By: Laura Osman and Mickey Djuric

OTTAWA (CP) – After losing a Toronto-area riding the Liberals have held for more than three decades, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday he heard the “concerns and frustrations” of voters.

His party, pollsters and even Conservatives had considered Toronto-St. Paul’s to be a relatively safe seat for the Liberals as voters headed to cast ballots in a byelection Monday.

But by the wee hours of Tuesday, the Conservative candidate took a narrow lead and clinched the seat — the first time the Tories have won in Toronto proper since 2011.

The upset has sparked questions about the political prospects of Trudeau and his Liberals, whose polling numbers across Canada are down around their ankles. 

“These are not easy times, and it is clear I, and my entire Liberal team, have much more work to do to deliver tangible, real progress that Canadians can see and feel,” Trudeau said at a press conference in British Columbia, where he did not take questions. 

“We’ll never stop working and fighting to make sure people have what they need to get through these tough times. My focus is on your success, and that’s where it’s going to stay.”

The statement appeared to pour water on any speculation that the prime minister plans to resign as party leader. 

At a press conference in Toronto, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland expressed her support for the prime minister and his ability to carry the party into the next election.

She wouldn’t reflect on the reasons for the loss.

“We know that these are hard times for Canadians, we know that we have to work hard to earn back their trust,” she said. 

“The prime minister is committed to leading us into the next election, and he has our support.”

The Liberal party issued a generic statement that thanked candidate Leslie Church and her volunteers for their hard work and acknowledged that the party knew the byelection would be a tough race.

Meanwhile, most Liberal MPs have been almost eerily silent in the aftermath of the loss, allowing their cellphones to ring directly to voice mail and pausing social-media posts. 

“I have no interest in playing any role in this feeding frenzy,” said Prince Edward Island Liberal MP Sean Casey when The Canadian Press reached him and asked for his reaction to the results. 

Several ministers did take questions at events on Monday, including Veterans Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor, who said the byelection results were not what Liberals wanted, and Revenue Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau who said she still feels confident about her party’s future. 

Though pollsters and political watchers have been keen to expound on what the byelection says about the Liberals’ prospects in the next general election, Toronto Liberal MP John McKay suggested the conditions may have been unique to the riding. 

He said he did some door-knocking one afternoon for the campaign in a Jewish community in the riding, and found that previous Liberal voters who supported Israel were planning to vote Conservative.

“I come away from it saying to myself that, really, this was a referendum on Israel as much as anything else, and unhappiness with Trudeau kind of played in the background,” McKay said Tuesday, noting the massive effect of the Israel-Hamas war on domestic politics. 

“The double-whammy effect of that puts the Conservative candidate over the top. I don’t think it’s a huge love affair with Poilievre.”

Toronto has seen a rampant increase in antisemitism and hate-motivated incidents since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing conflict in the Gaza Strip.

The Conservatives appealed to the Jewish community to vote Tory in response to the Liberal “silence” on the rise of antisemitism and hate. 

“We can no longer afford leaders who are silent in the face of this existential threat,” Melissa Lantsman, the deputy Conservative leader, said in a letter received by Jewish households in the riding. 

Andrew Kirsch, an organizer with Jewish Ally, which registered as a third party to run ads during the byelection, says he was surprised by the results.

He suggested the government’s response to the rise in antisemitism motivated Jewish voters to vote.

The Liberal candidate, Leslie Church, said she plans to run again in Toronto-St. Paul’s, but said voters have told her the party will need to re-earn their trust. 

Carolyn Bennett, the former Liberal cabinet minister whose resignation in January triggered this byelection, won the seat nine times for the Liberals, and by more than 20 percentage points every time except once.

It’s tough for incumbent governments in western democracies to bring home wins after years of global instability including a pandemic, said British Columbia Liberal MP Ken Hardie, but it’s even harder when the nominee is a young candidate “who just simply didn’t have the roots that deep in the community.”

“The slate was clear,” Hardie said. “And people did what they sometimes do in a byelection: they sent a message.”

