THUNDER BAY — A Lakehead University political scientist says that given Justin Trudeau’s long tenure as prime minister, his resignation was unsurprising.
When discussing Canadian politics with friends, colleagues and fellow citizens, Dr. Toby Rollo, a LU professor and chair of the political science department said he always tries to keep in mind that the next prime minister, if they stay in power long enough, is inevitably going also to be plagued by scandal, economic declines and the same sorts of things that Trudeau has encountered.
"Although it is doubtful that the next prime minister will have to deal with another pandemic," said Rollo. "Hopefully."
“It's hard to really assuage people's feelings about Trudeau. He was in power for a decade and, during which time, any leader of any party is going to amass scandals and failures and be held responsible for economic issues during that time, some of which are out of their control, some of which are in their control,” said Rollo.
Going forward, Rollo hopes citizens do not put too much faith in Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives being radically different from Trudeau and the Liberals.
He said he is concerned that for all Trudeau and the Liberal’s failings, there's not much they would have done differently than a Conservative Party in a similar situation.
“Effectively policy-wise they're going to appear virtually identical with maybe some exceptions, having to do with moving the carbon tax around or something like that and some other cosmetic issues. All in all, though, the two parties’ policy-wise have historically for the last few decades at least been fairly similar,” said Rollo.
Trudeau announced he would resign as Liberal Leader and step down as prime minister on Monday.
“It was kind of predictable and it was expected,” said Rollo.
“It was pretty clear the Liberal Party wasn't going to be able to move forward and have any chance of electoral success with Trudeau being at the head of the party, given that he's so unpopular right now.”
Rollo explained that the polls currently suggest that the Liberal government does not have a chance of getting re-elected this year.
But, he added, ‘anything could happen.’
“My suspicion is that the Liberal government is going to try to pick a leader who can go toe-to-toe with Pierre Poilievre and that they're going to probably try to associate the Conservative Party with the upcoming Trump presidency in the U.S. in order to cast the Conservatives in less appealing light for voters,” said Rollo.
Rollo said there is also a chance the Liberals could actually do better than they're projected to perform, if Poilievre commits a major faux pas or has a public gaffe in conjunction with the Liberals electing new leadership.
However, he said ‘the chances are slim.’
“It's likely that the Conservatives are going to have at least a minority government moving forward,” said Rollo.
In the meantime, Rollo said Parliament will be prorogued until the end of March, so there would be no effective government until then.
A prorogation, he explained, means that parliament is suspended, which prime ministers will often do strategically to let criticism cool off, when there's a scandal or sometimes it's used legitimately just to suspend Parliament for any number of issues.
However, he said Parliament "always reconvenes, fairly quickly."
“They will face confidence votes once Parliament is back in session in late March, at which point we could probably expect the government to fail ... and an election to be called, so there's not much of a future for this particular government,” said Rollo.
