National Perspective

VERDUN, Quebec — Is it time to be like Joe?

Join me on a walk down Wellington Street. You’ll see a Korean restaurant and an Italian one, and as you move along the sidewalk of what a global survey two years ago called the coolest street in the world, you’ll be able to pop in for Israeli, Irish, Indian, Peruvian, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai food. Hankering for chicken? You have three choices. Rather devour a book? Pick up a copy of a biography of LeBron James, written in French.

This street is the bleeding heart of the LaSalle-Émard-Verdun parliamentary district. A short stroll away are the voting booths in the Arena Denis Savard, named for the famed Hockey Hall of Fame member who was on a championship Montreal Canadiens team, and it was there that voters sent a strong, even stunning, signal to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The voters’ clear message: Be like Joe Biden.

Today, the urge to be like Biden has faded in American politics. His disastrous performance in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump led to questions about his mental acuity, which in turn led to questions about his fitness for the presidency. From there, if you will forgive the Canadian sports metaphor, it was a slap shot that ended his reelection campaign. He was mortified but dignified. He said he loved his job, but he loved the country more.

And then he stepped aside. His successor as Democratic nominee swiftly recovered the ground the president had surrendered and is now in a virtual tie with Trump.

Could that be a model for Trudeau?

Today, it is clear that the prime minister, who has been the country’s leader for nearly nine years, loves his job, too. He bounces around the country with aplomb, though his upbeat personality has worn thin, and he’s seen more as shallow than sunny, more as challenged than charming. He’s hanging onto that job despite the warnings that the left-leaning partners in his governing coalition will no longer blindingly prop him up. Many prominent members of his Liberal Party, swept into power largely by the charisma and cheery disposition of Trudeau, are ready to abandon him. They would prefer he depart the scene.

In short: Be like Biden.

That message emerged with unmistakable clarity when Trudeau’s Liberal Party candidate, Laura Palestini, received only slightly more than a quarter of the vote in this Liberal stronghold, a result all the more galling because the winner, Louis-Philippe Sauvé, is a member of the Quebec separatist Bloc Québécois party. Trudeau’s Montreal-bred father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was a lifelong, vocal, and passionate opponent of allowing Quebec to declare itself a separate nation and leave the Canadian confederation—a sentiment his son shares.

The Liberals have lost this district only three times in the past 40 years, each at a moment when the party that considers itself Canada’s natural party of governance has been at a weak point. This late-summer pummeling comes in the only province in which Trudeau’s Liberals are not behind the Conservatives in voter surveys. It comes, moreover, three months after the Liberals unexpectedly lost another parliamentary special election, that time in Toronto and to a candidate of the Conservatives, who are almost certain to prevail in the next national election.

Now, the pressure on Trudeau to step aside from the Liberal leadership seems almost irresistible. Now, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and Yves-François Blanchet, the leader of the Bloc Québécois, are smelling blood—and they have the power to bring down Trudeau in Parliament. Such a vote could come as soon as Wednesday.

Even so, Trudeau—whose own district is not far from the scene of the Liberal loss Monday—seemed unbowed when he entered Parliament the morning after. “We have lots of work to do, and we’re going to continue to do it,” he said.

“He’s unwavering,” Philippe J. Fournier, the creator of poll aggregator 338Canada, told me moments later. “This loss is devastating. Any leader would see the writing on the wall. It is one thing not to fall at the first sign of trouble. But losing seats the party has won by 20 points in urban centers that are Trudeau’s power base is a very bad sign. He should go but won’t. Sometimes politics is not logical, and we are in a very illogical time right now.”

Palestini’s placards—without the usual pictures with Trudeau—were plastered all around this district, which has a large English-speaking population hostile to separatism. She repeatedly tried to distance herself from the prime minister. “It’s about me,” she said. “It’s not about the PM. I will let myself be the… prime focus.”

But in fact, it was about Trudeau.

Whether pulling a Biden—relinquishing his position atop the Liberals and making way for new leadership—will work is unclear.

But hardly anyone in American politics thought that Vice President Kamala Harris was a political giant. Her poll ratings were low; she was easily portrayed as a failure in her most visible role (addressing the crisis at the Mexican border); and she was a dud when she ran for president herself four years ago. The signs were anything but promising. Now the Democrats see themselves as the party of great promise.

That is because Harris—like a drooping flower responding to a springtime rain shower—became an instant American political star, so much so that she unsettled the Trump campaign and then, in a stunning debate performance, put the 45th president on the defensive, piercing his logic and destroying his confidence.

But leaving the scene in Ottawa is no magic bullet for the Liberals.

Trudeau could peer beyond the Harris phenomenon and instead look back to 1968, when his father was Canada’s justice minister and attorney general. That year—in what might be a sobering lesson to the prime minister and his Liberal colleagues—Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from his reelection campaign. He did so in the face of a certain loss, if not to Sens. Robert F. Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries, then to eventual GOP nominee Richard Nixon. That time, however, the Democrats lost the general election.

Either way, Trudeau’s time is limited, if not over. He still has one trick left: to be like Joe.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.