offing, it’s time to remind everyone that polls of the general population are not necessarily reflective of the views of the people who will decide the leadership contest: party members.
Sometimes there is a relationship between the two, of course. Party members don’t live in a vacuum, aren’t entirely different from the population at large and generally choose a candidate that is the most “electable”, something that is revealed by public opinion polling. But leadership polling of the general population just shows us what Canadians as a whole believe, not what the outcome of the race will be.
And, this early in the contest, they are largely just a reflection of who people have heard of.
In a post this week on his Substack, David Coletto of Abacus Data dug up a poll he conducted in July 2024 asking Canadians whether they had heard of various political figures, prompted only by their photo. The results were stark: four out of five Canadians didn’t recognize Mélanie Joly or Anita Anand, while more than nine out of every 10 Canadians polled didn’t recognize Mark Carney, Sean Fraser or Dominic LeBlanc.
Freeland, with 39% recognition, polled the best. But that still meant a majority of Canadians couldn’t name the then-finance minister and deputy prime minister.
Some of those numbers might have changed a little, but probably not much. Polling that asks for opinions on various figures usually inflate name recognition, in part because people are happy to express opinions on politicians they barely know (and poll-takers in general tend to be more politically-engaged than the general population). Nevertheless, the Angus Reid Institute found that 36% of Canadians either said they didn’t know who Mark Carney is or that they didn’t have an opinion on how he would impact their vote if he became Liberal leader. The tally was 29% for Joly, 37% for LeBlanc and 40% for Anand. It was only 20% for Freeland.
So, it comes as little surprise that Freeland polled the best when she was substituted in as Liberal leader. While the Liberals were behind by 26 points (before the exclusion of undecideds) under Trudeau in the ARI’s most-recent poll, Freeland closed the gap to 15 points. It was 22 points with Carney at the helm.
While a bit of this might be because people prefer Freeland to Trudeau, a lot of it is probably that Freeland is not Trudeau, and she is the most recognized of his potential replacements. Similar polling from Nanos Research, Spark Advocacy and Léger that puts Freeland ahead of her rivals is also coloured by her greater name recognition.
Now, that’s not a bad thing — on paper, Freeland is more electable if she is the more recognized and appreciated candidate in the field. And her recent actions have likely improved her image, as Léger found a big uptick in Freeland’s support on preferred successor to Trudeau since it last polled on the question in September. But the fact of the matter is that, even when it comes to Freeland, Canadians’ views are not very well formed. And their views on most of the prospective candidates are nearly non-existent. A lot will change once the actual contestants come forward and become better known by the population at large.
IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY
I am running the CBC’s Poll Tracker with the seat projection and poll aggregation model that I’ve developed over the last four federal elections (and multiple provincial campaigns in between). You can check out the Poll Tracker here. For this election, I am making the seat-by-seat projections available to subscribers here.
There have been no provincial polls published since before the holidays, so the provincial projections have not changed.
They point to re-elected majority governments for Doug Ford in Ontario, Wab Kinew in Manitoba, Andrew Furey in Newfoundland and Labrador and Dennis King in P.E.I., while Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon and the Parti Québécois would likely oust François Legault from the premier’s office in Quebec. Alberta looks like a toss-up. There have been no polls published out of New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia or British Columbia since the fall elections.
The seat estimates for provincial legislatures are derived from a swing model that is based on trends in recent polls as well as minor tweaks and adjustments. Changes are compared to last week. Parties are ordered according to their finish in the previous election (with some exceptions for minor parties)
UPCOMING BYELECTIONS
Yet to be scheduled
QC - Terrebonne (to call by March)
CA - Halifax (to call by March 2)
AB - Edmonton-Strathcona (to call by end of June)
(ALMOST) ON THIS DAY in the #EveryElectionProject
Small-town mayor becomes Alberta Liberal leader
January 14, 1962
This was originally published on Jan. 11, 2023.
It’s been a long, long time since being an Alberta Liberal was easy.
