Susan Delacourt: Justin Trudeau still has a grip on the Liberal party. Here’s why

Justin Trudeau was forced to miss half of his own Liberal party's convention this weekend to attend the coronation ceremony in London.

Conservatives found this scandalous, even rolling out an attack ad to slam Trudeau as out of touch and out of the country."

Liberals did not. Trudeau may not have been physically present among the thousands of partisans milling around the Ottawa convention centre, but he was everywhere - photos of the prime minister rolling across big screens in the halls, his name evoked over and over again in the multitude of panel discussions on stage.

This much is clear - Trudeau still owns the party he brought back from near extinction a decade ago.

For a governing party that is enduring daily bashing in Parliament and on the pundit circuit, led by a man who is more unpopular now than he's ever been since taking power in 2015, the mood at this weekend's Liberal party convention was remarkably upbeat.

We needed this," one MP said to me as we made our way through a buoyant crowd exiting Friday night's double-bill show of former prime minister Jean Chretien and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

It was the first time the Liberals have held an in-person convention since 2018, which is a lifetime ago for this government - before a global pandemic, before two elections that kept them to minority rule, before the wear and tear of everything from the SNC-Lavalin controversy to a war in Ukraine.

All of that has left its mark on Liberals, without question. They talked openly in the corridors of the often-tense political discussions they have with friends and family back home. They talked about it in organizational sessions; what they're up against as they dare to contemplate winning a fourth term in government.

In one discussion, featuring Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, one delegate put the question: What are you going to do to overcome the perception that you're stale, you've been there a long time, you're not the new idea guys?"

Joly replied: Yes indeed, we've been in power for eight years. So the world has a perception that we have been in power for a long time." However, she said, that makes it all the more important to frame the next election as a choice between Liberals and the alternative - Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. I think it's important that the choice be stark."

On this point, the Conservatives would likely agree. Their new ad against Trudeau's travelling ways is ample evidence that they regard the prime minister as not only their main rival, but their major asset.

Justin Trudeau: he's taken five lavish foreign trips this year alone," the ad narrator says against a backdrop of photos of planes taking off, passports being stamped and champagne glasses clinking. Now he's taking off again, when his government can't deliver basic services, the streets are unsafe ... and the costs of housing and groceries keeps spiralling out of control."

I did see the ad run on TV during the past few days while the Liberal convention was underway, but it's not clear how it fits into any overall ad strategy by the Conservatives - whether this is the first of many to be sent into wider circulation, for instance. What is clear is that Conservatives were no doubt cheering on Thursday night, when Trudeau told his party faithful that it would be his honour" to lead them into the next election battle.

But Liberals were cheering too. As many others have been observing, this is not a party that seems in any mood to send Trudeau packing, if only because there is no one, clear alternative leader - certainly not anyone they could present as the stark" choice against Poilievre.

Many of the names on the list of would-be successors to Trudeau got to strut their stuff on stage at the convention - a sign, if nothing else, that the prime minister and his team don't see any of them as rearguard threats.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland did the interview with Clinton; Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne did a highly entertaining one-on-one with Chretien. Joly was the warm-up speech for Trudeau on Thursday night; Defence Minister Anita Anand had multiple turns at the microphone throughout the weekend. Each one of them, unfailingly, went out of their way to talk up Trudeau and how they worked together as a team with him at the helm.

At the risk of dating myself, I have to note here that I have been to many, many Liberal conventions over the past four decades. I have seen more than my share of Liberal gatherings where the hallways were buzzing with factional dissent and sparring leadership struggles. In fact, for most of the years between 1980 and 2015, this was the rule, not the exception. This was not that type of Liberal convention.

Ten years ago, Trudeau vowed in his Liberal leadership victory speech that the days of hyphenated Liberals' was over. By this, he meant the party's tendency to divide among leadership loyalists: Chretien Liberals versus Paul Martin Liberals, for instance, during the 1990s and early 2000s.

On Friday night, as the nearly 90-year-old Chretien gave a trademark, fiery, often hilarious speech, there weren't any hyphenated Liberals in the room. One cabinet minister said he was sitting with people who would once have been Martin Liberals" and they were applauding with everyone else. Another minister told me Saturday how one of the younger delegates to the convention earnestly informed him that Chretien was very popular with young Liberals.

Now, it's entirely possible that a Liberal convention isn't a representative slice of the Liberal voting public. Anyone willing to cough up the convention fees (ranging from roughly $200 to $600) and the cost of travel to Ottawa for a weekend is probably someone who's been sticking by Trudeau and his team through the roller coaster of the past few years.

Nor was the convention configured in any way to allow for much dissent. As the New Democrats' national director Anne McGrath observed, her party would kill her" if she held a convention where delegates' jobs were mainly to listen to panels. She marvelled that for many plenary sessions, there were no microphones set up for comments from the floor.

But this is a Liberal convention. They have always been known for conducting the real business in the corridors, where gossip, rumours and even grudges are shared. Trudeau made a point of roaming those hallways on Thursday and again on Friday before his plane left late in the day for a red-eye flight to the coronation.

In another time, facing another type of opposition leader, perhaps, Trudeau's departure from the convention might have been seen as a momentary chance to glimpse what the Liberal party looks like without him, even for a day or two.

But the Liberal party that gathered in Ottawa this past weekend is still Trudeau's party; the one created out of the depths of its existential despair a decade ago. Maybe the memory of those days is still raw for many Liberals; maybe it's the lack of an obvious alternative. Whatever the reason, the Conservatives dearly hoping that Trudeau is sticking around to fight Poilievre in the next election are looking like they'll get their wish.

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