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Back to work. That needs to be the operating principle of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s re-elected and slightly strengthened minority government.

It’s time to deliver results.

Although the NDP criticism failed to translate into seat gains, the truth is that the Prime Minister has seen a gap between what TS Eliot called the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act. It’s time to get things done.

Fire up the deal-making machine and get childcare agreements in place, funding flowing and spaces opening. Cut ribbons and kiss babies.

Get shovels in the ground for transit projects and get the ones in construction moving faster. Visit construction sites for mid-term progress reports. Announce every milestone of every project. When I worked in government, I used to push back on caucus criticism that “we’ve announced this already” by asking “have you announced it this week?”

End the remaining boil-water advisories on First Nation reserves.

Deliver meaningful relief for first-time home buyers and student-loan holders.

The Liberal government needs not only to get things done, but also to communicate how it is getting things done, every step of the way, day after day. Progressives have a real challenge between idea and implementation, communicating not only ambition but the tangible, slow but steady progress being made. The re-elected government needs to focus on telling its own story and showing how progress is being advanced.

Do it in partnership with the provinces and municipalities. Recognize that the big provinces face provincial and municipal elections in the near future, and they’re motivated to get stuff done too.

There is a pent-up demand for achievement, and as we emerge from hopefully the worst of COVID-19, now is the time to fire on all cylinders. Take the mandate you’ve been given and put it to work to accomplish the things you said you would.

Tweak the cabinet, elevating some backbenchers who are work horses, not show horses. Focus on delivering results every day. Focus on driving the ball down the field. On climate and especially green infrastructure. On childcare. On First Nations reconciliation. Tie it all together with a focus on jobs and the economy, and just a smidge more fiscal discipline.

It’s possible that we are in for a new generational political order of minority governments, European style. So long as the Bloc takes up roughly half of Quebec’s seats, it’s nigh on impossible to win a majority, unless the West were to become a multi-party region for the first time in generations. That means Trudeau could govern if he works at it for, if not the full four years, than something more in the realm of three.

If he’s interested in succession planning, he should start. I don’t think it’s Chyrstia Freeland. And it also isn’t simply about the leader of the party – it’s also about ensuring cabinet ministers and those working hard to join them get airtime and a chance to grow in their roles. There’s a lot of talent in the Liberal caucus. Put it to work. The odd “special assignment” wouldn’t hurt, either.

This re-election is an opportunity to buckle down and focus on delivering. I’d say the PM should roll up his sleeves, but he practically wears long-sleeve shirts solely for the purpose of rolling them up.

Get things done, be seen to get things done, and then get more things done. That’s my advice for the re-elected government.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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In the wake of an election marked by nastiness we are unaccustomed to in this country, and violence against politicians like we have never really seen before, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about how things got this bad. While many are quick to blame the Americans for somehow exporting this to our country, others are quick to point out that no, this is on us because we’ve got bad actors too in this country. Nevertheless, there is a prevailing sense among many in mainstream conservatism in this country who somehow believe that they can flirt with right-wing populism and somehow avoid the negative consequences that come along with it, as though there were some kind of “good parts only” version available to them. The hubris of that belief has come home to roost.

One of the most prominent proponents of using right-wing populism to his political advantage is Alberta premier Jason Kenney, who had spent years honing the craft of stoking and directing anger and turning it to his political advantage. First he sent it toward then-premier Rachel Notley, blaming her for every ill under the sun, and once she was defeated in the provincial election, he turned that anger entirely toward prime minister Justin Trudeau. It wasn’t Trudeau’s fault that a global supply glut in oil was depressing world prices because OPEC decided to open the taps in order to try and make the American’s shale oil unprofitable (which was even worse for the oil sands, for whom the shale boom was already sounding a death knell for their expansion plans), but Kenney was perfectly happy to blame Trudeau regardless – even if Trudeau was offering the province federal assistance that Stephen Harper had refused to.

Already, the signs were there that this was turning ugly. The “protesters” that Kenney was attracting were already selling t-shirts that promised to lynch Trudeau (or journalists, for that matter). “Lock her up!” chants about Notley and whoever else was convenient were starting, imported from the ugly Trump campaign, and Kenney gave a cursory “now, now, we vote them out,” rather than forcefully denouncing the practice and coming down hard on it and all that it entailed. Around the same time, there was a Conservative leadership contest happening, where there were candidates who were also willing to import this same American rhetoric for their own purposes.

