Justin Trudeau has lost quite a few Liberal friends around the first ministers’ table since he was elected in 2015.

With the ouster of Philippe Couillard’s Liberal government in voting across Quebec on Monday night, Canada’s three most populous provinces have sent Liberals packing in a little over a year: Ontario, British Columbia and now Quebec.

As well, New Brunswick’s Liberal government is only clinging to power since its election a couple of weeks ago, and is most likely to be replaced in the months ahead by the Conservatives who won the most seats in a shaky minority result.

In other words, these are not exactly great times to be a Liberal in the provinces.

So here’s the question that political trend watchers will be asking in light of these Liberal losses — is this portentous or a mere pendulum shift? Or, if one wanted to put it in environmental terms: is this a bout of bad weather for the Liberals in Canada, or permanent climate change?

At the risk of raining on the parade of the Liberals’ rivals, it might just be bad weather. There is indeed an argument to made that this is just the normal rhythm of things in Canada.

Roughly every 20 years in the past half-century or so, Grits have experienced a big power drain in the provinces — always coinciding with times of strong Liberal holds on power in Ottawa. The pattern goes at least as far back as Trudeau’s father’s days as prime minister.

Consider: back in the mid-to-late 1990s and at the dawn of this century, provincial Liberal governments were almost non-existent in Canada. Jean Chrétien was in the midst of his three-majority-government hold on power in the country at large, but he had few provincial counterparts. In fact, only Newfoundland was governed by Liberals at the outset of the 2000s, and for a few months in 2001, not one premier in the country was a Liberal.

British Columbians bucked that trend by putting a Liberal government in place in June of 2001, but these were Liberals who often seemed more aligned with Conservatives, in policy and in politics — a leaning that continued up until Christy Clark’s Liberals were defeated last year.

The dwindling-provincial-Liberal phenomenon was also a fact of Canadian political life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When Pierre Trudeau was negotiating the patriation of the Constitution in the 1980s, he didn’t have any provincial Liberals with him at the first ministers’ table — not one.

Justin Trudeau may well have that comparison in mind this fall when he convenes a meeting of the premiers. Unlike his dad in the 1980s, this Trudeau will at least have some Liberals at the table with him: Dwight Ball from Newfoundland, Stephen McNeil from Nova Scotia and PEI’s Wade MacLauchlan.

Still, there’s no doubt that this flurry of Liberal defeat in 2018 has heartened Trudeau’s critics and has many on social media talking about ill winds blowing for the federal Liberals in 2019. One hashtag on Twitter referred to a #LiberalFlush.

What is different about this power shift at the provincial level is who’s replacing the ousted Grits. This isn’t just a polite dance between centrist, old-time big brokerage parties.

In Quebec, power has gone to a brand-new party, the Coalition Avenir Québec, which is a populist party on the right side of the political spectrum — which fits quite comfortably in many ways with the brand of conservatism now on display in Doug Ford’s Ontario.

That reality speaks to a shattering of political norms — the idea that the old, centrist political consensus is in the midst of major disruption. Still, is that even new?

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We have seen this in Canada before, when new breakaway movements like the Reform Party or Bloc Québécois arrived on the scene in the late 20th century. After the 1993 election, people talked about whether the federal Conservatives and New Democrats were going extinct. After the 2006 election, the same question was repeatedly asked of the federal Liberals, reduced to third-party status for the first time in their history.

Throughout all this history, Canadians should have learned by now not to read too much into reports of political extinction. Provincial elections make things more interesting for prime ministers, but they’re not that useful as forecasting tools.

Susan Delacourt is the Star's Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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