New Delhi: After three terms in power, Canadian Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau shows further signs of losing popularity and control after his candidate was defeated in the race for a crucial parliamentary seat Monday.
In the byelection to LaSalle-Émard-Verdun, a Liberal stronghold for decades, Trudeau’s candidate Laura Palestini was defeated by Quebec nationalist Louis-Philippe Sauvé by 248 votes.
Monday’s defeat follows the party’s poor performance in Toronto in June and has increased pressure on the prime minister to resign. The St Paul’s seat in Toronto, held by the Liberals for about 30 years, went to the Conservatives with Don Stewart winning 42.11 percent of the votes compared to 40 percent by the Liberals’ Leslie Church.
Sauvé, who is a member of the Bloc Québécois, a party that has advocated independence for Quebec, may have won a three-way contest by just a margin but was successful in exposing the waning popularity of the Liberals.
While Sauvé won 28 percent of the vote, Liberal candidate Palestini received 27.2 percent and the New Democratic Party candidate won 26.1 percent.
The seat of LaSalle-Émard-Verdun was once considered “safe” for the Liberals with three-time MP David Lametti triumphing since 2015. In 2021, Lametti won comfortably, finishing almost 20 percentage points ahead of rivals. But he left his cabinet position sooner than expected due to issues with Trudeau after he was shuffled out of his post as justice minister in 2023.
The seat in Montreal, Quebec, which the Liberals have won for decades, is just over an hour’s distance from Trudeau’s constituency Papineau, and a little further from the airport named after his father.
Trudeau did not even feature in Palestini’s campaign, Politico reported, pointing to his waning popularity.
The withdrawal of support by Jagmeet Singh’s National Democratic Party earlier this month has also left Trudeau in a tough spot as his approval ratings plummeted to 28 percent. “Voters have had it,” said an opinion piece by Terry Newman in the The National Post, a Canadian daily. “There are simply no more safe spaces for Trudeau’s Liberals,” it added.
Trudeau has been facing competition from increasingly popular 44-year-old Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. Spars between the two have become common in and outside the Parliament. The Conservatives threatened a no-confidence motion against Trudeau and called for early elections in Parliament on Monday.
Opinion polls predict further losses for Trudeau, with the Conservatives gaining 45 percent of public support as suggested by a Leger poll last week. Poll-tracking website 338Canada anticipates a victory for the Conservatives in the 2025 federal elections with a 43 percent vote share, with the Liberals trailing at just 24 percent.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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