Some of you may remember the campaign that Kellie Leitch ran, promising “values tests” and dog-whistling to the far right – so much so that Maxime Bernier denounced her as a “Karaoke Donald Trump,” while he was trying to run on libertarian values (and very nearly succeeded). That Bernier later left the party and started his own that embraced this very same rhetoric and tactics shows that he too believes there was political value in embracing it – the biggest difference seeming to be that he doesn’t seem to care about the negative consequences that come with the embrace, or he is willing to turn a very blind eye to it.

It should be no surprise that this stoking of anger in the service of political point-scoring turned to violence, whether that was with the gravel-throwing incident against the prime minister, or Liberal incumbent Marc Serré being assaulted in his campaign headquarters. And sure, the leaders of the other parties – including Bernier – denounced these acts, but again, a single statement of denunciation doesn’t go very far when you’ve amped up irrational anger in a group of people who are looking to hurt those who you have blamed for their woes. That anger needs to go somewhere, and it’s more than just forcefully marking a ballot on election day.

These kinds of tactics are deliberate. O’Toole’s social media consulting firm makes a point about messages shocking people in order to “invoke anger, pride, excitement or fear.” Kenney is a month away from holding a series of provincial referendums, one of which is to explicitly stoke anger at the federal government by asking a torqued question about equalization payments, as though the referendum could do anything about it. That referendum will also be held alongside blatantly unconstitutional “Senate nomination elections,” which is something invented whole cloth by Alberta governments in the past as a fictional grievance that they can then stoke, which Kenney was all too happy to resurrect – because he needs to keep directing that anger elsewhere. It’s too late, however – all of the anger he’s fomented is now being directed at him, and he won’t last much longer in the job.

It’s also not a surprise that this anger, not just in Alberta but in other parts of the country where the messages resonate, have led to an increase in threats against not only the prime minister (it was only a few months ago that someone rammed through the gates of Rideau Hall with a truck full of loaded weapons, intending to harm Trudeau), but also Notley, and ministers like Catherine McKenna. And it wasn’t just Kenney or Bernier stoking it either. Both Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole made a point of winking and nodding to these crowds, whether it was addressing the Yellow Vesters under the credulous guise of only seeing them as their fig-leaf cover story of being oil workers concerned about carbon prices (when in truth they were the same far-right operators mobilized by M-103 the year previous), or in stoking conspiracy theories about the United Nations Compact on Global Migration, the Great Reset initiative, or even George Soros. They knew what they were doing, and thought it could work for them.

The fact that things have taken a turn to physical violence was the least surprising thing, and yet both the Conservatives and their apologists are acting shocked. They tried cherry-picking elements from the fetid swamp that is the eco-system of right-wing populism, and pretended that it wouldn’t come with consequences. But now that those ugly consequences have reared their heads, it’s time to dismantle this system before it festers, and that means the Conservatives making a conscious choice not to double down in the hopes of regaining PPC votes that they blame for losing them the election.

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Does political branding work? Is it real?

Some, like this writer, say yes. Some say it’s a lot of Madison Avenue gobbledegook and mumbo-jumbo: Pepsi versus Coke, whatever.

Trust me: political branding works, and it’s very, very real. Don’t believe it? Then take a look at what happened in three ridings on election night, right across the country: Vancouver-Granville, Spadina-Fort York, and Fredericton.

A summary:

In Vancouver-Granville, the Liberal candidate – Taleeb Noormohamed – was caught flipping houses and making millions, a practice the Liberal Party platform promised to outlaw. Noormohamed skipped all-candidates meetings, refused to get up and knock on doors, and was a disaster in media encounters. He won anyway.

In Spadina-Fort York, the Liberal candidate – Kevin Vuong – withheld the fact that he had been charged for sexual assault (a trial didn’t take place because the alleged victim could not participate in the trial). When the sexual assault charge was made public, it was too late to remove Vuong’s name from the ballot. The Liberal Party initially defended Vuong, but – when outrage grew – dropped him as a candidate. He won anyway.

