Opinion: For progressives, the Trudeau by-election and Biden debate disaster were blessings in disguise

The siren sounds. For progressives in Canada and the United States, it’s an emergency moment. They face the same dire circumstances. They are in the same sinking boats.

Their leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden, are flailing and failing. Their respective populations, as is evident in polls, want them to go away. They’re not listening.

It’s now up to their parties to move on from them. If they don’t, they risk getting blowtorched by the populist parties of Pierre Poilievre and Donald Trump.

There’s still hope both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau will do the right thing. They both experienced disasters last week. There was President Biden’s pathetic debate performance against Mr. Trump, and there was the Trudeau Liberals losing a by-election in a Toronto riding they had owned for decades.

Conservatives here and Republicans south of the border delighted in the debacles. But they may well end up wishing these moments never had happened. There’s a good chance now they won’t get the election opponents they wanted.

Sometimes for change to happen you have to hit rock bottom. That’s what occurred and for progressives, it’s a blessing in disguise.

Had the Liberals won the Toronto-St. Paul by-election, there wouldn’t be anywhere near the pressure on Mr. Trudeau to leave that there is now. In the debate, Mr. Biden was up against a convicted felon, a sexual abuser, an election denier, a twice-impeached serial liar. Had he performed just passably he would not be facing mounting demands to quit the race.

Liberals and Democrats now have no excuse not to be rid of both the Prime Minister and the President. Loyalty to the leader is not owed, not to someone who showed himself as incapacitated as did Mr. Biden. Not to someone like Mr. Trudeau who has already been in office nine years and has completely worn out his welcome. The stakes, given the huge values divide between progressives and populists, are too high.

Mr. Biden’s salvation plan sees his supporters trying to argue his debate performance was just an aberration. But the President’s cognitive difficulties have been increasingly apparent in recent months. He will try in public appearances, such as an upcoming extended interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday, to show he can speak lucidly and coherently without a teleprompter.

Like Mr. Biden, Mr. Trudeau sounds like he is doubling down on his intention to stay in power. If he does, “there will be a massive defection of voters from the Liberal Party in the next election,” Tom d’Aquino, the former head of the Business Council on National Issues and former special assistant to Pierre Trudeau, said in an e-mail.

The impression I got from talks with about a dozen Liberals in the last few days is that barring a miracle turnaround in the polls, the pressure on Mr. Trudeau to vacate will become intense. Nothing he has tried, they say, is working. People’s minds are made up.

No big names in the Biden or Trudeau circles are coming out publicly against either of them yet. It takes courage to do so, knowing that you’ll be seen as a traitor by loyalists if you do.

Catherine McKenna, who served in Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, was one who showed grit. “The Liberal Party isn’t about one person,” she said in a statement to the CBC. “The Prime Minister has a legacy to be proud of, but it’s time for new ideas, new energy and a new leader.” For those words, she’s taken a lot of abuse, she told me later. But a lot of support is coming her way as well, with many telling her she should run to be the next Liberal leader.

Former British Columbia premier Christy Clark has also called for Mr. Trudeau to step down. She might plan a run for the leadership herself, a source told me, with a campaign to bring the party back to the centre. A pollster told me that from the soundings he’s taken, the two Liberals garnering the most support for succeeding Mr. Trudeau are former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly.

Polls don’t show alternative candidates faring much better than Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau. But that could well change with the visibility and promotion such candidates would get from leadership campaigns, which would be the focus of enormous attention.

Changing leaders is a gamble. But it is not as much of a gamble as staying the course – the losing course – with the leaders the Liberals and Democrats have now.