Trudeau's ministers are standing by him even as Liberal fortunes wane

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still enjoys the support of his cabinet even though polls suggest the Liberal government is stuck in a losing position as it approaches the nine-year mark in office.

Reporters asked ministers assembled in Halifax this week for a cabinet retreat — a key planning session ahead of Parliament's return next month — if they still have confidence in Trudeau to lead the party after its bruising defeat in the Toronto–St. Paul's byelection. All of them said they did.

In fact, there's only been one sitting member of the Liberal caucus to publicly call for Trudeau's resignation since the party lost that one-time safe Liberal seat: outgoing New Brunswick MP Wayne Long.

338Canada, a poll aggregator, suggests the Liberals are roughly 16 percentage points behind Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives. The governing party has been down by double digits for much of the last year.

And an Abacus Data poll released last week found the Liberal Party's pool of potential voters — people who would ever consider voting for the party — is now smaller than the NDP's. (For this study, the margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is +/- 2.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.)

While the Liberals continue to struggle, there's been renewed enthusiasm for Democrats in the U.S. after an aging President Joe Biden stepped aside and Vice-President Kamala Harris took over as the party's candidate for the upcoming election.

While the Democrats under Biden were in tough against Donald Trump, Harris has closed the gap in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin only weeks after being thrown into the race — a sign that some voters are eager to back a fresh-faced candidate who's not Biden or Trump.

Asked if they had any second thoughts about keeping Trudeau on after watching what has transpired in the U.S., ministers said the Canadian political landscape is different.

"We have our own political dynamic here that is not necessarily readily comparable to the U.S.," Immigration Minister Marc Miller said.

He said Trudeau-Biden comparison is an imperfect one.

"Sometimes we borrow a little too much of our political rhetoric from the U.S. I know a lot of eyes are focused on the U.S. election, I'll focus a little more on what Canadians are saying," Miller said.

But that doesn't mean Miller doesn't have anything to say about the government's performance to this point and what it could do to improve its standing with voters.

"We have our points of view as cabinet ministers and we make them known — just not in public," he said, adding that part of Monday's cabinet retreat session was focused on political strategy.

That's a strategy that includes a renewed focus on policies Canadians say they want the government to address, Miller said, like tackling persistent affordability concerns and improving social programs.