ANALYSIS | Is Trudeau Going to Call an Election in 2024?
Photo Credit: Mary Altaffer/AP VIA Al Jazeera
After nine years in power and three election wins, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been staring down many issues in Canada recently, including generation-high interest rates, the housing crisis, and his lowest approval ratings ever. Because the 2021 election was called prematurely, Canadians are not yet scheduled to go back to the polls until October 2025.
According to a recent poll conducted by the Angus Reid Institute, most Canadians, including almost half of Liberal respondents, believe that Trudeau should step down from his position before the next election. This has caused some news organizations, such as the CBC, to speculate about a federal election in 2024. In fact, nearly one in two Canadians would prefer the next federal election to take place before 2025, according to a recent study conducted by Nano Research.
If Trudeau were to play it safe, he would wait until 2025 to call the election. By that point, his biggest opponent, Pierre Poilievre, may lose some of his current momentum and give Trudeau a better chance of winning the election in 2025 than in 2024. The Liberals and NDP currently maintain a supply and confidence agreement, in which the two parties support each other on key issues such as healthcare, housing affordability, the climate crisis, workers’ rights, and reconciliation. Because the agreement stipulates that the NDP will not support a vote of no confidence, Trudeau is guaranteed to remain prime minister until June 2025 as long as he does not call an election sooner. Therefore, even in the face of public disapproval, it is highly unlikely that Trudeau will drop his position as prime minister or call an election in 2024.
Many Canadians are still pondering whether Trudeau will continue to lead the Liberal Party or if he will drop his position in the near future to another top minister. With various poll results suggesting that the Liberal Party’s support is still going down, many Canadians want a major change to power in the government. In a poll conducted by Research Co., a plurality of Canadians, 30 per cent, considered Prime Minister Trudeau the worst prime minister of the last 55 years. Meanwhile, his father, Pierre Trudeau, was ranked as the best prime minister with 20 per cent of votes.
Some of Prime Minister Trudeau’s top ministers, including Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Innovation and Science Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, were recently asked whether they are planning to replace him as Liberal leader. Freeland, who has been considered by many as a possible successor, gave Trudeau her “full support” and said that he was a solid leader for the Liberal Party. Champagne, another rumoured future party leader, concurred with Freeland’s remarks. These endorsements have essentially ruled out any chance that these ministers might compete with Trudeau for the party leadership. However, that does not mean that Trudeau will win the Liberal Party nomination easily. He might encounter competition from other political figures in the running, such as Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.
Meanwhile, Trudeau’s Conservative counterpart, Pierre Poilievre, is continuing to pick up momentum with his promises to lower the cost of living, to balance the federal budget, and to call for an end to carbon taxes if he were to be elected as prime minister. Since September 2023, Poilievre has continuously hammered Trudeau with accusations of driving up the cost of living through what he calls “reckless government spending.”