To the dismay of his opponents, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is poised to call emergency elections on September 20 to seek a new mandate to guide the country’s pandemic departure.
Trudeau, who has been in power since 2015, and opposition leaders have been crisscrossing the country in recent weeks, delivering election-style announcements.
On Sunday, he will meet with the governor general to request that parliament be dissolved, triggering a general election that polls predict will likely return his Liberals to power.
Despite delivering massive pandemic aid, passing a federal budget, and passing other key legislation with opposition support over the past year, Trudeau has complained that parliament has become dysfunctional in recent months, with a “level of obstructionism and toxicity in the House that is of real concern.”
Opposition politicians disagreed, saying it’s too early to plan a way out of the pandemic now that Covid-19 cases are resurging across the country after a summer decline that saw most public health restrictions relaxed.
All five parties that now hold seats in parliament are preparing for a bruising election war.
“Justin Trudeau is planning an election in the middle of a pandemic because he’s focused on politics,” said Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, Trudeau’s main challenger.
“It’s past time for us to have a prime minister that is focused on Canadians when it comes to economic recovery,” he continued. “We’re all set.”
The majority of Canadians support Trudeau’s epidemic response. However, a fourth wave of Covid-19 infections during the campaign could jeopardize his support.
“This was his only window of opportunity,” Felix Mathieu, a political science professor at the University of Winnipeg, told AFP, “because with students’ return to school and universities in two weeks, Covid cases will certainly increase up.”
He went on to say that Trudeau’s government “had already held for 18 months, which is the normal longevity for a minority administration.”
Despite some of the world’s greatest vaccination rates (almost 62 percent of Canadians are fully immunized), nearly 1,000 new Covid-19 infections have been recorded daily in Canada recently.
Alberta, the first Canadian province to fully relax pandemic restrictions last month, reintroduced coronavirus testing and mandatory quarantines for infected people on Friday, citing an increase in hospitalizations.
