Is Justin Trudeau’s honeymoon over?

Maybe, for all I know. We have a new poll that suggests it may be. The new Forum Research poll suggests Liberal support is at 42 per cent, which is three points higher than it was when the Liberals won the 2015 election. If his honeymoon ends three more times, he might yet win half the popular vote.

Certainly, there is room to doubt the prime minister’s popularity will be eternal. My own column has been critical of Trudeau on several recent occasions: On cash-for-access fundraisers, on his fondness for Fidel Castro, on electoral reform. As no less an authority than the editorial page of Maclean’s magazine proclaimed two weeks ago, “The Justin Trudeau honeymoon is over.”

Surely this time it must be true. Surely if you predict something often enough, eventually it will be true.

Trudeau was sworn in as prime minister Nov. 3, 2015. At cbc.ca, Terry Milewski wrote: “There’s no set span for a political honeymoon . . . . So what are Trudeau’s chances? How long can he keep the magic going?”

A month later, Geoffrey Stevens wrote an open letter to the PM in the Hamilton Spectator. “Sir, the honeymoon is about to end.” Over what? Vacancies in the Senate, Stevens suggested. Or maybe medically assisted dying. He kept his options open.

Near the end of 2015 in Montreal’s The Gazette, James Mennie ventured that “this apparently never-ending honeymoon with the Trudeau Liberals may draw to a close.” Over what? Budget deficits.

A rare dissent appeared in these pages Jan. 9, 2016, in the form of a Carol Goar column that carried the headline, “Trudeau’s honeymoon will last well into 2016.”

But later in January, Reuters reported that “Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faces an early end to his political honeymoon.” The cause? “An economic slump with no easy exit.”

On March 22, Finance Minister Bill Morneau delivered a budget that featured whopping deficits. At Maclean’s, John Geddes said Morneau’s speech “sounded less like the language of a political honeymoon than a plea to keep it together for the kids’ sake.”

At the beginning of April, Frank Graves of the Ekos polling firm found a slump in voter support for Trudeau. So much for that honeymoon! “It appears that it is starting to fade a bit, and they are coming back to earth,” Graves said.

Another month passed. Katie Underwood wrote in Chatelaine that Trudeau’s awkward, needy video inserting himself into some friendly trash-talking between Buckingham Palace and the Obama White House over the Invictus Games had produced “the sound of Trudeau’s honeymoon bubble bursting.”

Two weeks later, Trudeau elbowed NDP MP Ruth-Ellen Brosseau during a vote delay in the House of Commons. “Mr. Trudeau’s political honeymoon is finally over,” Michael Taube wrote for the conservative National Review in the U.S. In the leftish Guardian in the U.K., Stephen Maher drew the same conclusion from the same elbow. “Trudeau’s long honeymoon came to an abrupt end.”

In early June the Trudeau government missed the Supreme Court’s deadline for new assisted-dying legislation. This failure left his honeymoon “shaken,” a Financial Times headline announced, though the body of the story admitted that judging from the polls, the honeymoon was “not over yet.”

In September MPs returned from summer vacation. NDP leader pro tem Thomas Mulcair predicted Trudeau’s honeymoon would end soon. Ten days later Bloomberg News said his honeymoon was “about to end” over indigenous protests to liquefied natural gas projects on the West Coast.

In mid-October the largest federal public-sector union bought radio ads complaining of stalled contract talks. Kathryn May wrote in the Ottawa Citizen: “Justin Trudeau’s honeymoon with Canada’s public servants is over.”

Perhaps we can pause from all this honeymoonology to acknowledge some flaws in the model.

First, it’s not true that political careers reliably follow an arc from popularity to acrimony. Trudeau’s hasn’t, so far. When last year’s long election campaign began, his Liberals were in third place and falling. So he’s already been down and fought back up. Stephen Harper never had a honeymoon, but his Conservatives gained in popular vote and seats in three consecutive elections after their first campaign, in 2004. Then the streak ended.

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What’s most annoying about the “honeymoon” model is that readers sometimes use it to imply criticism is illegitimate while a politician is popular — or that it’s mandatory when he’s down. It’s a rare morning when my inbox doesn’t contain some variation on “Dear Mr. Wells why are you being so mean to the prime minister can’t you see he’s doing great thank goodness Canadians have more sense than you.”

But so what? All the criticisms that were levelled against Trudeau’s government in the examples I cited above were legitimate. What’s less legitimate is an attempt to predict popular support for any leader, any party, based on one thing that happened yesterday. Let the voters decide how they want to vote. They usually do anyway.

Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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