Trudeau's ministers are standing by him even as Liberal fortunes wane

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still enjoys the support of his cabinet even though polls suggest the Liberal government is stuck in a losing position as it approaches the nine-year mark in office.

Reporters asked ministers assembled in Halifax this week for a cabinet retreat — a key planning session ahead of Parliament's return next month — if they still have confidence in Trudeau to lead the party after its bruising defeat in the Toronto–St. Paul's byelection. All of them said they did.

In fact, there's only been one sitting member of the Liberal caucus to publicly call for Trudeau's resignation since the party lost that one-time safe Liberal seat: outgoing New Brunswick MP Wayne Long.

338Canada, a poll aggregator, suggests the Liberals are roughly 16 percentage points behind Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives. The governing party has been down by double digits for much of the last year.

And an Abacus Data poll released last week found the Liberal Party's pool of potential voters — people who would ever consider voting for the party — is now smaller than the NDP's. (For this study, the margin of error for a comparable probability-based random sample of the same size is ± 2.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20.)

While the Liberals continue to struggle, there's been renewed enthusiasm for Democrats in the U.S. after an aging President Joe Biden stepped aside and Vice-President Kamala Harris took over as the party's candidate for the upcoming election.

While the Democrats under Biden were in tough against Donald Trump, Harris has closed the gap in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin only weeks after being thrown into the race — a sign that some voters are eager to back a fresh-faced candidate who's not Biden