Trudeau under pressure after Liberals lose another safe seat

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will face renewed pressure to step aside after his Liberals lost a Montreal stronghold in a special election late Monday night.

It's the second consecutive defeat for Trudeau, who has insisted he has no plans to resign.

Canada’s Liberals have trailed their Conservative Party rivals nationally by a wide margin for the past year. The by-election loss is the latest sign the party could be doomed, so long as Trudeau remains at the helm.

“A loss is another nail in the coffin,” Lori Turnbull, a respected Canadian political analyst and professor at Dalhousie University, told POLITICO ahead of the vote. “It's going to be really hard for them to get around the narrative that the government is basically done.”

Bloc Québécois candidate Louis-Philippe Sauvé, a former political staffer, upset the race in LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, snatching a seat long-held by the Liberals, including former Prime Minister Paul Martin before the riding was redistricted. He won with up 28 percent of the vote with the Liberals a close second with 27.2 percent.

The Liberals lost a seat in downtown Toronto to the Conservatives in June, dialing up the heat on Trudeau who spent his summer in one-on-one calls with MPs in a bid to reassure his worried caucus.

The Trudeau name, which swept many Liberals into office, was not even present on Montreal candidate Laura Palestini’s campaign signs, underscoring his unpopularity.

The loss could jolt the party and give Trudeau-dissenters leverage to activate within the caucus.

Trudeau is leading a three-term government that came to power in 2015, and would be out for a rare fourth mandate in the next election.

His party’s diminishing fortunes put Trudeau in the ranks of many incumbent leaders in the West struggling amid a difficult post-pandemic economy, from former U.K. Tory PM Rishi Sunak who was defeated at the polls to Joe Biden, who was forced out of the U.S. presidential race .

“I don't know that we have an equivalent of a Nancy Pelosi here, somebody who would bend his ear and have that tough conversation in a way that would really be impactful on him,” Turnbull said. “Not necessarily to quit, but [to say], ‘We need to change gears. We need to do something colossally different.”

The prime minister said ahead of the race that he is committed to remaining on as party leader.

He told Canadians last week that he’s “excited” to take on his firebrand rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. “I’m not going anywhere,” Trudeau told radio station CJAD 800 on Friday.

That’s the prime minister’s official line — for now.

“He can't say anything else,” said former Liberal House Leader Don Boudria. “Once he says he will no longer stay, he loses all authority.”

The knives have yet to come out in a party in which many Liberal lawmakers owe their careers to Trudeau. So far, there’s no clear successor in the wings who could perform much better.

The by-election loss is just the latest blow to Trudeau. He recently lost his national campaign director and there is speculation his top minister in the province of Quebec is poised to leave federal politics to run provincially.

The loss comes nearly two weeks after the NDP tore up an agreement that’s been propping up the Liberal government in a minority Parliament where Trudeau’s party is outnumbered by the others.

The next election is scheduled for fall 2025, but Singh’s break from the Liberals opened the possibility one could happen sooner.

When the Liberal caucus huddled in British Columbia last week ahead of the return of Parliament, lawmakers were forced to confront public frustrations with the prime minister amid a housing and cost of living crisis.

Monday’s results underscore the way the Gaza conflict is sowing division on Parliament Hill. During the campaign, more than 50 political staffers refused to support the Liberal candidate's efforts citing Trudeau’s policy on the conflict, demanding in a letter that the Liberal government condemn Israel for its wartime conduct.

Results for the Montreal race were announced in the early hours of Tuesday morning thanks to a protest campaign that resulted in 91 candidates registering in the race.

That led to comically large 12-by-38-inch ballots, about the size of three medium-sized Domino’s pizza boxes, which held up counting.

Farther West, the progressive NDP held onto its Elmwood-Transcona stronghold seat in Winnipeg in the other race held Monday.