In Fredericton, the Liberal candidate – Jenica Atwin – was elected in 2019 under the Green Party banner. In 2020, Atwin defamed the Jewish state, accusing it of the racist policy of “apartheid” – despite the fact that Israel has Palestinians in its government, military and judiciary. She was thereafter welcomed into Justin Trudeau’s caucus and told the media she was “not alone” in her anti-Israel position there, reaffirming that she “certainly stands” by her smears about the Jewish state. She won anyway.

Noormohamed, Vuong and Atwin represent the very worst in politics. They are unfit to run for dog-catcher, let alone a seat in our highest legislature. Allegations of anti-Semitism, sexual assault, illicit personal enrichment: these people do not in any way belong in Parliament. But to Parliament they were elected.

Some will lay the blame with the media – but it was the news media which made the allegations against Noormohamed, Vuong and Atwain public, and rained ignominy down on them. Others will accuse clueless urban voters of complicity – but Fredericton is comparatively very tiny, and Atwin was elected there by only a few thousand votes.

So why? Why, why, why were these creeps elected, when we all knew how disreputable they were?

Because branding. Because all three shared one thing: the Liberal Party brand.

Like it or not, the Liberal Party is the most successful political vehicle in Western democracy. It has ruled Canada for most of its history.

The Liberal brand means different things to different people – managerial competence, national unity, accommodation of newcomers. But its brand is stronger than the Conservative brand, or the New Democrat brand.

In one of my books, Fight The Right, I argue that big political choices are emotional, not rational. They are made in a voter’s heart, not his or her mind. Political branding works because it is all about emotion – it’s essentially repeating a word or phrase or logo, over and over, until it lodges in a voter’s gut.

For those of you who are appalled by Justin Trudeau, like me, rest assured, you are not alone: two-thirds of Canadians feel as we do. The 2021 federal election was “won” despite Justin Trudeau, not because of him.

Trudeau clung to power – with Noormohamed, Vuong and Atwin right behind him – because most people vote for a brand, not a person. They all ran under the Liberal brand, which is the strongest political brand in our history.

Can voters be persuaded to abandon the Liberal brand? Sure. Coke drinkers regularly become Pepsi drinkers (I did).

It’s a long, laborious, labyrinthine process, however. It ain’t easy.

But if you want to defeat Trudeau, Noormohamed, Vuong and Atwin next time, it’s the only way.

Kinsella was Jean Chretien’s Special Assistant and Vice-President of a Vancouver ad agency.

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Poking through the detritus of this week’s federal election results, the general contours of its impacts have emerged although the specific detail is yet to be refined.

The lack of change in total seat counts suggests that both the Liberals and the Conservatives will be held accountable in different ways.

Mr. Trudeau will need to find a way to recover from the personal character scars inflicted effectively by his opponents during the campaign. The party has a proven track record of reinventing itself; the search to attract new star candidates and a clearer post pandemic economic focus starts now.

The smouldering internal Conservative policy debate over the long term rewards of shifting from Harper lite to Liberal lite ones will likely flare up and consume the agenda for the next few months. That conflict may well decide Mr O’Toole’s future.

The next scene of the Green’s internecine warfare will determine not only Annamie Paul’s leadership but the party’s future itself.

While a post-pandemic populist party may be difficult to sustain nationally, the People’s Party may leave a more lasting impact on the shape of provincial politics in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Despite an improved campaign, Mr. Singh still has to manage the expectations of critics for not returning the federal NDP to its halcyon days under Mulcair and Layton. How can the NDP avoid being squeezed again in future elections, given its likely support of the whole Liberal minority agenda beyond a few calculated tweaks? Will this necessitate yet another internal review of whether the NDP best serves as a party or a movement?

Several truisms about political campaigning have also been reinforced that our chattering classes including the media would do well to remember in their future election analysis.

Campaigns do matter, no matter the pre-election polls. Mr. O’Toole’s initial well calibrated campaign shift to the political centre including the early release of an un-costed platform appeared to take the Liberals and media off-guard.

The resurrection of Liberal fortunes from mid-campaign doldrums remind us that even short campaigns are marathons, not sprints; victory is never declared after three weeks.

Both Mr Trudeau and Mr. Singh proved to be formidable campaigners; Mr. O’Toole’s interventions increasingly lacked spontaneity .

