In the summer of 1978, against his top political strategist’s advice, Pierre Trudeau called a full slate of byelections to fill 15 vacancies in the House of Commons, including seven seats the Liberals had won in the previous election.
As recounted in John English’s Just Watch Me, the Liberal Party’s own pollster said the governing party’s chances “ranged from slim to dreadful.” And when the results came back on the night of Oct. 16, the Liberals had retained just one of those seven seats, having surrendered the other six to Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives.
Obviously, this did not bode well for Liberal fortunes in a federal election that was by then less than a year away. But Pierre Trudeau insisted he was unbowed.
“I’m not going to be crushed by a few byelections,” he said. “I’d rather wait and see what happens when we fight a general election.”
Comparisons between father and son are a bit too easy to make, but the example of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals in 1978 offers at least one reference point for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2024.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says ‘there’s more work to do’ following the Liberal candidate’s loss in the Montreal riding of LaSalle–Émard–Verdun on Monday. Trudeau says the Liberals need voters ‘to understand what’s at stake in this upcoming election.’
“Obviously it would’ve been nicer to be able to win and hold [LaSalle-Émard-Verdun], but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it,” Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday morning, striking a somewhat more humble note than his father did (even if the younger Trudeau seems no less defiant at his core).
The difference between winning and losing in LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was a mere 248 votes. But the fact the Liberals lost the riding — as opposed to narrowly winning it — is less important than the fact that it was close. Two years ago, the Liberal margin of victory in the riding was nearly 10,000 votes.
One can hang any number of caveats on any specific byelection result — turnout is always low, relatively little is at stake and a single data point can tell us only so much about an electoral map that now includes 343 ridings.
But there are very few general election scenarios for the Liberals that don’t include them winning ridings like LaSalle-Émard-Verdun by a decent margin. The same could be said…
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