Justin Trudeau’s Election Announcement Flops, and so did the Liberal Polling Numbers

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set to announce the start of the new, and very short, federal election it seemed like the Liberals would sail to a majority, but when the actual announcement came it heavily backfired and put Trudeau far behind where he would have wanted to be.

Not only was Trudeau losing momentum going towards the election announcement due to Canadians disapproval of having to go back to the polls right now, but when he did drop the writ for the September 20 election, he bungled the rollout with cheap excuses for why he even bothered calling the election. 

Trudeau said during his announcement after speaking to Governor General Mary Simon:

The decisions your government makes right now will define the future your kids and grandkids grow up in. So in this pivotal, consequential moment, who wouldn’t want a say? Who wouldn’t want their chance to help decide where our country goes from here? Canadians need to choose how we finish the fight against COVID-19 and build back better.

Trudeau is going for this strange justification that despite them being the party of mandatory vaccines for federal workers they really wanted to give Canadians a “choice” in shaping the future.

Whenever a member of the media asked Trudeau why he decided to call the election despite having previously had his party vote for a resolution to not hold an election until COVID-19 is gone, Trudeau would keep repeating something along the lines of, “Canadians deserve their say, and that’s exactly what we are going to give them,” unable to justify his previous positions. 

After Trudeau’s quite clunky announcement of the new election, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh then proceeded to do his own campaign kickoff press conference where he severely blunted the Liberals’ momentum with an attack from the political left. 

Singh ended up trending on Twitter most of the day yesterday, whereas Trudeau mostly fell off the map, with even Erin O’Toole performing better on social media than Trudeau on the first day of the election.

It was as if Canadians had already grown tired of Trudeau before the day of his announcement with all of the over-coverage of the rumours of when the writ may drop, which made when it did come already feel played-out.

Trudeau also did himself no favours by crafting a speech that was incredibly self-congratulatory, on top of delivering no good answer for why he felt the need to call an election, in contravention of his parties previous position on an election with COVID-19 still around.  

The Nova Scotia provincial election will be held tomorrow and it appears that the Liberal’s may underperform what many had expected them to do when the campaign kicked off. The Nova Scotia Liberals had dropped from 45 percent in the polls at the beginning of the election, and are now at only 40 percent, which has reduced their chances at a majority government significantly. 

All this could prove to be fatal for Trudeau’s own chances at a majority, and if he wastes donor money to merely grow his minority government by a few seats then there could be harsh consequences for him and the Liberal Party in the aftermath of the election.