Did the Conservatives peak too early? Did their early success focus more media attention on the inconsistencies in their platform and drive the Liberals to unveil their time tested and proven ‘fear ‘strategy to drive progressive voters their way (mid-town Toronto, as well as Vancouver)?

Political apparatchiks are constantly reminded that the final vote shift, especially among undecideds, takes place in the last 5 to 10 days of the campaign. A summer election reinforces this conclusion even more because most citizens are not paying critical attention at the outset of the call.

The quality of local candidates and incumbents’ effective attention to constituency needs between elections counts even more when faced with negative reactions at the door to an unpopular leader. Those are factors harder to quantify in aggregated polling.

While the Liberals lost a couple of so-called swing ridings (e.g. Peterborough Kawartha), they retained others (Oakville) in the competitive constituencies of the 905 for these very reasons.

Another consequential lesson is that ground games do matter, especially when dealing with pandemics and lower voter enthusiasm.

Identifying each party’s vote and getting them to the polls trumps amassing Tik Tok followers, likes or dislikes on Twitter, or general regional or national polling swings.

According to numerous media reports, a number of Conservative candidates could not find sufficient volunteers for their all-important E-day teams.

For the third federal election in a row, we are reminded in a first past the post system that efficiency of votes counts more to win a larger number of seats than racking up large majorities in a number of ridings that falsely skew the aggregated numbers.

Managing surprise events remains an ever present reality. While Afghanistan and the Delta variant dominated the early news, the provincial Tory vaccine passport flip flops refocused the campaign from the phoney war about the need for an election during the pandemic to the more Liberal friendly issue of management of the crisis. Indeed, it can be argued that Mr Kenney cost the Conservative campaign its national momentum at a critical juncture of the election.

Looking forward, Liberal last minute musings about changing the first past the post electoral system [where have we heard this before] and the likelihood of the broad implementation of the Liberals child care scheme with the remaining provinces may prove to be even more existential threats to the Conservative goal to topple the current Liberal regime.

Make no mistake. Beyond the numbers, a lot has changed in Canadian politics.

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The federal election is over. Canada’s Parliament in 2021 is a near-carbon copy of the 2019 session. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are still in power. Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives won the popular vote for the second straight election. No political party had any huge gains or losses in terms of overall seat count. The status quo won the day.

If you’re trying to figure out what the point of this exercise was, you’re not alone. If you’re trying to make any sense out of it, you should quit while you’re ahead.

To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld’s popular TV show, this was an election about nothing.

Policy issues related to taxation, health care, education, government spending and climate change were rarely mentioned. Topical issues like Afghanistan, China and the two Michaels, and bodies found at former Native residential schools barely had a pulse. Controversies involving guns, mandatory vaccines and the removal of several political candidates simmered for a bit, and quickly cooled off.

Emergency relief measures during COVID-19 didn’t have much of a ripple effect, either. Our federal deficit increased from $21.77 billion (CDN) in 2019 to $314 billion (CDN) in 2020 due to government-funded programs like CERB and CEWS. Some financial analysts have suggested it could reach an eye-popping $400 billion by the end of this fiscal year. How are we going to pay this down? Anyone? Jerry, George, Elaine – Kramer?

Trudeau and his public battles with female MPs has been topical for years. Former Liberal cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s book about SNC-Lavalin and her battles with Trudeau and his senior advisers, for instance, should have raised the political temperature to a boiling point. Former Liberal MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who was Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary, should have stoked the political fires after endorsing local Conservative candidate Maleeha Shahid during an interview with Mercedes Stephenson on Global News’ The West Block. Yet, in spite of the fact that Trudeau’s faux feminism has been a regular punch line in Canadian politics, it just didn’t register with voters.

Heck, a fourth photo of Trudeau in blackface was posted by the advocacy group Canada Proud mere hours before voters went to the polls. Most Canadians had already decided whether they were disgusted by the original three photos, or willing to forgive and forget. You would still think this new photo, the first one in colour, would have led to some discussion or evoked a momentary pause and reflection. For the most part, it didn’t.

Was there an issue that stuck during this federal election? Well, sort of.

Canadians didn’t want to go to the polls during COVID-19. A Nanos Research/CTV News poll conducted between June 30-July 5 found that only 26 percent of Canadians wanted a fall election, while a Mainstreet Research/Toronto Star poll conducted between August 10-11 pushed the number up slightly to 35 percent. Voters were also likely displeased that Trudeau had seemingly called this election for the sole (and selfish) purpose of shifting his minority government back to a majority.

