The vernal equinox was Sunday, and for Justin Trudeau the end of summer couldn’t come too soon. Canada’s Prime Minister had a horrible summer, but doesn’t seem to understand why.

As Parliament rose for its summer break the Liberals lost a stronghold Toronto riding in a by-election, one that had been held by retiring former cabinet minister Carolyn Bennet for almost 30 years. This led to a lot of speculation about Trudeau’s future, and even some calls within the party for him to step down. The thinking was that of the Liberals could lose in Toronto-St. Paul’s, then there wasn’t a safe seat left in the country.

The Prime Minister’s response was basically to shrug off the defeat. The Liberals just needed to do better at communicating their message to the public, he said. It certainly wasn’t a referendum on huis leadership (or lack thereof) and he wasn’t going anywhere.

While many observers felt that the loss of a safe Liberal riding meant that the party was on the rocks, I wasn’t one of them. I know the Prime Minister and his party are disliked across the country, but I saw St. Paul’s as more the personnel fiefdom of MP Carolyn Bennett. She served the riding for almost thirty years, and by the end of her tenure residents were probably more loyal to her than they were to the Liberal Party. The loss didn’t surprise me, though it did most observers.

At the end of the summer came another byelection loss, this time in the Montreal riding of LaSalle-Emard-Verdun. That one too had been held by a former Liberal cabinet minister. Once again observers were stunned by the results, with the Liberals losing to the separatist Bloc Quebecois.

Sixty years ago I was living in LaSalle. I wouldn’t describe it then, or now, as a hotbed of separatist sentiment. The riding has almost always voted Liberal for the past 100 years (unlike Toronto-St. Paul’s which has changed hands before). To vote in a separatist was a deliberate slap in the face of the Liberals.

Voters in LaSalle weren’t going to vote Conservative like those in Toronto did. They are liberal at heart. But they wanted to send a message to Justin Trudeau: it is time to go.

He got a message, but not that one. He said the results made it obvious that the Liberals had to work harder in explaining their ideas and policies. Voters weren’t rejecting him or his party, they just didn’t know what he stood for.

If you believe that, I have a new BMW for you and a check for $5 million (see Tuesday’s post for context).

The House of Commons will vote this afternoon on a Conservative motion expressing non-confidence in the Prime Minister and his government. Given that all the Opposition parties have expressed dissatisfaction with the Liberals you would expect the vote to plunge Canada into a federal election. But the Liberals will probably survive the vote, with one of the three opposition parties propping them up.

The Bloc Quebecois especially thinks they think they can get concessions from the Liberals in return for keeping the government in power. That’s what the New Democratic Party thought in 2022 when they signed a formal agreement to do just that, an agreement they ripped up earlier this month after realizing they hadn’t got what they expected. In politics, hope springs eternal. The Bloc thinks they can succeed where the NDP failed.

Which means we are unlike to see an election campaign start today. I suspect though that Canadians will be going to the polls in the spring, and Justin Trudeau will discover that Canadians understand his policies very well – and still want him gone.