GUNTER: With Trudeau at the helm, expect more Liberal MPs to bow out

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“Abandon ship! All hands, abandon ship!”

If that wasn’t printed on a banner over the entrance to the hall the federal Liberals have been using for their national caucus in Nanaimo this week, it should have been.

Back in July, former Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan left cabinet. He may have been prompted to go because, as labour minister, he didn’t want to have to deal with an impending railway strike (which could have been very messy).

Nevertheless, he left.

Last week, the party’s national campaign director, Jeremy Broadhurst, resigned that position (which he had held since 2019) the day after NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh tore up his agreement to prop up Justin Trudeau’s minority. After nearly two decades in senior Liberal circles, Broadhurst reportedly told friends he is pretty sure Trudeau can’t win next year’s scheduled federal election.

Three-term Ontario Liberal MP Francis Drouin announced in July he won’t seek re-election. Fellow Class of 2015 MP Pam Damoff, from suburban Toronto, announced in May.

And Monday, Alexandra Mendes, the Liberal MP for Brossard-St. Lambert in Quebec, became the first member of caucus to say publicly that Trudeau needs to go as party leader. “My constituents,” she explained, “do not see Mr. Trudeau as the person who should lead the party into the next election.”

In all, just over a quarter of the Liberal caucus (more than 40 MPs) have failed to fill out the internal party forms that would assure them the nominations in their ridings without a contested fight.

This reminds me of the 1993 general election in Alberta. Tory MPs could sense they were about to be wiped out by the Reform Party (and they were), so many of them chose not to run and instead “spend more time with my family.” That excuse was so prevalent that in the newsroom where I worked, we dubbed 1993 “The Year of the Family.”

Liberals know that almost everywhere outside Montreal and Toronto they are unlikely to win, so individual MPs are sparing themselves the embarrassment by pulling out now.

“But, Lorne,” you say, “Didn’t international fiscal guru Mark Carney just sign up to chair the Liberals’ task force on economic growth? Isn’t that a sign that talented people are still eager to become Liberals?”

Not really. This puts me in mind of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s off-colour quotation that, “It is better to have your enemies on the inside of the tent pissing out than on the outside pissing in.”

Trudeau is a longshot to win another election. Carney is a potential replacement. If Trudeau has no desire to resign before the next election in October 2025, he’s better off hugging Carney tight. That way there’s less chance of Carney staging a palace coup.

Who knows, Carney, who is a former Bank of Canada governor, might even slip Trudeau a couple ideas that perk up the economy and improve Liberal fortunes – a tiny bit.

But the Liberals have another problem. They have played woke and politically correct games for so long, that are now coming home to haunt them.

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Until now they have managed to keep these self-contradictory themes from colliding, but that is proving harder and harder to maintain.

Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance.

Not only have the Liberals welcomed to Canada hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (as well as often being adamantly anti-Semitic), they have nurtured a cult of victimhood for all sorts of minorities (Palestinians included), that has convinced hundreds of thousands of young voters to join with the angry Muslims to hate Israel.

Approximately 50 young Liberal staffers in the Montreal area announced two weeks ago they would boycott their own party’s byelection campaign in a Montreal suburb next week because the Trudeau government has not been sufficiently anti-Israel.

Thriving, principled parties don’t have these problems.