This frustration created some short-term momentum for the Conservatives and, on a lesser scale, the NDP. Alas, the bubble burst about midway through the campaign. What caused this? Several political analysts have suggested it was a result of some of the issues already mentioned in this column. I don’t agree. Rather, it just wasn’t a burning issue that angered most voters enough to constantly simmer through an entire election about nothing. They sighed, shrugged and moved on.

What a very Canadian thing to do.

Election day was also the equivalent of a nationwide sigh and shrug. Although there are still mail-in ballots to be counted, the Liberals are currently at 157 seats, up from 155 at the dissolution of Parliament. (This total doesn’t include one elected member, Kevin Vuong, who was disavowed and won’t sit with the party caucus.) Meanwhile, they’ve only received 32.3 percent of the popular vote, which is the second straight election this party has finished in second place.

O’Toole’s Conservatives will form the opposition after winning the same number of seats, 119, and 33.9 percent of the popular vote. Yves-François Blanchet’s Bloc Quebecois are in third place with 34 seats (up two), followed by Jagmeet Singh’s NDP (25 seats, up one) and Annamie Paul’s Greens (2 seats, down one). Although Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada had a better showing in 2021 (5.1 percent) than in 2019 (1.62 percent), they didn’t come close to winning a seat.

So. Trudeau spent a reported $610 million (according to Elections Canada) to hold an election that few Canadians wanted. He brought down a minority Parliament that was passing left-leaning legislation – and was working to his political advantage, albeit imperfectly at times. He attempted to win a majority, and failed. He wasn’t punished by the voters. He will continue to lead this country in a weak, ineffective and vapid manner for at least another 12-18 months.

Hard to believe, but that’s democracy for you.

National Post cartoonist Gary Clement captured the moment perfectly. He drew an illustration on Sept. 21 of a beaming Trudeau flashing the victory sign and saying, “Omigod! You fell for it!!!”

That’s the only thing about this election that truly makes any sense.

Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

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Unless any of the mail-in ballots flip enough ridings, it looks like we are once again destined for a hung parliament with the Liberals continuing in government. While there appears to be only a small number of changed seats on the headline numbers, there were a lot of shuffled seats at the local level, which actually ensured a greater distribution of seats, such as Conservatives in Atlantic Canada, and Liberals in Alberta. Still, the evening was spent with the talking heads on TV declaring the election “useless,” sighing that it was a “$600 million Cabinet shuffle,” and wondering aloud if it was really all worth it if we wound up with seat math that largely resembles where we went into it. And while the exercise of democracy is never useless, I do think there were some important outcomes of this election.

In spite of all of the pundits declaring that this was an election about nothing, or at worst about Trudeau’s own ambition to regain his majority, there were some very big differences in party visions for the path forward out of the pandemic. If anything, those who proclaimed this was about nothing have had the least at stake over the course of the pandemic. To an extent, this election result becomes something of an inoculation around “mandate-talk” among the pundit class, many of whom would likely be spending the post-pandemic recovery period grousing about the government’s spending, and the direction that they have been taking, and plan to continue taking. This is in large part of what Trudeau was referring to when he said this election was about Canadians choosing a path forward – and what he called a “clear mandate” (in spite of the abuse of the term) in his victory speech.

To an extent, this also gives Trudeau some additional political pressure to apply to recalcitrant provinces to sign onto his national plans – universal childcare with Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick most especially, but possibly as well with the nine provinces who have not yet signed onto the pharmacare plan as PEI has, and his plans to implement national standards (with audits) around long-term care in exchange for federal dollars. He is promising to sit down with those premiers once the pandemic is officially over to discuss the shape of future healthcare transfers – again, with strings attached – and having this fresh electoral result will probably help the hand is able to play with them, because it will be at least another 18 months, maybe two years, before we go back to the polls and the premiers can pin their hopes on someone else who promises higher transfer with fewer strings. It’s the same with the even tougher environmental measures that the Liberals are promising – because much of that burden will fall on provinces, Trudeau may have some additional leverage now that he didn’t five weeks ago when it comes to getting cooperation.

