Susan Delacourt: Justin Trudeau is hammering Erin O’Toole. That’s not the leader he should be afraid of
Carpooling hasn't yet come to leaders' election tours, but Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh could well have been fellow travellers in the first days of this campaign.
Both headed to Montreal immediately after the election campaign kicked off this week, then to the Toronto area, before heading to Western Canada.
The two leaders have even shared a slogan. A version of Trudeau's old better is always possible" from 2015 has turned up repeatedly in Singh's speeches this week.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in campaigns, this kind of overlap tells you where the competition is likely the most fierce. Trudeau needs New Democratic Party voters to win back a majority, and Singh couldn't be clearer about his pursuit of disenchanted Liberals.
Essentially, the NDP leader is telling these voters that he will be the guy that Liberals thought they were electing in 2015 - before six years of governing rubbed off all the hope and change and sunny ways.
On that score, there's no question that Singh has people's interest. In all the areas where Trudeau once soared in the public opinion polls - authenticity, likability, trust - the NDP leader regularly scores higher than the Liberal leader these days.
Voter curiosity is not an easy thing to measure, but Google Trends isn't a bad place to start. This is a tool that allows you to plug in words, phrases and names, then compare search volume for them over time. It doesn't give results in precise units, but through wavy-line graphs.
Back when Trudeau started seeking the Liberal leadership, it was Google Trends - in an eerie act of forecasting - that showed people were much more curious about him than they were about Thomas Mulcair, then the leader of the NDP, whose search-volume graph was a flat line.
Singh is not flatlining these days. While not outpacing the enduring Google-search interest in Trudeau, the NDP leader appears to be regularly generating more curiosity than Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole.
There's surely some correlation here between Singh's mastery of TikTok and other media more appealing to youth and pop culture. Eight years younger than Trudeau, the 42-year-old Singh can now claim to have been handed Trudeau's old mantle of candidate most friendly to youth.
TikTok hits and Google searches don't automatically translate into votes, however, and Singh still has some way to go if he is trying to pull off the kind of sneak-from-behind victory that came to Trudeau six years ago.
Still, like Trudeau in 2015, Singh is not burdened with overly high expectations at this point. Though it's difficult to remember now, Trudeau initially approached the 2015 election as a modest bid to bump the Liberals back up to second place from their third-place standing in the Commons. Even that seemed like a reach at first. The party entered that extra-long summer election amid serious doubts it could hang on to the few dozen seats it had.
Singh says he is campaigning to be prime minister, but the realistic goal for now is to boost the NDP up from its fourth-place standing in Parliament. Even getting the New Democrats back to their traditional place as third party would be seen as a win for Singh, given how the party has been shedding MPs ever since its big win under Jack Layton in 2011, when it became the Official Opposition.
If Trudeau is nervous about Singh, or seeing any echoes of his old popularity in the NDP leader's buoyant approval ratings, he isn't saying so. The square focus of Trudeau's attacks in these first few days has been the Conservative party and the newly released platform from Erin O'Toole. On Tuesday, day three of the campaign, the Liberal leader spoke almost exclusively about the blue team - barely a word about the orange one.
Singh, on the other hand, is talking about Trudeau incessantly. All of the Liberals' alleged failings in government are the centrepiece of each release from the NDP this week. Trudeau's corporate giveaways" are a constant refrain, as well as shots at Trudeau's handling of the pandemic and vaccination mandates. There hasn't been much talk of NDP opposition to the Conservatives.
So while Trudeau and Singh may be travelling similar roads in the opening days of Canada's 44th election campaign, they aren't going head to head yet. But if all the interest in Singh persists, watch for Trudeau to change his tack and start warning against wasted votes to fight Conservatives - a very familiar line of attack when the NDP threatens Liberal turf.
Trudeau, more than most, knows the potential of an underestimated rival, selling optimism and quietly amassing voters' curiosity. That's who he was in 2015.
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