As I pointed out yesterday, PM Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party was facing a special election in Montreal where they were at risk of losing a once-safe seat. As expected, the Liberals lost the seat though not to the NDP but to a candidate from the Bloq Quebecois. The pressure on Trudeau to step aside will only increase after this loss, the second loss for the Liberal Party in just a few months

The defeat will raise the pressure on the 52-year-old leader to step aside before the next election, which is scheduled for October 2025 but may happen earlier than that.

It’s the second significant defeat at the ballot box in just a few months for his party. In June, voters elected a Conservative Party candidate to represent an area of Toronto that had previously been a Liberal stronghold. Now they’ve rejected the Liberals again in the electoral district of LaSalle-Emard-Verdun in Montreal, Trudeau’s hometown — though they lost by only a narrow margin.

The special election was won by Louis-Philippe Sauve of the Bloc Quebecois, a political party that advocates for Quebec’s interests in Ottawa and runs candidates only in that province.

It was a close race with Sauve beating the Liberal candidate by just 248 votes. Trudeau brushed off the loss and reaffirmed that he has no intention of stepping aside.

Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday morning that “there’s all sorts of reflections to take’’ on the election outcome.

“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win,’’ Mr. Trudeau said. “But there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it.”

But one political analyst suggested in advance that a loss would be another nail in Trudeau's coffin.

“A loss is another nail in the coffin,” Lori Turnbull, a respected Canadian political analyst and professor at Dalhousie University, told POLITICO ahead of the vote. “It’s going to be really hard for them to get around the narrative that the government is basically done.”...

“I don’t know that we have an equivalent of a Nancy Pelosi here, somebody who would bend his ear and have that tough conversation in a way that would really be impactful on him,” Turnbull said. “Not necessarily to quit, but [to say], ‘We need to change gears. We need to do something colossally different.”

The NDP, which recently tried to distance itself from Trudeau, came in third in the contest. Polls had indicated the NDP had a chance to win the seat but some observers think those chances were squandered by a last minute error of judgment.

The NDP had a very good candidate in Craig Sauvé, a hard-working and well-liked Montreal city councillor. His campaign had been going extremely well and he had every chance of winning the byelection.

In the final week, the NDP decided that their best move to close the deal with voters was to put out an election pamphlet containing anti-Israel rhetoric and a Palestinian flag along with Sauvé’s picture. It left many NDP voters scratching their heads.

This was a political blunder of epic proportions — scuppering a winning campaign because someone, somewhere in the NDP world decided to push anti-Israel positions that, unfortunately, are becoming commonplace in the party.

The NDP is a progressive party and, just like progressives here in the US, they have become increasingly vocal about their anti-Israel positions recently.

Meanwhile, Trudeau's biggest problem is not the challenge coming from his left but the one coming from his right. Polls continue to show the conservatives lead the Liberals by around 20 points. Parliament resumed yesterday after a summer break and conservative leader Pierre Poilievre went after Trudeau, repeating his central message of cutting taxes on fuel as Trudeau stumbled a bit repeating his own message about climate change.

A majority of Canadians have had enough of this sort of thing after also being hit with high inflation and a sputtering economy in the past few years. Trudeau is holding on, hoping a gradually improving economy will restore his fortunes, but I think at this point the die has been cast. After 9 years of this, people are just tired of his act. I'll wrap this up with the reaction from a columnist for the Calgary Herald. He predicts Trudeau's obstinance could be the end of the Liberal Party.

Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, this party is on the verge of electoral obliteration. The Liberals prove they can lose not just anywhere, but everywhere...

Worried Liberals now recall the 2011 election, when they won only 34 seats. No, it’s worse than that. The Liberals are about to become the woolly mammoths of politics; memorable, but extinct...

And what of Trudeau? His resistance to the obvious is almost pathological. He seems to think he can win again as the champion of the carbon tax, the only leader who cares about climate change.

It's not working. Sooner or later members of the Liberal Party will panic and do to Trudeau what Democrats just did to Joe Biden.