The struggles of the Alberta Liberal Party are not just a recent phenomenon — and the blame can’t all be laid at the feet of one Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Take the 1959 Alberta election, for instance. In that vote, Ernest Manning’s Social Credit captured 61 of 65 seats on offer. The Liberals, then under Grant MacEwen, managed just 14% and a single seat. It wasn’t MacEwen’s.
So, the job of being the leader of the Alberta Liberal Party became vacant. And it stayed that way for more than two years.
By 1962, the Liberals decided it was time to fill that vacancy. The names of a few promising candidates were bandied about, but in the end it came down to just two.
One was Bryce Stringam, a former MLA who was elected as an Independent in 1955 and served for one term in the legislature.
The other was Dave Hunter. The mayor of the small northern community of Athabasca, Hunter was serving as president of the Union of Alberta Municipalities and was the odds-on favourite to win.
About 500 delegates gathered in Calgary in January 1962 for the convention, an event that was enlivened by a fiery performance by Ross Thatcher, leader of the Saskatchewan Liberals. Though himself only an opposition leader in Regina, he had reinvigorated the Liberal Party there and would eventually end the CCF’s long run of power in 1964.
For now, though, Thatcher’s job was to rally the Liberal troops in this neighbouring province. And it wasn’t his first time — in the previous fall, he had spoken at a rally in Edmonton where he “apparently inspired some members of the Alberta [Liberal] executive to the point where they were all set to go out and fight. Unfortunately,” wrote Andrew Snaddon, the Globe and Mail’s correspondent in Calgary, “they don’t seem to know what they are fighting about.”
The Liberals recognized that they were unlikely to defeat Social Credit. The party had governed Alberta for more than a quarter century and Manning looked (and, as it turned out, was) unbeatable. But the Liberals had more hope at the federal level, believing that John Diefenbaker’s unpopular Progressive Conservative government was vulnerable. The PCs had swept all of Alberta’s seats in Diefenbaker’s 1958 landslide, but both the Liberals and Socreds believed they could win a few federal seats back in the upcoming vote.
That test was in the future, though. In January 1962, the Liberals had to choose their local standard-bearer to give the brand some new energy. And they chose Hunter by a substantial (unreported) margin.
Snaddon thought Hunter had potential.
“Athabasca is in the northern part of the province,” he wrote, “good Liberal ground in days past. He also has an advantage in rural-dominated Alberta in that he does not come from Calgary or Edmonton, for city interests are conflicting with rural ones.”
However, the Liberals faced an uphill climb.
“Mr. Hunter is not a spectacular orator, nor is he likely to be an inspirational leader,” Snaddon opined. “But he is said to be a determined man and a hard worker.”
The Liberals failed in their first test in the 1962 federal election. While Diefenbaker’s PCs were reduced to a minority, they only lost two seats in Alberta — both to Social Credit.
In the next provincial election in 1963, Hunter would have only limited success. The Socreds won 60 of 63 seats and 55% of the vote, leaving the Liberals with just 20% support and two seats — neither of them Hunter’s.
His leadership would come to an end in 1964 when Hunter failed to win a seat in a byelection.
But Hunter’s short-lived leadership did get the Liberals back their official opposition status, even if it was with just two seats. It wouldn’t last for very long, however, and it would be another 30 years before the Liberals would be awarded that role again.
MILESTONE WATCH
On Monday, Jagmeet Singh will surpass Alexa McDonough as the fourth longest-serving leader of the federal New Democrats. McDonough was in the post from 1995 to 2003, and led the NDP into the 1997 and 2000 elections. Only Tommy Douglas, Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton led the NDP longer than Singh has.
That’s it for the Weekly Writ this week. The next episode of The Numbers will be dropping on Thursday. The episode will land in your inbox on Friday but you can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps. If you want to get access to the weekly mailbag and other special episodes, become a Patron here!
The Liberals have three months! Will they waste it or use it well?