FIRST READING: Christy Clark’s bid to rule over the Liberal’s ashes

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With a surprise Monday social media post, former B.C. premier Christy Clark has become the first to actively hint that she is angling for Justin Trudeau’s job.

But with the statement gingerly avoiding suggestion that Trudeau should resign immediately, it could be an early bid to rule over whatever’s left of the Liberal Party following the next federal election.

“The Prime Minister has earned the right to make any decision about his leadership on his own — the position of leader is not open,” she wrote. “Right now, we all need to be focused on uniting Canadians and working together as Liberals to defeat the divisive Poilievre Conservatives in the next election.”

Clark served as the B.C. Liberal premier of B.C. for six years — something she referenced by noting she is “a proud Liberal voter, registered Liberal, and former Liberal Premier.”

Although, confusingly, the B.C. Liberals had no official ties to the federal Liberals and generally served as the province’s centre-right option against the B.C. NDP.

As such, Clark has long occupied an awkward middle ground between conservative and progressive politics.

As recently as 2019, Clark wouldn’t rule out exploring a bid for the leadership of the federal Conservatives. Although she didn’t end up running for leader, during the race she would defend Andrew Scheer (the eventual winner) against accusations that his anti-abortion beliefs made him ineligible to lead a major party.

“I’m proudly pro-choice, but as a leader, I worked with lots of people in my caucus who disagreed with me on that. They weren’t dangerous radicals from the alt-right. They were just people with deeply held, very different views from mine,” Clark wrote on Facebook.

On the left-wing side of the ledger, Clark oversaw a B.C. carbon tax long before it became federal policy. Just last month, she endorsed Canadians for Kamala, a union-led effort to recruit Canadian election volunteers for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for U.S. president. She was joined in the effort by former NDP premier Rachel Notley, and former Ontario Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne.

“People who claim that Christy Clark ‘isn’t a Liberal’ don’t understand British Columbia coalition politics that existed for much of the province’s history and also don’t know the history of the Liberal Party of Canada,” read a Tuesday X post by longtime Liberal Party organizer Mark Marissen. He also happens to be Clark’s ex-husband.

Although Clark has never gone on record with her opposition to Trudeau, two former Clark staffers, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the issue, said that her contempt for the prime minister is well-known.

And while Clark is now avoiding any suggestion that Trudeau should immediately step down from the Liberal leadership, in June she was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying, “I think it’s time for him to move on to other, fairer pastures.”

As for Clark’s liabilities, she speaks terrible French, although she’s reportedly been making trips to Quebec to pursue a crash course in the language.

In an Ottawa scandalized by foreign interference, Clark cultivated ties to the Chinese Communist Party during her time as premier, including courting China Poly Group, a major state-owned Chinese corporation with ties to the People’s Liberation Army.

And, there’s the simple Canadian political curse that premiers do not become prime ministers. The only politician to ever pull it off was former Nova Scotia premier John Thompson in 1892. Although, Thompson served just two years before dropping dead of a heart attack.

Given the Liberals’ catastrophic poll trajectory, it seems unlikely that any change in leadership could rescue them from defeat.

This question has even been directly asked in polls, with respondents generally saying that the Liberal brand is too tainted to be saved.

A June poll by the Angus Reid Institute asked Liberal-leaning voters what made them least likely to support the party in the next election. Only 31 per cent cited Trudeau specifically, against 48 per cent who said the Liberal Party had shown a “lack of progress on issues I find important.”

“While Trudeau’s personal unpopularity is viewed as a major drag on the party’s support, the data does not suggest a leadership change would close the 21-point gap between the Liberals and the Conservatives,” read an Angus Reid analysis.

Former Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe — who faced Trudeau in the 2015 election — said in a recent appearance on Global News that the Liberals are effectively stuck with Trudeau since any replacement would be able to do little more than become the face of the party’s collapse.

“Nobody is ready to replace Trudeau or want to replace Trudeau because they know they will lose,” he said.

Today marks the Liberal caucus meeting where a shadowy dissident faction of Liberals could well present Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with “the letter,” a document of unknown length and content that is reportedly a petition outlining why Trudeau needs to resign for the good of the party. However, the early indications are that the bid isn’t going to work, to the great disadvantage of the dissidents. “Anybody who’s ever bet against Justin Trudeau are sorry they made that bet the next day,” Employment Minister Randy Boissannault told reporters Tuesday.

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