Canada Election 2021: How Trudeau Blew It

 Before the election call, polls indicated that the Trudeau Liberals had a comfy 10 point lead over the main opposition party, the Progressive Conservatives led by the virtually unknown Erin O'Toole. Now, five weeks into the campaign, the PC's have edged into the lead according to Yesterday's Mainstreet poll, while the even righter People's Party has edged ahead of the Greens and all the rest of the also rans.

So again, why? One factor, as we've discussed, must be a widespread assumption that a government calling an election when only halfway through its mandate is either expecting a slump in popularity soon, presumably due to the adverse effects of its profligate and increasingly authoritarian handling of Covid, or because it wants a full four years to accomplish something that will be very unpopular. 

Justin Trudeau in blackface. Source: CBC

But the 1964 US Presidential election between Barry Goldwater and incumbent Lyndon Baynes Johnson suggests another explanation. During that campaign, Senator Goldwater ran on the slogan "In Your Heart You Know He's Right," which prompted a widely resonating riposte: "In Your Heart You Know He's Stupid." That one suspects, is Trudeau's problem. 

But it is a problem compounded by a lack of moral fibre. To put it in the simplest terms, Trudeau is a self-serving corruptionist too stupid to hide his own dishonesty. 

His problem is not just blackface episodes. It is a dozen things: the idiotic dress-up tour of India, the public hankering after Chinese Communist style dictatorship, the multiple breaches of Parliament's ethics code, the crass dismissal of a fine indigenous Attorney General because she would not submit to his inappropriate lobbying on behalf of corrupt SNC Lavelin executives, an action compounded by booting said minister from the Liberal Party caucus, the WEE scandal, and much, much more.

In short, Trudeau has proved to be a poor leadership choice by the Liberals and his performance now has many liberal-identifying Canadians looking elsewhere for leadership. And what they see is that the PC's,  may have the man. 

Erin O'Toole is largely unknown. In appearance he seems normal, and totally average: just your decent, slightly overweight Canadian middle-class family man.  His manner of speech is calm and hardly inspiring, and yet, it turns out, he has all kinds of plans for incremental improvement in the way things are run. 

Thus the outcome of the election seems inevitable. Canadians, among the most cautious people on the face of the planet, will surely opt for the decent, solid, sensible-seeming Mr. O'Toole over the obviously untrustworthy, dishonest and basically idiotic Trudeau, the man who has little if anything going for him other than his undoubted good looks, a famous name and a slavish following of uninspiring liberal MPs.