The Liberals weight-loss goal shows they are running out of options

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The bad polls are weighing down the Liberals, so they have decided to shed some weight: They aim to cut the Conservatives’ lead by five percentage points by July.

Like middle-aged dieters beginning a new regime, they’ve looked in the mirror and decided they have to do something.

They’ve committed to it, too. For three weeks, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ran around the country, breathlessly marketing the measures in an pre-election-style budget that last week outlined $53-billion in new spending. Now Liberal cabinet ministers are out selling them every day: On Tuesday, there were 14 ministers doing events in 10 different locations, from Wolfville, N.S., to the Sunshine Coast in B.C.

The Liberals are taking a big swing at winning back some support now, before it is too late. Sources told The Globe and Mail’s Marieke Walsh that Mr. Trudeau’s team are targeting a five-percentage-point narrowing of the Conservatives lead by July.

But as many dieters know, the results don’t always match your goals. The obvious question is this: What will they do if they don’t meet them?

By that point, the Liberals won’t have many options left, apart from dropping 180 pounds worth of Justin Trudeau.

The early polls since the budget was brought down don’t show any movement – in fact, they show the Tory lead growing. On Tuesday, the latest Nanos Research four-week tracking poll and a postbudget Ipsos survey both placed Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals 19 percentage points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

That’s not a definitive answer. Most Canadians don’t spend their days scanning for new federal policies, so it’s conceivable there will be some delayed upside for the Liberals. The younger voters Mr. Trudeau’s party are targeting are less likely to watch TV, let alone TV news. Some of them already won’t listen to anything Mr. Trudeau and his ministers say, but others just don’t hear much about politics.

That’s why the Liberals embarked on a pre- and postbudget road show. It’s a scramble to try to get in front of the eyeballs of under-40 voters with a relentless series of events and headlines in places across the country with polices aimed at them – housing-construction loans, proposals to make rent payments count toward mortgage credit, an AI fund, expanded students loans and so on.

There’s a logic to the strategy. Mr. Trudeau knows they can’t skip happily around the discontent in the country, among people who have lost buying power to inflation and higher interest rates, and young voters facing high rents. They have to tell young voters they are working to fix the biggest problems. But doing so makes the Prime Minister talk a lot about how bad things are.

“The reality is that for far too many millennial families or Gen Zers, the dream of home ownership is getting further and further away every year, no matter how hard they work, no matter the side hustles they pull together,” Mr. Trudeau said at a news conference in Saskatoon on Tuesday.

That’s not exactly an inspiring message of hope, even for those millennials still patient enough to keep listening past Mr. Trudeau’s talk about “huger and huger rents” to get to the part about the government investing in the housing supply. It’s harder for older governments to win people back.

If this big spring push doesn’t change things for the Liberals, there’s not much left to try other than changing leaders. Mr. Trudeau keeps insisting he is all in for the next election, but there are a half-dozen potential contenders inside his cabinet and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney campaigning semi-discreetly outside.

It’s late to change leaders now, however. A Liberal leadership race could see the party split over everything from the carbon tax to the Middle East, ending up with a winner who has less than a year to pick up the pieces and prepare an election campaign.

The last option, of course, is for the Liberals to tough it out, and live in hope. Maybe interest rates will fall, and rents. Maybe Mr. Poilievre will make mistakes and kill his own fortunes. Like middle-aged dieters, they’ll keep looking for some new way, hoping results will come.