Need to Know: Justin Trudeau’s most consequential legacy is here to stay

Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s twice-weekly roundup of expert insights into the biggest economic stories, political news, and policy developments that readers need to be keeping their eyes on. The Trudeau consensus on deficits is now the new normal By Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large The timing was rather auspicious. The 10-year anniversary of Justin Trudeau’s 2015 election win was marked by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre with a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney calling on him to limit this year’s deficit to no more than the $42 billion that had been projected when Trudeau was still in office. Poilievre’s letter, which implicitly defines Trudeau-era deficits as a form of relative fiscal restraint compared to what’s now anticipated from the Carney government, is itself a testament to the former prime minister’s enduring influence. Trudeau won the 2015 election by overturning the balanced-budget consensus that had guided federal politics for two decades. Successive governments under Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Stephen Harper had accepted that budgets ought to balance over the economic cycle and that deficit spending should be a last resort. Trudeau challenged that orthodoxy and in doing so ushered in a new era of bigger, more activist, and ultimately more expensive government. The results speak for themselves. Over the past decade, program spending has nearly doubled. The national debt has roughly done the same. What once would have been considered extraordinary is now treated as normal. And the official Opposition’s call for a $42 billion deficit—a figure that would have scandalized Ottawa not long ago—now counts as fiscal prudence. If, as historian Gary Gerstle argues, a political paradigm takes hold when one’s opponents eventually adopt its premises, then it’s fair to say that the so-called “Chrétien Consensus,” which ran from roughly 1995 to 2015, has been replaced by a “Trudeau Consensus.” One can, of course, believe that this is a bad development—I certainly do—but there’s no denying that it marks a profound realignment in how Canadians think about the state, its role, and its limits. That may prove to be Trudeau’s most consequential legacy: not a set of programs or policies per se, but a new normal when it comes to the size and scope of government itself. Can anyone get the NDP out of the deep hole it’s in?  By David Coletto, founder and CEO of Abacus Data, the official pollster for the Toronto Star, and a regular member of the Hub Politics podcast The federal NDP is in a deep hole. It has no party status in Parliament, little money, and an organizational infrastructure that’s been hollowed out. But it’s been here before. After the 1993 collapse, Alexa McDonough rebuilt the party, making a historic breakthrough in Atlantic Canada in 1997 that almost cost the Chrétien Liberals their majority. Our new Abacus Data poll (conducted Oct 9–15, 2025) of 1,500 Canadians shows the next NDP leader faces a similar challenge starting from near zero public recognition. None of the three likely contenders, Heather McPherson, Rob Ashton, and Avi Lewis, have significant name recognition or a clear favourability advantage. But who Canadians respond to may say something about the kind of NDP that could matter again. To test that, we presented respondents with three fictional quotes without suggestion who might have said them or their political affiliation.1See here for the full polling results. McPherson’s pragmatic social-democratic message about fairness beginning with stability resonated most broadly: 78 percent agreed, including 36 percent who strongly agreed. Ashton’s populist, worker-first message about taking on corporate greed and standing up for working people also landed strongly, with 73 percent agreement. Lewis’s more idealistic, transformative message about imagination, public ownership, and solidarity drew 63 percent agreement, but also higher ambivalence. When asked which message best fit a potential NDP leader, 41 percent chose McPherson’s, 38 percent Ashton’s, and 21 percent Lewis’s. Among those open to voting NDP, McPherson still leads slightly (42 percent), while Lewis’s share grows among those on the “Left.” Interestingly, Ashton’s framing poses the biggest threat to Pierre Poilievre. Among Conservative supporters, 49 percent agreed with his message—far higher than for McPherson (37 percent) or Lewis (14 percent). His populism overlaps with Poilievre’s appeal to working-class frustration, but from a different ideological direction. Based on this initial research, McPherson’s grounded message may have the widest resonance. Yet Ashton and Lewis are saying things that could disrupt the political status quo. The NDP needs a leader who can grab attention without the traditional platforms it used to have and make the party relevant again—among enough voters, in the right places, to win seats. A lesson from Newfoundland and Labrador: Fish where the fish are By David Tarrant, dead of Atlantic practice and VP national strategic comms at Enterprise Canada On October 14, political watchers turned their attention to my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador where, in a result that was completely missed by most pollsters, the Tony Wakeham-led PCs won a majority mandate over the incumbent Liberals. The election outcome leaves just Yukon and New Brunswick as the only provincial and territorial Liberal governments in the country. Are there lessons that an outside observer can take from Newfoundland and Labrador’s role in this trend? The biggest takeaway is to consider the role that our urban versus rural geography plays in determining the issues that drive elite debate versus the issues that actually matter most to voters. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the campaign was ultimately a story of two elections, not just one. The first election centred around an intense and important debate around the so-called memorandum of understanding (MOU) deal that the incumbent Liberal government had signed with the Legault government in Quebec to develop two hydroelectric megaprojects at Churchill Falls and Gull Island in Labrador. Supporters of the MOU pointed to the billions of dollars of revenue it would take in, and the closure it would provide in resolving the 1969 Churchill Falls deal with Quebec that remains seared in the province’s psyche. Opponents condemned the fact that the new deal repeated the same mistakes of the previous deal by handing Quebec complete control over a resource that they could buy at a fraction of its market price. This first election consumed the attention of business, political, media, and academic elites, largely based in St. John’s, that included the incumbent Liberals who had negotiated the deal and made support for the MOU the centrepiece of their campaign. The second election was far more prosaic. Anytime they were asked, most people of Newfoundland and Labrador made it clear that they wanted their leaders to focus on the crumbling health-care system, spiking cost of living, and crime wave that had overtaken the province during the previous decade of Liberal government. For many of them, participating in a game-of-thrones debate about the MOU was a luxury they could not afford. Despite having a strong point of view on the MOU himself, Premier-Designate Wakeham leaned heavily into this second focus during the election. He ring-fenced his opinion on the MOU in his very first campaign speech and then declined to proactively raise it again, instead focusing on his core priorities of better health care, lower taxes, and safer communities. The Liberals, geared for a debate on an issue the PCs ignored, were left scrambling, and their slapdash and sloppy campaign played a large role in their defeat. The lesson here for those hoping to get elected is to have as much modesty about the issues you think are most important as you do about the positions you take on each. Given that our business, political, and media elites tend to co-locate in affluent urban geographies, the temptation to assume local groupthink is reflective of the wider populace is real. But the MOU debate was unquestionably the most important issue to absolutely everybody…except the voters. Only Tony Wakeham and the PCs had the humility to recognize the facts staring them in the face. This trend is about more than a Left-Right issue. While the woke-Left’s decoupling from the political mainstream is part of this phenomenon, elite conservatives have their own elite hang-ups that separate them from the real issues of real people. They say the first rule of fishing is to fish where the fish are. That’s a handy rule for politics, too. And, in my experience, if you want the best fishing, it’s best to get outside the city.