More importantly, it is likely that this election will break the deadlock in the House of Commons that stymied progress on most bills for the bulk of the spring session. There is every chance that we can finally put the WE Imbroglio to bed for good, now that Bill Morneau has long-since retired from politics and Trudeau has been returned with this in voters’ minds. In the coming Cabinet shuffle, he also has the opportunity to finally move Harjit Sajjan out of the defence portfolio, and can put someone far more competent to manage the Canadian Forces’ transformation to dealing with its highly sexualized culture and toxic masculinity problem into the role. That will hopefully free up some of the committees to do actual legislative work as bills start to come down the pipeline. But as in any hung parliament, the fact that the opposition parties are depleted – the NDP most especially in a much more precarious financial situation after a high-spending national campaign – gives Trudeau more room to manoeuvre. Those parties are unlikely to be calling any bluffs for at least a year before they start huffing and puffing and making threatening noises about bringing Trudeau’s government down, so that he can make moves that they wouldn’t have allowed in the toxic spring.

This being said, Trudeau never made the case for this election around said parliamentary deadlock, which was a baffling choice that hampered his chances more than his “happy warrior” schtick helped him on the campaign trail. Credulous journalists and pundits who didn’t pay attention to what was going on in the House of Commons never brought it up on the campaign trail, and Trudeau didn’t volunteer it either, to his own detriment, and it all played into the “useless” election narrative, which Trudeau was ineffective in communicating around.

The one thing that I suspect more than anything, however, is that this result will hasten Trudeau’s departure. After a second hung parliament, it is increasingly unlikely that he will want to contest a third election as prime minister, where the chances are greater that he’ll be turfed. Rather than face defeat, it is far more probable that he will complete the child care agreements, and one or two more policy planks that are within reach, and then declare a job well done and that it’s time to pass the torch – and because we’re in a hung parliament, it will likely be within a year, rather than the two or three that he might have in a majority parliament. Chrystia Freeland is waiting in the wings, and while we’ll get a leadership contest between her, François-Philippe Champagne, and a couple of no-hope outsiders hoping to build their own profiles, that will last a couple of months rather than a full year, and she’ll have a few months to establish herself before the shelf-life of this parliament gets stale and they go back to the polls, but with a fresh face leading the charge.

This wasn’t an election over nothing, and with a little luck, it bought a reprieve from the poisonous atmosphere in the Commons from the spring.

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Dominic LeBlanc said a funny thing on Wednesday.

First, to the Toronto Star, the Liberal cabinet member said, “I’m very confident in our chances of forming a majority government.” And then a little later he told reporters much the same thing.

“I’ve said from the beginning of the campaign that we’re campaigning to win a majority government,” LeBlanc said.

It’s an interesting thing to hear with just five days left.

It was around last weekend, when the release of excerpts from former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s book were making their splash in the newspapers and the SNC scandal was once again raising it’s head that I thought, “Hmmm, smells like a Liberal win, maybe a big one.”

I hashed this out a bit on Twitter, but essentially my logic is this: However wretched that SNC Affair was, and how ever horrible the issues around ethics and the interplay between corporations and government, too much has happened since then for JWR to be the focal point of a day or two of the Conservative campaign.

More than 26,000 people are dead — more are still dying! — from COVID-19. Homes are increasingly unaffordable. There’s been a major economic shock because of the pandemic. And oh yeah the world is on fire.

And yet, here we were, after a few days of ethics talk.

It looked to me, and still does, like a Conservative campaign that had lost its way. Plus, the Liberal sink in the polls seems to be bouncing back. The polls aren’t fully there yet, and many of the projections give it a low probability of there being a Liberal majority. And yet…

Which brings us back to LeBlanc. From the start it was clear winning a majority was the point of this whole exercise. That’s why we’re having an election. The trouble was, as soon as the election was called the Liberal poll numbers dived and so even thinking the word majority was libel to sink the whole enterprise.

And now here we have a senior Liberal not just thinking about a majority, but talking about it to reporters.

But here we are, on the other side of the debates, where Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau walked away bruised but not broken. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole wasn’t a disaster — nothing like his predecessor — but he flubbed his answer about daycare in in the French-language, and didn’t really stand out in the English-language debate. And by that point O’Toole’s momentum seems to have stalled out.

