Only the Liberal Party knows when this election campaign will start for real. A Liberal today corrected me on that and pointed out that probably only a handful of Liberals very close to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are in the know.
Trudeau controls the timetable, and that means the other parties have to prepare for all the various possibilities. When will the writ drop? In other words, when will the Prime Minister ask the Governor General to dissolve Parliament to start the election countdown to October 21.
All the politicos know that a federal election campaign must be a minimum of 36 days and working back that makes September 15 the last possible day for the call. But what if the call is on September 7 or even tomorrow? The uncertainty means the leaders are probably going to hang around central Canada to make it easier to pick up the journalists who will join the formal campaign leader tours.
So where are the leaders today? Prime Minister Trudeau is in the GTA. He did an editorial board with the Toronto Star, and there’s an evening fundraiser in Brampton. The NDP tried to score a point sending out a release that Trudeau wouldn’t commit to an “affordable national childcare program,” in his meeting with the Star’s editors.
Conservative leader Andrew Scheer was in Toronto yesterday. He will spend the next few days in Quebec campaigning as he waits for the starting bell of his first national campaign. Tomorrow he’ll give a speech to the Chamber of Commerce in Montreal.
Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, was up early in a Toronto riding the NDP will target to win back. The NDP lost Davenport in the Liberal sweep of Toronto in 2015, and Andrew Cash wants the seat back. Singh was with Cash this morning making a youth-friendly announcement about student debt. Singh promised the NDP “will eliminate all interest on federal student loans – both outstanding loans and going forward.” In 2015 Justin Trudeau energized young voters, and they turned out in big numbers. To make an impact in this election, Singh will need to mobilize the youth vote and try to pull it away from the Liberals.
Singh then flew to Montreal and told reporters there the NDP would have 302 candidates in place within a few days. He went on to say he can be an ally for Quebec and took on questions about his ethnicity head-on.
The Green Party leader, Elizabeth May, is in Toronto Friday. She will do a town hall in the evening and an interview here at CP24 tomorrow afternoon.
The fact is that, as the governing party, the Liberals hold all the cards. They’ll decide when the campaign starts and the Liberals will use the time making funding announcements across the country.
