Trudeau earns rebuke for election that should never have been called.

To the Liberals’ relief, Justin Trudeau staved off a public rebuke Monday.

This was an election that should never have been called. And voters appear to have made that point by returning MPs to the House of Commons in nearly identical proportions as in 2019.

Trudeau had no need for a new mandate. He could have continued to govern with the help of the NDP.

All the Liberals’ election proposals would have been passed in the last Parliament — in fact, tougher climate change targets were set and eight child care agreements were signed before the writ dropped. The NDP even ran on the Liberals’ daycare plan, proposing no changes.

But instead of working with the opposition, Trudeau decided to send the country to the polls so he could try to obtain a majority. This, after he spent more than a year asking Canadians to act selflessly, to make sacrifices to safeguard the health of their neighbours — causing businesses to close and jobs to be lost. Call it a personal or partisan reason, vanity or hubris, calling the election was off-brand. (Or totally on-brand for Liberal haters who think Trudeau only ever acts in his own interests.)

Trudeau only needed to negotiate a little, share credit, and live with the fact that parliamentary committees during minority governments are dominated by the opposition. That means MPs can spend their time poking around pesky real or apparent conflicts of interests, such as the government’s handling of sexual assaults in the military, the WE Charity affair, or Canada-China relations.

Back in 2015, Trudeau promised to strengthen parliamentary committees. The Liberals’ platform stated that “for Parliament to work best, its members must be free to do what they have been elected to do: represent their communities and hold the government to account. Government must always stay focused on serving Canadians and solving their problems.”

It’s hard to see the Justin Trudeau of 2015 voting for the Trudeau of 2021. At the very least, he would have been far less enthused to do so — a sentiment frequently heard at doors.

Nevertheless, it seems voters decided that if the race came down to Trudeau or Erin O’Toole, they weren’t quite ready to punish the prime minister by electing a flipflopping Conservative leader who appeared to coddle antivaxxers.

Although the opposition tried to make the election a referendum on Trudeau, consequential issues were on the ballot. In some ways, that made this whole exercise even more disturbing.

Trudeau put his legacy — on climate change, on child care, on pandemic relief — at risk. So confident were the Liberals that they would be re-elected that they gambled everything they pledge to care about, for example, a repeal of their tanker-traffic ban on the West Coast or their “assault-style” weapons ban.

I asked Trudeau during a meeting with the Star’s editorial board in September, whether he would apologize to the public for calling this election.

He declined. “For me, the decisions I’m making are about people. You can make it about me, people can choose to make it about me, but I’m not making this about me,” he said.

I hope he revisits this answer in the hours or days ahead.

He is now a weakened leader. The negotiating power he held over the opposition parties has evaporated. No party will take seriously any Liberal threat to return to the polls if the government is unable to get what it wants adopted in the House. But, the opposition too has nothing to feel emboldened about. The message is clear: work together.

Although NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier may not have obtained the results they were hoping for, at least their members won’t throw them to the wolves.

The same likely cannot be said of Green party Leader Annamie Paul, who had a hard time keeping her job before the election and now has lost her bid for a seat.

O’Toole should also brace for a revolt, if he doesn’t step down. Even before the ballots were cast there were angry rumblings from those upset by his move toward the centre, his stance on gun control and his embrace of Brian Mulroney. The knives are out from those who feel the Tory leader will say anything to get elected.

Conservative party rules state any leader who loses an election must face a leadership review at the next convention — that’s likely scheduled for 2023.

But MPs could choose at their first caucus meeting to give themselves the power to review and remove the party leader. Party members could also initiate a referendum on O’Toole’s leadership. Only five per cent of the current membership in at least five provinces — approximately 50,000 members — need to request it.

Instead of working with the opposition, Trudeau decided to send the country to the polls