A12 EZRE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019
BY AMANDA COLETTAtoronto — Prime Minister Jus-
tin Trudeau, the selfie-snapping
Liberal leader who swept t o power
and international fame four years
ago with promises of “sunny
ways,” heads into Monday’s feder-
al election with his star dimmed
and his political future in jeopar-
dy.
Polls show Trudeau’s Liberals
and Andrew Scheer’s Conserva-
tives locked in a tight race, with
neither party building the neces-
sary momentum to win an out-
right majority in Parliament. That
would leave the winner depend-
ent o n smaller parties to maintain
power.
Despite Trudeau’s blackface
scandal and a lesser kerfuffle
about Scheer’s U.S. citizenship
and résumé claims, the state of
play as the r ace comes down to the
wire has changed little since the
campaign began nearly six weeks
ago.
“This election has been a bit l ike
a rugby scrum where everyone h as
been locked in and not really able
to give a lot of w ay o n both sides of
the pitch,” said pollster Shachi
Kurl, executive director of the An-
gus Reid Institute. “A nd the
ground beneath them is only get-
ting muddier.”
In the final days of the cam-
paign, Scheer, 40, a nd Trudeau, 4 7,
have doubled down in the key
battlegrounds where elections are
won and lost: The ethnically di-
verse suburbs of To ronto and
Trudeau’s home province of Que-
bec.
Analysts say a bump in support
for Jagmeet Singh’s New Demo-
crats and Yves-François Blanchet’s
separatist Bloc Québécois Party
threatens the political fortunes of
both front-runners.
This election was supposed to
be a cinch for Trudeau, whose
father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was
one of Canada’s longest-serving
prime m inisters.
He seemed to sail through his
first few years in office, earning
international acclaim for swear-
ing in a gender-balanced cabinet,
greeting Syrian refugees at Toron-
to Pearson International Airport
and l egalizing recreational canna-
bis.
But a series of scandals have
sullied his image, spurring rivals
to assail him as a “fraud” who acts
one way in public and another inprivate.
Canada’s ethics watchdog re-
buked him in August for inappro-
priately pressuring his former at-
torney general to cut an out-of-
court settlement with SNC-Laval-
in, a Quebec-based construction
giant f acing criminal c harges. L ast
month, his campaign was upend-
ed — at least briefly — by revela-
tions that he wore brownface and
blackface several times as a young-
er man. H e has apologized, repeat-
edly.
“2019 has been the story of Jus-
tin Trudeau as an average politi-
cian just like all the other politi-
cians,” Kurl said. “The m agic s par-
kle dust that he had in 2015 has
largely worn o ff.”
Scheer, an affable social and
fiscal conservative, faces his own
hurdles. Since becoming party
leader in 2017, he has struggled to
expand his party’s appeal beyond
its base and remains somewhat
unknown to voters. Foes have at-
tacked him for his antiabortion
views, for misrepresenting his
work experience and for not dis-
closing his dual U. S.-Canadian c it-
izenship until it was revealed this
month by the G lobe and Mail.
No single issue has dominated
the campaign, but the environ-
ment stands out as a key area of
disagreement. S cheer has pledged
to “use every legislative tool” to
repeal the Liberal government’s
levy on carbon. Trudeau has com-
mitted Canada to net-zero emis-
sions by 2050. Critics to the left of
Trudeau s ay b oth leaders h ave un-
ambitious plans that are scant on
details.
Analysts say the election’s re-
sults will hinge on whether pro-
gressive voters coalesce around
Trudeau as they did in 2015, and
on whether disillusioned voters
choose t o sit this one out.
At a campaign event in Mon-
treal, Trudeau delivered the con-
ventional Liberal warning to vot-
ers w ho could split the p rogressive
vote by casting their ballots f or the
NDP or Greens: Don’t d o it, unless
you want to wake up Tuesday
morning to Prime Minister
Scheer.
Singh, 40, has ruled out sup-
porting a Conservative minority
government and said last week
that he’d “ absolutely” f orm a coali-
tion, in which the parties shared
cabinet seats — to block Scheer.
But he has since walked those
comments back. He urged votersThursday in Brampton, Ontario,
to “vote for what y ou believe in.”
Scheer, appearing at a freight
trucking facility in Brampton
earlier in the day, warned that a
Liberal-NDP coalition would be
one “ that you cannot afford.”
Pollster Bruce Anderson, chair-
man of A bacus Data, says t he Con-
servatives would have few natural
allies in a minority scenario and
could face pressure from the other
parties to make concessions on
issues such as the environment to
earn their support.
The election in Canada, a close
security and trade partner, has
implications for the United States
— and at l east one A merican polit-
ical figure has been paying atten-
tion. Former president Barack
Obama offered a rare cross-border
endorsement of Trudeau’s reelec-
tion bid last week, tweeting that
“the world needs his progressive
leadership n ow.”
Whatever the outcome, Chris-
topher Sands said, Canada is likely
to ratify the U nited States-Mexico-
Canada Agreement if and when
the United States does. Sands, di-
rector of the Center for Canadian
Studies at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, said there is potential for
greater cooperation o n issues such
as energy infrastructure with a
Conservative g overnment.
Scheer has pledged to tighten
the U.S.-Canada border by closing
a loophole in a law that allows
asylum seekers who cross into
Canada at an unauthorized point
of entry to file a claim. He did not
say what he would do if President
Trump opposed s uch a proposal.
Canadians complain that the
campaign has b een dull a nd atypi-
cally divisive. Trudeau, who took
the unusual step of wearing a bul-
letproof vest at a campaign event
this month in Mississauga, Ontar-
io, b ecause of an unspecified s ecu-
rity threat, accused the Conserva-
tives of running “one of the dirti-
est, nastiest campaigns.”
“Partisanship isn’t n ew i n Cana-
da, b ut this idea of ‘I don’t like you
just because you’re from that par-
ty’ is something w e’re seeing more
than before,” said Melanee Thom-
as, a political scientist at the Uni-
versity of Calgary.
Sands expected the campaign
to be more p ositive.
“A s an American, I look a t it and
say, ‘There’s another bad idea
they’ve imported from us.’ ”
[email protected]On eve of election, Trudeau on ropes