The hopes of an anxious Liberal caucus were first raised at the end of the summer of 2022 in the resort town of St. Andrew’s, New Brunswick.
Liberals had gathered that August for the first in-person retreat after the pandemic to confront a series of polls that found them trailing the leaderless Conservatives by a few points.
In September of that year, the Conservatives would find their leader, Pierre Poilievre, and now, two years later, the anxiety of 2022 has turned to the panic of 2024 with multiple polls showing the Liberals 20 points behind and facing an absolute rout if an election were held this fall. Many Liberal MPs who once thought they might survive on their own popularity are now facing the reality that they will lose their jobs because of the unpopularity of the same leader who helped them win back in 2015.
Liberal MPs were told at that 2022 caucus that there was a plan to turn things around. They were told the same thing when they met last month in Nanaimo, B.C., for this year’s summer caucus retreat. Indeed, applause could be heard from the closed-door meeting in the room at the conference centre in downtown Nanaimo when Trudeau’s director of strategic communications, Max Valiquette, presented his marketing plan for the months ahead.
Now many of those MPs complain that nothing was done after the St. Andrews meetings. And nothing has been done since Nanaimo.
The complainers say there has been no promised communications campaign, no change in policies, and no change in the way the PM and his senior aides interact with caucus.
Conservative campaigner Cole Hogan, a principal at gt&co, tracks the amount of money each party spends on Facebook advertising, figures which Facebook itself discloses about all political parties. For the week ending Oct. 5, the Conservatives spent $114,569 on Facebook ads compared to $3,086 by the Liberals and $1,240 by the NDP. Hogan has documented week after week of this kind of lopsided ad spending ever since that Nanaimo meeting and before it. The data reinforces the views of complaining Liberals that nothing has been done.
And while Liberal MPs were promised some sort of marketing campaign to boost their fortunes, the Conservatives produced slick TV ads that aired on legacy television networks. The Liberal response? Trudeau did a podcast with one of his own backbenchers and made an appearance on a U.S. late-night TV show.
The contrast has some of Trudeau’s MPs shaking their heads.
At least one of the common complaints of many MPs who spoke to Global News this weekend was addressed Sunday when the party finally named a national campaign director, a position that had been vacant for more than a month after Jeremy Broadhurst resigned from the job. The new campaign director is Andrew Bevan, who will be leaving his post as the chief of staff to Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister and deputy prime minister.
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Bevan is a Liberal ‘old hand,’ a soft-spoken Brit, quick with a smile and a laugh who has been working in and around federal and Ontario Liberal parties for ages.
“Good at reading people, wise in understanding how to help them trust him. And a very nice guy,” Robin Sears, the former principal secretary to NDP leader Ed Broadbent, wrote at Bevan’s LinkedIn page as an endorsement when Bevan joined Freeland’s office.
“Andrew Bevan knows how to win,” David Herle posted on his social accounts. Herle has run several political and federal campaigns for the Liberals.
That said, Bevan has also ended up as the top staffer in some famous Liberal lost causes. He ran Stephane Dion’s office when Dion was trying — and failing — to sell his Green Shift to Canadians in the 2008 election. He was Kathleen Wynne’s top advisor at Queen’s Park as the Liberal reign in Ontario came crashing down in 2018. Now he may be facing the steepest hill he’s ever had to climb: getting a long-in-the-tooth Trudeau government re-elected in 2025.
It will be no surprise to him that many of the incumbent Liberals he will be trying help re-elect think the job would be easier with a new leader.
Those who want a leadership change tend to be ‘blue’ Liberals, the kind who might have supported Paul Martin or John Manley in ancient leadership races. Some believe someone like François-Philippe Champagne, who represents Jean Chrétien’s old Shawinigan riding and serves as Trudeau’s minister for innovation, science and industry, would immediately improve the Liberals’ fortunes if he were leader.
It’s not just leaders that need to change, say some of the complainers, it’s time also to abandon some cherished policies including the carbon tax.
“It’s out the door anyway when Poilievre wins,” one MP said.
Indeed, several progressive-minded politicians across the country have already decided that it is impossible to campaign and win on a federal carbon price. New Democrat premiers Wab Kinew in Manitoba and David Eby in B.C. have called on the feds to scrap the carbon tax. Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck is campaigning in the provincial election underway in her province against a carbon tax. And federal NDP Jagmeet Singh, too, is now wavering on the principle of pricing carbon.
In New Brunswick Liberal leader Susan Holt has also called on Ottawa to cancel any hikes in the carbon tax. And now there are members of Trudeau’s own caucus — largely MPs from English-speaking Canada — who think it’s time to do what Polievre’s Conservatives have been constantly calling for and “Axe the Tax.”
Global News spoke this weekend with many members of the Liberal caucus. Those who had something substantial to say about a mushrooming caucus revolt — either pro or con — preferred not to be quoted by name.
Indeed, one of those MPs seeking a leadership change said part of the problem is that there is almost no one seeking a revolt who will say so when the TV cameras are pointed at them.
Someone, this MP said, needs to either hold a press conference or organize a sustained “storm the microphone” campaign at the next Liberal caucus meeting which, given the ‘break week’ ahead, is not likely to occur until Oct. 23.
It’s unclear how widespread any caucus leadership revolt is. The Toronto Star first reported Friday that a movement was underway to get rebels to commit in writing to seek a new leader. Other news organizations, including Global News, have confirmed the existence of such a document. But how many have signed? It might be 20. It might be 30. There are, though, more than 150 Liberal MPs. Those who seek a leadership change say there would need to be at least 50 demanding change to force some action.
News of this ‘revolt’ broke publicly on Friday as Trudeau and his closest aides were in the midst of a 13-hour flight from Laos to a refuelling stop in Honolulu on an RCAF aircraft with no Internet connectivity. Trade Minister Mary Ng, who was travelling with Trudeau, told reporters during that refuelling stop that she did not learn of this revolt until she fired up her phone as the flight was landing in Hawaii. (Indeed, all the reporters on the plane learned of it the same way.)
And yet, back in Ottawa, Trudeau loyalists had already begun the hunt for the rebels. Global News has learned that while Trudeau was in the air, PMO aides were already phoning around to Liberal MPs trying to find those they suspected of signing the document demanding change.
Those PMO aides would almost certainly have started with members of the Atlantic caucus. Last Wednesday, while Trudeau was out of the country, the chair of the Atlantic caucus, Nova Scotia’s Kody Blois, startled the weekly national caucus meeting by declaring that Atlantic MPs had just come from a “a difficult but frank discussion about the future of the party” and then he simply walked out of the closed-door national caucus meeting.
“It was quite unbelievable,” one non-Atlantic Canadian MP said.
MPs who spoke to Global News said Trudeau is now on the verge of losing the support of the Ontario and Quebec caucuses.
As MPs from those two provinces knock on doors soliciting support, they say that they get positive reviews about the work the government has done (spurred on by Jagmeet Singh’s NDP) on national pharmacare and national dental care but any support Liberals might earn on those policies evaporates when it comes to the leader.
“He’s not just unpopular,” one Liberal said. “He is strongly disliked.”
David Akin is the chief political correspondent for Global News.