Predictability hangs in the balance as Justin Trudeau’s government awaits results of the U.S. presidential election

The tag line on one of the new Liberal ads — “We won’t go back” — is a very unsubtle hint on just how closely Justin Trudeau’s team is watching the U.S. election, and which side it is on.
The line is, of course, a direct borrow from Democrat Kamala Harris’s campaign chant: “We’re not going back.”
Officially, the Trudeau government says it’s not taking sides in this momentous choice for Americans, and that it will work with Harris or Donald Trump when the dust settles.
But it’s also pretty evident that the Liberals would prefer a Harris win, for the same reason it was hoping the Democrats would triumph over Trump four years ago: it’s not just ideological alignment between Democrats and Liberals, it’s predictability.
Here’s how Trudeau put it last January when I sat down for an interview with him and asked whether he was taking sides in the U.S. election.
“I mean, the first time through four years of Donald Trump was a real challenge,” the prime minister said. “Given what Mr. Trump has said about his intentions if he gets re-elected, it would certainly be challenging once again.”
He also said, “There’s no question that when there is significantly more alignment, like there is on environment and human rights and international engagement with the current president, with Mr. Biden, I obviously would hope to continue to work with people who are more aligned.”
Back in the early part of this year, Trudeau and his team were a little less guarded in their views of Trump, constantly casting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre as a northern version of Trump.
They have since dialed that back a bit, as former ambassador David MacNaughton urged them to do in a conversation with the Star’s Tonda MacCharles.
But they haven’t totally abandoned that attack line. Just last week, Housing Minister Sean Fraser ripped into Poilievre as a Republican knock-off, even going so far to make a connection between Poilievre’s support for the so-called “freedom convoy” of 2022 and the Jan. 6, 2021 siege of Capitol Hill in Washington.
“It is almost as though the Conservative party, when looking for a new leader, hopped on Temu and typed in ‘far-right Conservative,’ so it spat this guy out,” Fraser said. “He borrows lessons from his cousins south of the border when he opposes birth control for women. During the Jan. 6 of Canada, the convoy, he was not only telling people to stand by, but he was also bringing them coffee in the streets. It might be election season in America, but we do not need this far-right, right-wing populism here at home.”
A potential Trump win this week is one reason the Trudeau Liberals will want to keep those kind of shots to a minimum. As MacCharles reported in an analysis piece over the weekend, this government is preparing for that very real possibility.
But there are domestic reasons as well for the Liberals to take a more neutral tack on Trump’s politics.
The political landscape here, for instance, is not exactly the same as it was eight or even four years ago, when the vast majority of Canadians, polled on how they felt about Trump, were very much against his presidency.
An Environics Institute poll this fall suggested that a Harris win is still the preferred outcome for 60 per cent of respondents, but support for Trump has picked up in Canada since 2020, especially in Ontario and the West. Moreover, when Environics focused just on who Conservative voters would support, Trump edged out Harris — which is a big change from the last two presidential elections. (Environics conducted landline and cellphone interviews with 2,016 Canadians between Sept. 9 and 23, and results are considered accurate 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.)
So when Liberals say “we won’t go back” in their ads, they are not likely to find a mark among these Conservatives, who appear to be very open to Poilievre’s oft-repeated argument that Canada was a lot better before Trudeau came along.
A Harris victory could carry a mixed message for Liberals. On the one hand, it would be evidence that American voters are more disposed to progressive politics. “Progressive” is a word that also features large in the Liberal ads. However, it could also be viewed as what happens when the progressive party pulls off a switch of leaders, something that even some Liberals are seeking this fall.
For political and governance reasons, Trudeau will also be keeping an eye on the level of post-vote chaos in the U.S. He’s already kept his cabinet shuffle on hold until after the election and he may even want to prorogue Parliament while the U.S. — and Canada-U.S. relations — remain in limbo.
Trudeau and the Liberals have vivid memories of the chaos that Trump can insert into that relationship. “We won’t go back” is what many will be saying to each other as they watch results roll in.