Here’s a look at the options Trudeau and the Liberals face as they enter a summer of soul-searching:

Liberals look for a new saviour

It’s hard to imagine Trudeau staying until the next election, said Phillipe Fournier of 338Canada.com, which publishes a statistical model of electoral projections based on polling, demographics and elections history. 

“If I may make a hockey analogy, it’s 5-0 after the second period,” Fournier said Tuesday.

“You pull your goalie because it’s just getting humiliating.” 

While there’s a real risk that picking a new leader may not be enough to reverse the Liberals’ fortunes, Fournier asked: “Does it matter?”

“This is not a normal defeat,” Fournier said of the byelection results. And when it comes to a general election: “This is heading to be a historic defeat.”

The Liberals may need to search for another “saviour,” he said — as Trudeau was seen when he pulled the Liberals back from historic lows after the Conservatives’ 2011 majority win. 

But the clock is running out to stage a potential leadership race, with a federal election slated to happen no later than October 2025. 

And history dictates that switching leaders doesn’t guarantee new results. Take the situation in 1993, when Kim Campbell and the erstwhile Progressive Conservatives were nearly wiped off the map after former prime minister Brian Mulroney resigned. 

That year, the Liberals captured Toronto-St. Pauls. They held it until early Tuesday. 

For the Conservatives, there’s hope that Trudeau sticks around, given his low popularity and the fact a Liberal leadership race would bring a push for membership sales and fundraising.

The prime minister stays and fights 

As it stands, the prime minister is giving no hints he plans to follow in his late father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow — or the sun, or the rain — anytime soon. 

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday she thinks he should stay on. 

And Leslie Church, the longtime political staffer who ran and lost as the Liberals’ candidate in the byelection, said now isn’t the time to walk away, but instead to re-earn the trust of voters. 

After nearly a year of public opinion polls showing a growing appetite for change across the country, that will be easier said than done. 

The Liberals need to find a way to embrace the current atmosphere of change, said Scott Reid, who worked as the director of communications for former prime minister Paul Martin.

“The government has to reconcile itself to the conclusion that if it doesn’t channel change, it will become the victim of change,” he said.

“But pretending that they’re on the right course, and pretending that all is well, and that Canadians just haven’t tuned in yet to politics (and) aren’t really thinking about their choices — that mirage has been shattered.”

One point of proof, political insiders note: the byelection had unusually high turnout, especially for a summer contest. 

Trudeau calls a snap election 

If Trudeau felt like it, he could look across the pond to his counterparts in France and the United Kingdom for inspiration. 

Both of them recently took bad results and turned them into a reason to plunge into campaign mode. 

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak triggered a snap election in late May after a tumultuous run for his Conservatives, who have cycled through five prime ministers over the past 14 years. 

Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked the nation by calling a snap election following an abysmal showing for the party in a vote by European Parliament that saw a rise in far-right parties. 

Trudeau might find that Macron’s experience so far is a reason not to pull the plug, Fournier suggested.

“I haven’t seen anybody who said Macron’s idea was good.”

Trudeau said Tuesday he knows his team has “much more work to do” — and that they are committed to following through on that. 

The New Democrats prepare to trigger an election

If they wanted to, the next time the House of Commons is in session, New Democrats could pull their support from the minority Liberals and vote against the government on a confidence matter, triggering an election. 

But while the Liberals are reeling from their loss, the NDP also has reason to worry.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh saw his share of the vote drop to around 11 per cent in the byelection, down from the nearly 17 per cent he captured in 2021. 

A longtime party operative and national director-turned-principal secretary to Singh, Anne McGrath, dismissed the need for soul-searching, saying the race was always set up to be a battle between the Liberals and Conservatives. 

“We have never come in second,” she said in an interview. 

She also rejected the idea that it was time to consider breaking off the supply-and-confidence deal, in which the NDP votes with the Liberals on key legislation in exchange for progress on shared priorities like dental care and pharmacare.

“We’re going to be continuing to push to get those things done,” she said.

“And I will say that in any byelection where the results are different than anticipated, (it) makes every party try to figure out what that was about.”— With files from Stephanie Taylor, Mickey Djuric, Laura Osman and The Associated Press.