LILLEY: Voters ready for change after showing Trudeau the door

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Behind all the noise about whether Liberal MPs want to oust Justin Trudeau, there is one major factor that we shouldn’t forget – voters are done with Trudeau. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that Sean Casey, the Liberal MP from Charlottetown gave for arguing Trudeau should resign.

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“The message that I’ve been getting loud and clear — and more and more strongly as time goes by — is that it is time for (Trudeau) to go,” Casey told CBC. “And I agree.”

It seems he believes voters are tuning out Trudeau, which is not a shock to anyone who has followed the polls over the last year or so.

The Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre started gaining voter support and pulling away from Trudeau’s Liberals in the spring of 2023. By the end of September 2023, the Conservative lead had moved into double-digit territory and then earlier this year moved to between a 15 and 20 point lead where it has stayed.

The latest poll from Abacus Data has Poilievre’s Conservatives at 43% voter support, the Liberals at 22% and the NDP at 19%. As they have for months now, the Conservatives lead in every region except Quebec, and in Quebec, they are tied at 24% with the Liberals, both parties well behind the Bloc Quebecois at 36%.

The Ontario numbers are where the Trudeau Liberals need to worry the most.

In the last federal election, the Liberals won 78 of the province’s 121 seats. They dominated in Toronto, in the Ottawa area, in southwestern Ontario and now….all of those seats are at risk.

According to Abacus, the Conservatives lead in every region of the province including Toronto, the city itself.

Abacus has the Conservatives taking 47% of the votes across Ontario, the Liberals 25% and the NDP 20%. In Toronto proper, the Conservatives are polling at 47%, the Liberals at 26% and the NDP at 18%.

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Some seat projections say that the Liberals could be reduced to just one of Toronto’s 25 seats in the next election.

When voters, especially in what were once strongholds for the party, are tuning you out, does changing the leader matter? Put another way, if more MPs step forward like Sean Casey has, and Trudeau is forced out, will anything change?

It’s tough to see the Liberals recovering at this point and while it’s not impossible, it is also unlikely.

Just as it is unlikely that dozens of Liberal MPs will step forward and call for Trudeau to resign. If they felt that strongly about this matter, they would have done so already.

We’ve been hearing about dissension in the ranks for months and before Casey, only New Brunswick MP Wayne Long had called for Trudeau to go. Montreal MP Alexandra Mendes said in September that her constituents want Trudeau to go before quickly adding that she felt Trudeau should stay on.

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If Liberal MPs haven’t found their spines by now, they are unlikely to do so in the near future.

Meanwhile, Trudeau is trying to use the issue of foreign interference to change the channel on his leadership. He came out hard against India’s political activities on Monday and is appearing at the Foreign Interference Commission on Wednesday.

He’s clearly hoping to use this issue to show that he is still the prime minister and he’s still in charge.

Based on the polling, those optics may only matter to the Liberal caucus and the media covering Parliament Hill. Voters have moved on from Trudeau, now they’re just waiting for him to move along himself.

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