Susan Delacourt: ‘I can’t back down’: On the ropes, Justin Trudeau finds his ferocity

I can't back down," Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau declared on Monday, kicking off what may be two of the most crucial weeks in his political career.

Trudeau may not have entered this election seeing Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole as the man who could take his job from him later this month. But he clearly does now.

The Liberal leader's Labour Day news conference featured a significantly sharper, sustained attack on O'Toole and his alleged weak" or wishy-washy" leadership.

O'Toole, Trudeau said, is bowing to the fringe politics that want to take back Canada. It's not just on vaccines, it's not just on guns, it's on more private, for-profit health care to give the wealthy better choices. It's on scrapping $10-a-day child care to give the middle class fewer choices. It's not standing up to climate deniers or the oil lobby, it's giving in to his MPs and anti-choice groups on women's rights."

Many Liberals will be heartened to see this all-out effort to turn the last two weeks of this election into a referendum on O'Toole, rather than the vague, anger-management exercise it has been to date for the Trudeau team.

Anger has lurked everywhere along the campaign trail and it isn't coming just from that chaotic fringe," as Trudeau described them on Monday, who have been stalking the Liberal leader's events.

There's general pandemic weariness, fuelled by frustration over no clear end in sight for COVID and its new variants and waves. There's anger over the fact that Canada is having an election at all. Add to this the normal, garden-variety frustration any government can accumulate over six years in office, from random groups annoyed over what Trudeau has or hasn't done since taking power.

For Trudeau, a politician who once billed himself as a leader in touch with the emotional mood of the country, the anger has added an X" factor to all the political calculation in favour of having this election at this point in the country's history.

One wonders if Trudeau in his private moments regrets what he has unleashed, and particularly its potential to knock him right out of office after election day on Sept. 20. Perhaps, but as the Liberal leader said on Monday, he can't back down now.

Trudeau, looking far more fierce and focused than he has in this campaign, said in Welland, Ont.: For people who still wonder, whether or not we really needed an election right now, just take a look at the issues and the intensity of debate over so many big issues that really matter to Canadians, the clear and stark differences between our various approaches for this country, the clear and stark differences in leadership style."

His task over the next two weeks is persuading Canadians to see it the same way. But he is running up against a population that is tired of hearing bad news from this politician - or maybe just tired altogether.

Mental health has popped up as an issue here and there in the party platforms of this election, but it may in fact be the issue - a campaign that keeps exposing the fragile emotional state of a nation 18 months into a pandemic.

Smart political strategists who have worked closely with Trudeau in the past - but who aren't any longer - have been publicly remarking upon this phenomenon in recent days.

Gerald Butts, Trudeau's old principal secretary and friend going back to their years in university, spoke to Maclean's last week about how the mere fact of the election, happening right now, had rankled the electorate in unpredictable ways.

The calling of the campaign itself has obviously reset the public mood in a negative way toward the government, which I don't think is a surprise to many close observers of politics in Canada," Butts said. I don't think there was a great appetite for this campaign, and it's on the government now to make the case for why we're having it and why they should be re-elected."

David Herle, who was part of the small circle that worked with Trudeau on his original Liberal leadership bid, is also now watching from the outside. In his work as a podcaster and public-opinion analyst, Herle sat down with a group of undecided voters over the Labour Day weekend and reported: It really felt in my focus group like people are reluctant to reward Trudeau for this election."

Neither of these Liberals, incidentally, is convinced that it's all heading to a happy ending for Trudeau, though they don't rule it out either.

I don't think there is any guarantee that things are going to turn out OK," Butts said in his Maclean's interview. Believe me, I think this campaign is very much up in the air."

Languishing" is a word that has long been used in political commentary; as in, parties languishing in the polls. But earlier this year, it entered the lexicon of the pandemic, to describe a mental condition afflicting people over the long haul of COVID lockdowns and restrictions. Languishing, in this context, is what one headline called the blah, empty, stuck state" between flourishing and full-fledged depression.

Watching the Liberal campaign, either up close or from afar, the word comes to mind to describe the state of the effort in the first half of the election. Blah? A matter of opinion maybe. Stuck? The polls bore that out. The Liberal campaign was neither thriving nor down and out; it was going through all the motions of a normal campaign amid highly abnormal circumstances.

But all those efforts were yielding was the dull thud of surviving to do it all over again the next day. When you're struggling with a pandemic, as this group around Trudeau has for 18 months, that is a victory. Languishing is a coping strategy, though; it's not a path to electoral success.

The last few days, however, have seen a shift; not huge, but perceptible. A new wave of ads has appeared, in which Trudeau takes direct aim at O'Toole. Be aware: this is not business as usual in the Liberal party under Trudeau since 2015. Liberals have done contrast ads" on a small, micro-targeted scale in the past couple of elections, but not the large-sized TV versions that came out over the weekend.

Trudeau's tone on Labour Day was also evidence that the party is trying to steer the campaign back from the brink. I can't back down" was a call-out to Liberals as much as it was to the party's rivals - a message to shore up any faltering morale.

But it is also Trudeau's message to himself. He chose the election, if not the position in which he now finds himself: fighting to keep O'Toole from taking his job. Backing down is in fact not an option.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt