Similar to Margaret Thatcher, Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper unified conservatives, won three elections in a row and utterly dominated the political landscape for almost a decade.
But like the Iron Lady, the conservative leader’s downfall was brutal and quick, relatively speaking.
Eleven weeks ago, few pundits gave Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau much of a shout at winning an overall majority, with the three largest parties tied in the polls in a statistical dead heat.
But if a month is a long time in politics, as the saying goes, 78 days – Canada’s longest election campaign since 1872 – is almost a lifetime.
Many countries mock the United States for its exhausting presidential campaign marathon that began to take shape August 3 (virtually the same time as the Canadian campaign started) with a televised forum featuring 14 Republican candidates – a full 15 months before the 2016 general election.
Apologists for the lengthy campaign say U.S. voters get to be sure the candidates have the right character to occupy the Oval Office and are sufficiently qualified for the task. Voters need the time to “think out” their vote, the argument goes.
A similar principle may have been at work in Canada’s longer-than-usual campaign. As the campaign went on, the more the electorate seemed to engage in the debate and the deep-rooted dissatisfaction with Harper and the appetite for change surfaced. The end effect was that 68.5 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot — a 12 percent increase over the 61.1 percent who voted in 2011.
Some analysts believe one of the reasons Harper had wanted a longer campaign was because he believed Trudeau’s inexperience and defects had more chance of becoming exposed. What actually happened was that the extended campaign played up Harper’s obvious negatives: lack of empathy, uninspiring, unambitious, penny-pinching – as well as his perceived “politics of division” that came to a head with his government’s effort to impose a ban on niqabs (face veils) during the citizenship oath. Trudeau’s late momentum also scuppered the hopes of Tom Mulcair and the New Democratic Party. Did “more time to think” mean voters reasoned that a return to the historic two-party model was a safer bet than putting the nation’s hands into an untried and untested “third” party for the first time? And just how important was the dynastical link with the past: the irresistible Pierre Trudeau, the charismatic prime minister synonymous with Canadian national unity and progress.
Even though the Conservatives counted on a more bountiful election “war chest,” they were outmaneuvered on the stump by savvy campaigning. Trudeau visited more ridings than either Harper or Mulcair, espousing a positive message that clearly connected with Canadians looking for more optimistic leadership in Ottawa.
Keen to tap into the prevailing positive vibes, Trudeau announced Tuesday that he plans to press ahead quickly with many of his campaign promises, starting with immediately pulling Canada out of the bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria.
How soon and smoothly he will be able to implement the rest of his agenda is less clear. It’s a complex, left-leaning list that includes tax breaks for the middle-class, more spending on infrastructure, the introduction of a national daycare program, the legalization and regulation of marijuana, increasing the number of Syrian refugees to 25,000 and electoral reforms, as well as reappraisal of plans to purchase F-35 fighter jets, amendments to controversial anti-terror legislation and a new debate on the recently signed Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The spirit of change that Trudeau is promising was quickly taken up by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose relationship with Harper had deteriorated to such an extent that he recently boycotted a North American Summit in Canada. The Liberal Party victory gives “Mexico and Canada the opportunity to start a new stage in its relationship,” he tweeted Tuesday. His administration has been highly critical of Harper’s 2009 move obliging Mexicans to obtain a visa to visit Canada, a result of the many claims by Mexicans for refugee status.
Trudeau has vowed to do away with the visa requirement and has stated that Mexico is a legitimate source of refugees.