Trudeau on a path walked by Wynne

Should Justin Trudeau stay or should he go?

- MARTIN REGG COHN

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets Ontario’s then-premier Kathleen Wynne in 2017. “There is going to be such pressure on him now — not to leave so much as come up with a reason that he should stay,” Wynne told columnist Martin Regg Cohn.

Kathleen Wynne has been there, done that — and didn’t go.

After a bitter byelection defeat for the federal Liberals in Toronto—St. Paul’s riding this week, Wynne has been asking herself the same question anew. As premier, she stayed to fight another campaign in 2018, paying a high price in the election defeat that followed.

So what would Wynne tell the prime minister if he called for advice about whether he should quit federal politics?

Good question. A better question for him, she argues, is why exactly he should stay.

The calculations aren’t as simple as they sound. All these years after her own ups and downs, Wynne says a bad byelection result, even in a traditionally Liberal riding, is not “a line in the sand.”

That’s because a byelection can mean everything and nothing — or something in between. Typically, they are protest votes — and rarely predictive of a general election outcome.