So is it really that crazy to think that after all this Trudeau might pull off his dreams of a second majority? I’m inclined to think not.

But I think the Liberals have halted what looked like a terminal slide out of government. Instead, Trudeau and his party seem to have hit their stride at just the right moment. Summer has ended* and kids have gone back to school, and life has entered a period of sort-of normalcy where people are more focused on ‘real’ things, rather than summer leisure.

Voters seem to have given Erin O’Toole a look, and found him wanting. The Conservative Party leader made an interesting pitch to voters, that he was a different, nicer kind of Tory.

Pitching a sort-of compassionate conservatism — though it’s unlikely he or the party would ever invoke George W. Bush — O’Toole has made the case that he wasn’t like those other Conservatives that have come before.

People do not seem to have bought it. Sinking in the polls, increasingly firing off random attack lines and policies, his campaign seems to have peaked too early.

It’s possible if he was able to run in another campaign voters might come around to his vision of Conservative governing, pitching the same program twice tends to convince people you’re serious, but that would require his party to both want to keep him on and stay together.

Big changes — even if they’re just rhetorical ones — so soon after the last election are a lot to get a handle on. Especially when O’Toole is a former Conservative minister.

It’s tough for people to believe you are a kind and gentle party when they’ve seen how you’ve governed before, and how your allies have governed as premier in provinces across the province. It’s an interesting tactic, but one that doesn’t seem to have worked this time around. It’s an interesting play, and will be even more interesting if his party gives him another shot at it.

In any case, I don’t think it’s a certainty that Trudeau has his majority in hand. But I no longer think it’s an impossibility. Enough so that I put a $5 wager on it happening — figured I might as well put my money where my mouth is.

Now all we have to do is wait for Monday.

*Yes, yes, I know summer ends Sept. 21, but we all know what I mean here.

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After four uninspiring and unstimulating weeks, the campaign to form the next government of Canada has narrowed into a tight two-way race between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

For progressive voters, heading to the polls this election will be a rather disheartening exercise in civic responsibility, especially in the ridings in which third parties aren’t registering much support, leaving many torn between voting for what NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has called a choice between “pretty bad” (aka Justin Trudeau) and “worse” (Erin O’Toole).

It’s hard to find fault with Singh’s analysis on his two main rivals.

After taking stock of Trudeau’s record in office, I can’t imagine there are many Canadians that are enthusiastic about a renewed Liberal mandate.

While the Liberals have not been the failure some pundits claim they are, they also haven’t been the boldly progressive, honest, and transparent administration that Trudeau promised.

Instead, for every moment of praise this government has earned (resettling 40,000 Syrian refugees, helping lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, instituting a gender-neutral cabinet, legalizing marijuana, etc.) they have cocked up equally with clumsy policy missteps and cynical politicking.

For examples, one need only recall Trudeau’s cowardly about-face on electoral reform. Or the Liberal’s abysmal record of global engagement, epitomized by their humiliating loss for a seat on the United Nations Security Council. Or their insufficient action to tax the super-wealthy, institute a national pharmacare program, and tackle the lack of affordable housing in this country.

Nonetheless, as disappointing as Trudeau’s record has been, there are even more reasons to be wary of Erin O’Toole and his Conservative cabal.

For one, O’Toole is campaigning to scrap the deals that Trudeau negotiated with various provinces to finally implement universal, federally funded childcare.

Back in 2006, Stephen Harper killed Paul Martin’s dreams of national childcare. Now, fifteen years later, another Conservative leader is pledging to do the same. For the millions of working and middle-class families, struggling to balance work with raising children, O’Toole’s promise to eliminate what could be the next major pillar in Canada’s social safety net is a worrying prospect.

Then there is O’Toole’s climate plan.

Throughout the campaign, O’Toole has stated clear his intent to rollback Canada’s emissions targets and build more pipelines, including the now-defunct Northern Gateway pipeline. This, even as scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have released yet another report, warning of dire repercussions to the planet if urgent action is not taken. But really, what else can you expect from the leader of a party whose delegates reject policy proposals affirming that “climate change is real”?

While we are on the topic of retrograde views, a majority of O’Toole’s own caucus voted against a proposed Liberal ban on conversion therapy, so don’t expect an O’Toole government to be an activist champion on LGBTQ rights, either.

