Last week we learned that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals would no longer have a guarantee of support from the more progressive New Democratic Party. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announced he was tearing up the prior agreement though he did not promise to vote against Trudeau if a confidence vote was held. Instead, future votes would be held on a case by case basis.

This was considered pretty weak tea by conservatives eager to see an election to replace Trudeau prior to the one scheduled in the fall of 2025. If you can't support Trudeau then why not commit to voting no in the next confidence vote right now? 

The consensus seems to be that Singh and the NDP made this move in recognition of the fact, based on nearly a year of polling, that Trudeau's government is going down and they need to create some distance from the whirlpool or they'll be sucked down with him.

“Why you’re seeing Singh pull support from the agreement now is actually to set things up for an election in 2025,” former NDP adviser Jordan Leichnitz said. “He needs some time, some runway, to create distance between himself and Trudeau.”...

Until this week, NDP fortunes were latched onto Trudeau’s sinking ship, which explains why Singh is eager to break free.

Leichnitz said there was a strong sense in the party brain trust that the NDP needed to distance themselves from the Liberals by “pivoting back to issues that are a little bit more favorable for us and, frankly, not being pulled down by Trudeau’s terrible national numbers.”

And yet, even with this very public indication that his allies don't think he can survive, Trudeau himself is said to be all in on another run for office. After a summer spent touring the country and taking selfies with Canadians, Trudeau is convinced he's the best the Liberal Party can offer. One anonymous Liberal Party member suggested Trudeau was confusing celebrity with support. "Some of it may be support, but the selfie is largely celebrity-driven and not politically driven," this party member said.

In public and in private, Trudeau has expressed his determination to stay at the helm of his party through to the next election...

Some said Trudeau believes he must stay on to counter Poilievre, even in the face of polls showing he is leading the Liberal party to likely disaster.

“He’s not getting the message. He thinks he’s the only one who can fight for the progressive agenda in Canada against the big, evil Conservatives,” said one.

If all of this sounds familiar, that's probably because it's the same argument Joe Biden was making for the first half of this year. Even as polls showed he was losing the race, Biden seemed convinced that he was the person who could best save the country from Trump. 

Even the excuses given by Canadian liberals are similar to the ones we hear from Democrats in the US. Any sign their candidate is unpopular is put down to a messaging problem created by a media that isn't being sufficiently favorable to their cause.

Some Liberals genuinely believe Trudeau is the best leader the party’s got for that fight, and all they need to do in the months ahead is a better job of prosecuting the case against Poilievre...

Trudeau also thinks that most of the negative spin about his leadership comes from “groupthink” in the Ottawa press gallery.

Trudeau may be convinced he has what it takes to win another election but there are signs within his own government that things are wrapping up.

Jeremy Broadhurst, the Liberal Party’s campaign director, said last week that he was stepping down, citing family reasons after one newspaper reported that he told the PM he didn’t think he could win a fourth term...

Others are leaving now, too. The Globe and Mail is reporting that five chiefs of staff to ministers, including the senior staffers for Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, are leaving the government. For whatever reason, they have decided that now is the time to go.

There are always comings and goings among political staffers, to be sure. There sure seem to be a lot of goings now.

What most of the people outside the campaign bubble could see about Joe Biden was that he was too old and had really lost a step. Eventually that became impossible to deny. Similarly, Trudeau's confidence in himself may be limitless but those around him are sending clear signals that his time in office is coming to an end. Most importantly, Canadian voters have been sending that signal for months.

When Mr Poilievre won the leadership of the party in September 2022, the Conservatives were tied with the Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, the prime minister. Today the Conservatives have a 17-point lead (see chart). The party has not polled this well since 1988. Many of Mr Poilievre’s plans are still foggy, but he has built his popularity on a pair of issues that bother swathes of the electorate: inflation and a drum-tight housing market strained by millions of immigrants. He couples this with a well-honed pitch to young voters and relentless hard-hat-heavy signals that he feels for working people’s troubles. That Mr Trudeau has a net personal approval rating of minus 35 helps, too.

It would not surprise me if the Liberal Party in Canada made a similar choice to the one made by Democrats here. Justin Trudeau is the focus of voters ire. At some point the party may realize they have a much better chance of putting up a good fight in the next election if they dump Trudeau and replace him with someone new. If Trudeau is looking a bit like the Joe Biden of Canada, there is probably a Kamala Harris waiting in the wings. Someone without as much baggage. Sooner or later, the need to step aside will probably be thrust upon Trudeau whether he likes it or not.