Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt
Somewhere this weekend, some federal Liberals may quietly mark an anniversary that many wouldn’t have predicted they would get to enjoy while still in power.
Ten years ago on Sunday, Justin Trudeau led his third-place party to a majority government, with promises of “sunny ways” and the conviction that “better is always possible.”
Politics being politics, those feel-good slogans didn’t age all that well. Majority victories have eluded the Liberals in the subsequent decade and the most recent polls show that even with new leader Mark Carney, the party is still locked in a tight race with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
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Carney, who likes to say that Canada has a new government, likely won’t be leading any 10th-anniversary commemorations this weekend. This is a prime minister who has been distancing himself from the Trudeau legacy wherever possible, and the coming months will probably see more Trudeau-era cabinet ministers fading from view, as Chrystia Freeland has already.
But the 10th anniversary is a chance to take a long view on how the federal political ground has shifted over a decade, from what seemed like a surge of hopeful progressivism in 2015 to a harder, more pragmatic politics in 2025.
Donald Trump has had a lot to do with that, to state the obvious. Trudeau had to put up with the first wave of Trump disruption. Carney is dealing with a more reckless, aggressive Trumpism in the president’s second term. Trump’s annexation threats and tariff wars helped Carney and the Liberals win this year’s election, but they are also what should be keeping the key players in this government awake at night as the damage spreads. The Stellantis pullout from its Brampton car-assembly plant this week and the 45 per cent softwood tariffs are just the latest signs of wreckage.
The COVID pandemic, which was followed by a surge in inflation, has also altered the country in ways that we are still trying to measure. At first, progressives took some comfort in the idea that these national crises would remind people of all the ways in which government could be a force for good in individual citizens’ lives — that Ottawa could do more than collect their taxes.
But all that involvement in Canadians’ lives also bred resentment — against vaccination mandates, in some quarters — as well as increasing demand for Ottawa to give people relief on everything from housing prices to the costs in the grocery store.
Now, if people do assert the state has a role to play, it seems less like an attachment to progressive ideology than an exasperation that it’s not doing enough to keep calamity from befalling their jobs, their incomes or their families.
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There’s other evidence that the country, not just Carney’s Liberals, is in retreat from the progressive surge of 2015. Policies the Trudeau Liberals fiercely embraced — on climate change, Indigenous reconciliation, gender equity — are not as front and centre in the Carney makeover. This is causing some nervousness in Liberal ranks, we keep hearing, but not so much nervousness that MPs are going public.
A declining openness to immigration is maybe the most visible sign of how the country has moved from 2015. Just look at the outpouring of welcome for Syrian refugees the Trudeau government presided over and then look today at the rollback in immigration levels and work visas — not to mention the hardening public sentiment the polls keep reporting when it comes to immigration.
When Trudeau came to power in late 2015, there was a definite progressive tilt around the first ministers’ table. Eight provinces were led by Liberal or New Democrat premiers, and in three large provinces — Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario — those premiers were women. Today, with the exception of Manitoba, B.C., New Brunswick and Yukon, most of the provinces are led by conservative-leaning governments. Federally, the New Democrats are leaderless and have lost official party status in the Commons.
It’s not just the country that’s become more conservative though, but the federal Conservatives too. As political debate has coarsened over the past decade — thanks again, Trump — so too have the Conservatives become more aggressively personal and pointed in their attacks on everything Liberal. The poster boy for this transformation is Andrew Scheer. When he became the first in the chain of leaders they burned through after the 2015 defeat, Scheer seemed like a nicer version of Stephen Harper. Now, on any given day on social media, Scheer seems almost like a meaner version of Poilievre. His contempt for Liberals drips through almost every post.
Earlier this week, I wrote about how Conservatives seem to be ripping pages from Trump’s executive orders, on birthright citizenship and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, for instance, to put in their own policy playbook. A few weeks ago, I also wrote about the general retreat from progressivism, wondering whether this was a pendulum swing, a backslide or even a backlash. It feels like a mix of all. An austerity budget next month will further seal the impression that progressivism is maybe too expensive a proposition for this country right now.
Terry O’Reilly, host of a long-running CBC Radio series about the advertising business, has a new book out this week, “Against the Grain,” about “defiant giants” who overcame the naysayers to great success. He devotes one whole chapter in that book to Trudeau and the Liberals’ 2015 election campaign, recounting how they defied conventional political wisdom about attack campaigning and advertising.
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On CBC Radio’s The Current this week, O’Reilly was asked whether someone could pull that off again these days. “Theoretically, yes,” he said. You would still have to have a great platform and have a vision for the country, but if you think about how dark it is out there right now and all the division, I think people would be hungry for a positive outlook.”
But he said he recognized this would be a monumental challenge. “Every politician right now is just hammering the other side, so it would take incredible courage to do it.”
What that means is we’re not only a long way from 2015 in this country, but maybe a long way to anyone seizing back that progressive surge.
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