OTTAWA – With Marc Garneau officially ending his campaign, the outcome of the Liberal leadership is all but assured.
It is frontrunner Justin Trudeau’s race to lose, but Garneau’s departure raises questions about whether that was ever in doubt.
After weeks on the road, Garneau returned to Ottawa on Thursday and filled a room on Parliament Hill with reporters waiting to hear why he was bowing out of the race.
“I entered this race believing I had a chance to win. The odds were long, but not impossible,” Garneau said. “But it is my opinion now based on internal analysis that the party has chosen.”
Garneau cited a survey he commissioned, that showed Trudeau had 72 per cent support compared to 15 per cent for Garneau.
Garneau was considered Trudeau’s only serious challenger in a leadership race many warned could not become another coronation.
The last Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, was simply ratified as leader at the convention in 2009, after the other candidates dropped out, and later led the party to a historic defeat in 2011.
Six years earlier, the criticism of a “coronation” was similar when Paul Martin won that leadership race.
This time around, many party members, pundits and politicians insisted the party needed a truly competitive race that would put the next leader to the test and prove them worthy of the job.
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And despite the commanding lead he has had since the beginning, some say the leadership race will not be a coronation even if Trudeau does win.
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“Justin has been held to account,” said Greg MacEachern, vice-president of government relations at Environics Communications and former Liberal advisor. “Liberals wanted something balanced, something that wasn’t going to be a divisive fight where people walked away angry afterwards but at the same time was a very competitive race. I think they got that. They’ve still got some very strong candidates in it.”
Some critics will definitely use the word “coronation” if Trudeau is elected, but such a description will not be accurate, according to Queen’s University political science professor Erin Crandall.
“I don’t think it was treated as a coronation by the Liberal party,” she said. “They really wanted to push Justin and make him take positions that, if he wasn’t being pushed, he otherwise wouldn’t have been inclined to do.”
Garneau, too, insisted the race wasn’t over and that although he was bowing out, he had successfully tested Trudeau by calling on him to take a decisive stance on policies.
“After I initially mentioned that that policy did become to come out,” Garneau said. “He endorsed the policy I had brought out in terms of student debt deferment.”
Liberal interim leader Bob Rae didn’t make much of comments that a less competitive race could hurt the party.
“Every race is what it is. Each race is different and it represents the choices people are making and we will see in the end what choices people do make, but until the race is over I won’t be making any comment on who is ahead or who is behind,” he said.
There are still seven candidates in the running: Trudeau, Joyce Murray, Martha Hall Findlay, David Bertschi, Martin Cauchon, Deborah Coyne and Karen McCrimmon. The 100,000 Liberal supporters and members registered to vote so far will be able to start casting their votes in the first week of April. The winner will be announced in Ottawa on April 14.
Murray plans to battle it out with Trudeau until the very end.
“I’m in the running. I have a good shot at this,” she said. “If Marc felt he didn’t then it’s his decision as to how to take that information and what action to take.”
MacEachern, who has remained neutral in the race, said a tight race in terms of numbers may have eluded the party because Trudeau has been crisscrossing the country for the last several years trying to breathe some life into the party.
“Justin just started so far ahead, add on to that high name recognition, high visibility, a young active MP in a party that has obviously been struggling since 2011,” he said.
Even if Trudeau is crowned, Crandall said that doesn’t necessarily bode poorly for the party as long as there were no actual impediments put in place for other candidates.
“People are paying attention to the Liberal party. The media is paying attention to the Liberal party. It gives them a platform that they otherwise wouldn’t have as the third party in the House of Commons,” she said.
The numbers prove the race has been good for the party, according to MacEachern.
“A huge amount of Canadians have signed up as supporters and that’s exactly what I think the Liberal party needed, was more new blood, more new people being involved in the process,” he said.
In an interview, former prime minister Jean Chretien said Trudeau has a big policy plan and wants to replace the Conservatives, which is fundamental for Canada.
“You know he will be fiscally responsible and he will be socially preoccupied like a Liberal is and he will want Canada to be what we were in the world under (Lester B.) Pearson, under his father and under myself. That is a big change,” Chretien said in an interview to be aired Sunday on the Global News program The West Block with Tom Clark.
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