Next, consider foreign policy, another area O’Toole would likely be worse than Trudeau.

With dangerous platform promises to “Recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the Canadian embassy to Jerusalem” and “Return Canada to its longstanding policy of not singling out Israel for criticism at the United Nations” O’Toole’s continuation of Scheer/Harper-era positions would only facilitate Palestinian injustice and hinder efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East.

Equally disheartening is his pledge to increase military spending, while offering nothing to bolster Canada’s embarrassingly low foreign aid spending.

Finally, O’Toole’s appeasement of Quebec nationalists (what with his silence over the province’s secularism law) has been so weak-kneed that it has even earned him Quebec Premier Francois Legault’s endorsement, which doesn’t bode well for all the discriminated religious minorities in the province, nor for Canada’s continued descent into crippling, ineffectual decentralization.

True, Canada’s other party leaders have not spoken out against Legault with the nerve that is required of them. But none have been quite so placating as O’Toole with his assuaging words and litany of Quebec-centered platform promises.

In an ideal election, neither the Liberals, nor the Conservatives, would be the party that forms the next government. Unfortunately, this election is far from an ideal one.

Therefore, in the ridings in which only the Liberals are competitive with the Conservatives, it is candidates of the former, not the latter, that Canadians will be better off casting their ballot for.

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If you think the federal election has been a snooze fest so far, don’t worry, all the really fun stuff is going to happen over the next few days.

I say that because, typically speaking, it’s only in the last week of an election that the legions of undecided voters out there actually make up their minds.

Before then, they’re really only half paying attention to all the political shenanigans taking place on the electoral stage.

The fact is, for a huge number of people in this country (or in any democracy for that matter), the game of politics is just not that interesting, which explains why there are so many undecided voters.

In other words, they’re undecided not because they’re diligently studying all the various competing political party platforms, or studiously comparing all the pros and cons of the leaders, or carefully pondering the issues put on the table, they’re undecided because they’re simply not engaged in the electoral process. (This is one reason why you should take all those political opinion polls conducted in late August with a huge grain of salt.)

Yet, the closer we get to Election Day, the more the undecided voters will get caught up in the electoral drama and the more their minds will become focused on politics.

Knowing this, political parties will always unleash their best, most persuasive messaging campaigns in the last week of the race, a time when they figure voters will be the most receptive.

It’s not a coincidence, for instance, that Jody Wilson-Raybould releases her book this week.

So, brace yourself; each party is about to launch a full-scale propaganda assault.

And since these ads will be geared toward the undecideds, don’t expect much in the way of subtlety or substance.

After all, if you’re reaching out to people who don’t care about ideology or policy, your ad campaign shouldn’t focus on ideology or policy.

Nor will you have time to “educate” voters on policies or issues.

The only persuasive tactic that will work during this short but crucial period is to manipulate emotions.

So, watch for all the parties to bash us over the head with strong appeals which will tap into our hates, fears and hopes.

The exact tone of the ad messaging, of course, will depend on what the internal polls are telling the party strategists.

If, for instance, pollsters are telling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he’s falling behind, expect the Liberals to accelerate their efforts this week to demonize Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole.

It won’t be pretty.

In fact, if they’re truly desperate, the Liberals will throw everything they’ve got (including the kitchen sink) at the Conservatives. (Expect the name “Donald Trump” to pop up a lot.)

Also, if the Liberals are holding any dirt on O’Toole, now’s the time they’ll release it.

On the other hand, if Trudeau’s doing well in the polls, he’ll push a more inspirational, “vote for a happier Canada” sort of message.

Meanwhile, the exact same political calculations are going on in the Conservative camp, meaning if O’Toole is in trouble, he’ll drop the hammer on Trudeau; if he’s ahead in the polls, he’ll take the high moral road.

As for the New Democrats, well this is where their lack of fundraising success in the past, will come back to haunt them.

My point is, I seriously doubt they’ll have the financial resources needed to match either the Liberals or Conservatives when it comes to pushing a last week advertising blitz.

What that means is it’ll be much more difficult (but not impossible) for NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to make any sort of surge at the finish line.

Anyway, watching all the parties for broke this week should be entertaining.

So, grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.

Tag: Justin Trudeau

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