Prime ministers who can’t see the writing on the wall

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/11/2024 (310 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chooses to remain as PM and as leader of the Liberal Party, the odds are fairly high that the Liberals will be decimated in the next federal election like they were in September 1984 when Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives won one of the largest majorities in Canadian history.

Even if Trudeau accepted that his time was up as prime minister and heeded a recent poll which showed that 57 per cent of Canadians want the another Liberal leader in the next election, that might not be enough to save them from the type of shellacking they received in 1984 and again in 2011, when the party led by Michael Ignatieff came in third behind the Conservatives and the NDP.

After Ignatieff’s downfall, the Liberals wandered around in the dark for the next two years until they chose Trudeau as their leader and he delivered a majority government in 2015. But that now seems like ancient history.

The electoral success of politicians who replace prime ministers has varied.

William Lyon Mackenzie King eked out a majority government in the election of 1921 after he became Liberal leader following the death of Wilfrid Laurier in 1919, and then went on to serve as prime minister for close to 22 years during non-consecutive terms between 1921 and 1948.

His successor, Louis St. Laurent, was victorious in the elections of 1949 and 1953, as was Pierre Trudeau in the 1968 election after he replaced Lester Pearson.

But it can go the other way, too. Just ask John Turner and Kim Campbell. Turner took over the Liberals from Pierre Trudeau in June 1984. He ran an awful campaign in which, among other things, he was trounced by Mulroney in a televised debate when he failed to denounce a flurry of patronage appointments Trudeau had made before he left office.

When challenged by Mulroney to defend his actions, Turner meekly declared that “I had no option.” That reply sealed his fate at the polls six weeks later.

Kim Campbell became the Progressive Conservative leader and the first woman to serve as prime minister — if only for 132 days — after Mulroney, who was by then as unpopular as Justin Trudeau is today, resigned in June 1993.

Campbell also ran a poor campaign and suffered an utterly humiliating defeat when she and the party were reduced from 156 to two seats. She lost her seat in her Vancouver riding and resigned as PC leader seven weeks later.

One truth of Canadian politics is that it often has been difficult to convince a prime minister, particularly ones who have led majority governments, that their parties would be better off if they resigned.

Hubris is one reason: they perceive themselves as indispensable and refuse to accept negative poll results or criticism from within their parties.

Laurier, one of the greatest of Canadian prime ministers, won four majority governments between 1896 and 1908.

After he and the party were defeated by Robert Borden and the Conservatives in the 1911 election, he stayed as Liberal Party leader for another eight years, through the tumultuous years of the First World War and the battle over conscription in 1917.

By then, Laurier was 76 years old and should have seen that it was time for someone else to lead the party, but he insisted that he could rebuild the party, and none of his colleagues was bold enough to openly challenge him. Only his death in February 1919 ended his political career.

No one becomes leader of a political party or prime minister without an oversized ego. The power they wield and the perks of office can be intoxicating and hard to relinquish. Their sense of their own greatness can cloud their judgment.

“You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none,” Mulroney boasted to journalist Peter C. Newman in one of many unguarded conversations the two had.

That was not quite true. Mulroney wasted much political capital on trying to appease Quebec, yet his efforts at constitutional change with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords failed and were highly divisive. And the free trade agreement he negotiated with the U.S. was not as indisputably positive as he believed.

As historian Norman Hillmer and editor Andrew McIntosh argue, the agreement “brought economic prosperity in some respects, but critics said it also led to the erosion of the middle class and worsening income inequality.”

When it comes to political leaders, Canadians can be fickle. Following Mulroney’s death in February of this year, a poll indicated 83 per cent of those who participated believed he had “done a good job” as prime minister.

No doubt these were some of the same voters who had denounced him three decades earlier and turfed his party from power.

Time does alter perspective. Who knows? One day in the distant future Justin Trudeau’s term of office as prime minister might be regarded a lot more positively. Seriously, it could happen.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.