Coyne: Justin Trudeau’s appeal has NDP scrambling to the left ahead of election

The Liberals and their popular leader, Justin Trudeau, are poised to take support from both the Conservatives and the NDP. Photo: JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press

A year after the past election, the future of the Liberal Party of Canada was very much in doubt. A year before the next, the party has not only rebounded, it is the party to beat. It leads the polls in every region except the Prairies. It leads on a range of issues, not only traditional Liberal strengths such as health care and the environment but also job creation and accountability.

There isn’t the slightest room for doubt why. The party’s surge in support coincided precisely with the election of Justin Trudeau as leader. An Abacus Data poll has him ahead of his rivals on virtually every leadership attribute: values, ideas, attitude and judgment (where he is tied with the NDP’s Tom Mulcair). A large part of that has to do with Trudeau’s personal appeal, not only in his own right but — never underestimate how much this matters — as the Son Of. But as important has been where he has positioned the party.

Instead of the predicted convergence on the centre by the other two parties, leaving the traditionally centrist Liberals with neither votes nor raison d’etre, the Liberals have held their ground — and then some. Trudeau’s dynastic appeal, at first a shield against the other parties’ incursions, has become a sword, carving away sections of support from both the Conservatives and the NDP. Voters on the centre-right and centre-left are as likely to believe that Trudeau agrees with them.

A man shares pictures with Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau during a campaign stop in this file photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Marc Grandmaison)

Some of this, again, is personality-based. Trudeau has not needed to stake out a position on many of the issues to be given the benefit of the doubt. But the positions he has taken — on marijuana legalization (for it), on tax increases (against), on pipelines (for Keystone XL, against Northern Gateway) — artfully blend left and right in a way that makes it hard to categorize him as either.

But, of course, what is a strength in politics can as easily become a weakness. The Liberal leader’s ambiguous message has carried him, and his party, this far. But with the political season having begun in earnest, the other parties already are trying to turn it against him. Their strategies to date having failed, both are making major adjustments for the campaign to come.

The clearest signal of this has come from the NDP. Whatever the surface rhetoric, there is no mistaking the underlying message of last week’s caucus retreat: trailing badly in the polls, having lost a string of byelections it might have been expected to win, the NDP has given up any hope of forming a government at the next election. The game now is to hold on to Official Opposition status. Operation Occupy the Centre has been called off. Operation Reclaim The Left is on.

This will be less about sowing doubts about Trudeau’s abilities as a leader than about questioning his bona fides as a “progressive.” What difference would it make, they will ask, to replace the Conservatives with the Liberals, if their policies are largely the same?

To make the point, the NDP will unveil a series of policy proposals intended to sharpen the distinctions between themselves and the Liberals. The teasers offered to date — a national day-care program modelled on Quebec’s $7-a-day system (even as Quebec is in the process of moving away from it), a $15 minimum wage for federally regulated industries, plus pledges to reverse any number of Tory policies, from corporate taxes to Old Age Security — are not those of a centrist government in waiting. They are a party trying to hold on to its existing base.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, right, greets spectators during the Vancouver Pride Parade in Vancouver, B.C. in this file photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)

They have no choice. They cannot allow the election to be about leadership — whatever his strengths, Mulcair cannot compete with Trudeau’s popular appeal — and they cannot allow it to be about who is best placed to defeat the Conservatives, or risk seeing the left unite behind the Liberals. By making it about policy, they can at least cause trouble for the Liberals on their left flank, restricting Trudeau’s ability to court conservative voters. Other than that, cross your fingers and hope the kid implodes during the campaign.

Until now that was very much the Conservative strategy. Yet millions of dollars of advertising on the “in over his head” theme — reinforced by Trudeau’s own periodic head-shakers — would seem, to date at least, to have failed. While that message will undoubtedly continue, the emphasis may be about to shift. The evidence is fragmentary — a “positive” ad, touting their own accomplishments, in place of the usual harsh attacks on Trudeau; a relaxed, even folksy speech by Harper to kick off the fall session of Parliament, with an address to the United Nations to follow — but the Tories may be ready to dial back the partisanship a little, in a bid to win back those centre-right voters who have been put off by the nastiness of the government’s approach — the same voters Trudeau has been successfully wooing.

At the same time, the Tories are firming up their policy pitch to reassure supporters who might have wondered if the party had lost its way. Long-promised initiatives — free trade agreements with Europe, Japan and Korea; a balanced budget; more tax cuts — are at last reaching fruition, just in time for the election. Foreign policy will be given unusual prominence, partly to showcase Stephen Harper as statesman — in contrast with Trudeau’s inexperience — and partly as a broad statement of values and identity, in furtherance of the Tories’ effort to rebrand the country in their own image. Is Canada, they will ask, a country that takes sides and stands up for what’s right, or one that, as the prime minister likes to say, “goes along to get along?”

Trudeau, in short, has had a great, almost effortless run to date. But the squeeze is on. The next year will be where his leadership is really put to the test.