Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had good reason for calling a $610-million snap election on Aug. 15.
That is, the most expensive federal election in Canada’s history because of pandemic precautions and mail-in ballots — $100 million more than the cost of the last election in 2019.
By his reasoning, Trudeau had an excellent motivation for calling the election 22 months after the last one.
He thought it was his best shot to recapture the majority government he lost in 2019, by bribing Canadians with their own money.
Barnstorming across Canada before he called the vote for Sept. 20, Trudeau was a veritable money machine, spewing out taxpayer cash in every direction, like a Las Vegas one-armed bandit gone berserk.
The Globe and Mail tallied up the total price tag of all the pre-election goodies Trudeau and the Liberals announced through news conferences and press releases and came up with the staggering figure of more than $40 billion.
But we knew that was coming because of Trudeau’s April budget.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said the Liberals would spend up to $100 billion of tax money over three years to promote economic recovery, thus making the world safe for political lobbyists, fighting to get their clients a slice of the pie.
Women, subsidized child care providers, green energy aficionados, Indigenous communities, the unemployed, seniors, young families and businesses large and small were all going to benefit from Trudeau government largesse.
But while it’s still early days in the election, polls suggest Trudeau may have miscalculated on whether voters wanted to be bribed with their own money, all of which has to be paid back eventually through higher taxes, reduced services or more debt.
What was supposed to be a cakewalk to victory for Trudeau pre-election, now appears to be a pitched battle in which Conservative leader Erin O’Toole and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh have become serious contenders.
A Leger poll Tuesday said 69% of Canadians surveyed believed Trudeau could have held off calling the election for at least a year and 62% said he called a snap election as a “power grab.”
So yes, Trudeau had plenty of reasons to call an election — for himself.
Voters, however, appear to be experiencing it differently.