Conservative campaign co-chair Walied Soliman earlier said holding Trudeau to a minority government would be a win. Trudeau the majority mandate he wanted,” O’Toole said. O’Toole, 47, is a military veteran, former lawyer and a member of Parliament for nine years.
The 49-year-old Trudeau channeled the star power of his father, the Liberal icon and late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, when he first won election in 2015 and has led his party to the top finish in two elections since.Ī Conservative win would have represented a rebuke of Trudeau by a politician with a fraction of his name recognition. “The explosion of the pandemic in Alberta in the past 10 days undermined O’Toole’s compliments of the Alberta Conservatives on how they had handled the pandemic and reinforced Trudeau’s argument for mandatory vaccinations,” he said. Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto, said the Conservatives were hurt by the situation in Alberta. “The debate on vaccination and Trudeau taking on the anti-vaccination crowd helped the Liberals to salvage a campaign that didn’t start well for the party,” Béland said.
O’Toole described vaccination as a personal health decision, but a growing number of vaccinated Canadians are increasingly upset with those who refuse to get the shot. Kenney apologized for the dire situation and is now reluctantly introducing a vaccine passport and imposing a mandatory work-from-home order two months after lifting nearly all restrictions.Ĭonservative leader Erin O’Toole, meanwhile, didn’t require his party’s candidates to be vaccinated and would not say how many were not. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said the province might run out of beds and staff for intensive care units within days. Trudeau supports making vaccines mandatory for Canadians to travel by air or rail, something the Conservatives oppose.Īnd he has pointed out that Alberta, run by a Conservative provincial government, is in crisis. Trudeau argued that the Conservatives’ approach, which has been skeptical of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, would be dangerous. Canada has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and Trudeau’s government spent hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up the economy amid lockdowns. Trudeau bet Canadians didn’t want a Conservative government during a pandemic, playing up his own party’s successes.
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Trudeau and the Liberals saved their skin and will stay in power, but many Canadians who didn’t want this late summer, pandemic election are probably not amused about the whole situation,” he said. “Basically we are back to square one, as the new minority parliament will look like the previous one. “Trudeau lost his gamble to get a majority so I would say this is a bittersweet victory for him,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal. Hours after the results came in, Trudeau greeted commuters and posed for pictures at a subway stop in his district in Montreal on Tuesday morning - a post-election tradition for the prime minister.īut experts noted that it was not the victory Trudeau had hoped for. “I hear you when you say you just want to get back to the things you love and not worry about this pandemic or an election.” “You are sending us back to work with a clear mandate to get Canada through this pandemic,” Trudeau said. The leftist New Democrats were leading or elected in 25, while the Bloc Québécois were leading or elected in 34 and the Greens were down to two. The Conservatives were leading or elected in 119 seats, two less than they won in 2019. The Liberal Party was leading or elected in 158 seats - one more than they won 2019, and 12 short of the 170 needed for a majority in the House of Commons. In the end, the gamble did not pay off, and the results nearly mirrored those of two years ago. Still, Trudeau struggled to justify why he called the election early given the virus, and the opposition was relentless in accusing him of holding the vote two years before the deadline for his own personal ambition. Trudeau entered Monday’s election leading a stable minority government that wasn’t under threat of being toppled - but he was hoping Canadians would reward him with a majority for navigating the pandemic better than many other leaders. TORONTO > Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party secured victory in parliamentary elections but failed to get the majority he wanted in a vote that focused on the coronavirus pandemic but that many Canadians saw as unnecessary.