Desk Report
Publish: 21 Sep 2021, 06:36 pm
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau || Photo: Collected
Canadian Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau’s political gamble failed to pay off Monday when voters returned him to the office but denied him the expanded bloc of
power he had been seeking in Parliament.
Unofficial
election results on Monday indicated that while he would remain as prime
minister, it would again be as the head of a minority government.
In
August, with his approval ratings high, Trudeau called a “snap election,”
summoning voters to the polls two years before he had to. The goal, he said,
was to obtain a strong mandate for his Liberal Party to lead the nation out of
the pandemic and into recovery.
But
many Canadians suspected that his true ambitions were mere political
opportunism, and that he was trying to regain the parliamentary majority the
Liberals had until they lost seats in the 2019 election.
Whatever
his motive, it did not work.
With
some votes still being cast or uncounted, the preliminary results were a near
repeat of the previous vote. The Liberal Party won 156 seats on Monday — one
fewer than it acquired in 2019 — while its main rival, the Conservative Party,
won 121 seats, the same as before.
“If
you missed the 2019 election, don’t worry, we just did a rerun for you,” said
Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary,
Alberta.
The
outcome left Trudeau in a familiar situation. To pass any laws, he will once
again have to win members of the opposition over to his side. And, at least in
theory, his party’s shaky grip on power leaves his government vulnerable to being
overturned by Parliament.
In
his victory speech early Tuesday, Trudeau acknowledged the unpopularity of his
call for a snap election.
“You
don’t want us talking about politics or elections anymore; you want us to focus
on the work that we have to do for you,” he told a partisan crowd in a hotel in
downtown Montreal. “You just want to get back to the things you love, not worry
about this pandemic, or about an election.”
In
calling for the early election, Trudeau had argued that, like his predecessors
in the aftermath of World War II, he needed a strong mandate from voters to
vanquish the coronavirus and rebuild the national economy, badly damaged by the
pandemic.
But
the announcement was not well received by many Canadians.
Alarm
that the government was holding an election when it did not have to, even as
the Delta variant was straining hospitals in some areas, never abated for many
voters during the 36-day campaign. And Trudeau’s opponents were quick to
characterize his move as a reckless power grab. Erin O’Toole, the Conservative
leader, went so far as to call it “un-Canadian.”
In the end, Trudeau not only failed to secure a majority in Parliament, according to unofficial results, he may have also squandered the good will he had gained as he led his nation through the coronavirus crisis. (The NY Times)
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