HANNAFORD: Trudeau fixed the Liberals and they're stuck with him

Liberal MPs are restless in the wake of the Toronto-St.Paul’s by-election and many want to save their own seats by getting rid of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But does the party even have a mechanism by which it can dump the leader?“Not really, no it doesn't,” says Yaroslav Baran, tonight’s special guest on ‘Hannaford.’ “The Liberal Party has been reconstructed in such a way that there’s no alternative power base that can force out the prime minister.”Baran is co-founder of Pendulum Group, an Ottawa firm specialising in crisis communications and political analysis. He has been working in and around government for more than 25 years and at one time provided high-level advice to former prime minister Stephen Harper.In this edition of Hannaford, he talks about whether in the wake of the recent earthquake byelection loss in Toronto, Justin Trudeau can or should continue as prime minister until the next election, set for October 26th, 2025..Bottom line, if he wants to, he probably can."When Mr. Trudeau took over as party leader, the first thing he did was take out all the capital regimes in his party, all the independent points of authority and power. He excommunicated the Liberal senators. Then he went after the local captains, the party leaders in Montreal and Toronto, the chieftains who served as gatekeepers to the Italian community, the Greek community, he put those micro institutions out of their misery and created a party that had only one focus of loyalty, and that was to him. That and the way he did candidate recruitment… he went after so-called star candidates… Olympians and star bankers and notable journalists and so on, and people from outside the Liberal Party, so that their allegiance isn't necessarily to the Liberal Party because they’ve been a lifelong member, it's to him so that he's in a stronger position than most party leaders would be in a situation like this.”And those Liberal MPs? They’re the ones with the problem.“Toronto-St.Paul’s was a safe Liberal seat and they lost it. So now a lot of Liberal MPs are saying if we lose that, we can lose anywhere, so they are now in ‘save the furniture mode.’ And every MP now wants to be part of the furniture, so they're making calculations like, ‘I could lose my seat, but maybe if we have a different leader I could win again.’ ”Maybe. And maybe not. Most Canadians don't want to see Mr. Trudeau walk off the field, they want to see him lose. And that will mean Liberal MPs losing with him.This, and much more, tonight on Hannaford at 7 p.m.Don’t miss it.

HANNAFORD: Trudeau fixed the Liberals and they're stuck with him

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