All over the world, voters are in revolt over outrageous new taxes and regulations to support the progressive Green New Deal. Green parties lost over a quarter of their seats in this month’s European Union elections, and now the revolt has reached our neighbor Canada.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party lost a special election in the left-wing stronghold of Toronto. A seat that Liberals had won by 24 points in the last election swung to the opposition Conservatives, putting in jeopardy Trudeau’s hold on power.
Pollster Nik Nanos called the result “completely devastating” because “if the Conservatives can be competitive in downtown Toronto, that means basically, there’s not really a safe seat in the country.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called the result a vote “to axe Trudeau’s carbon tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.”
Scott Reid, a Liberal Party strategist, admitted that the crushing defeat tells Trudeau “in indisputable, undeniable and implacable terms, that his leadership harms his own party. The message for Liberals – and for the Prime Minister in particular – is unmistakable: Change or leave.”
Trudeaus’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland lashed out at just before the vote in Toronto by framing it as “a choice between two visions of Canada, two sets of values.” She called the Conservative approach “really cold, and cruel, and small…..cuts and austerity, not believing in ourselves as a country, not believing in our communities and in our neighbors.”
Canadian pundits are calling Freeland’s over-the-top comments a “Hillary moment” for the Liberals, a reference to when the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”
That rhetoric didn’t work for Hillary then, and the panic by Canadian progressives into imitating her almost certainly won’t help Trudeau when he faces voters next year.