In Durham, Trudeau trapped himself in the corner.

And there's no easy way for him to spin out of it.

Just shy of twelve years ago, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participated in a highly publicized boxing match against a fellow Parliamentarian to much triumphant press hype and fanfare.

A lot has changed since then. Canada is facing multiple serious crises, including an acute housing shortage. Mr. Trudeau is facing historically low personal approval ratings, his governing Liberal Party is facing multiple major political scandals, and the opposition Conservative Party is polling at least 10 points higher than the Liberals in many national polls.

So now, many people are wondering if Mr. Trudeau still has the chops to fight his way out of a corner.

Thus entered the Liberal party into a byelection held yesterday in the Canadian federal electoral district of Durham, where Conservative candidate Jamil Jivani won a record-smashing victory in a seat vacated by former Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole when he retired from politics last year.

There’s really no other way to describe it, the byelection results were terrible for Mr. Trudeau and his Liberal Party. It was a major, historic routing in a riding in vote-rich southern Ontario. In the boxing world, this would be the electoral equivalent of a decisive K.O.

But when Mr. Trudeau has found himself in a political corner in the past, he’s heavily relied on one key move to pivot to a better position: political spin. However, over the past year, facing an electorate in need of real solutions and an invigorated Conservative party, this one tried and true strategy has been consistently failing the beleaguered leader and his team.

Which is why they should have known better. The Durham byelection was a spectacular example of the Liberals taking a big, dumb swing and finding themselves with their face in the canvas. To illustrate, allow me to preemptively block all the corner evasive moves (read: the political spin) that they will almost certainly attempt to use to explain their performance in Durham.

<DING! DING!>

1.) Pffffft. Durham is a seat held by the Conservatives for a long time. The Liberals never implied they actually could win it.

That’s flat out, laughable bullshit. LOL.

And that’s because for several weeks, the Liberal Party has sent scores of senior cabinet ministers, caucus members, and JUSTIN TRUDEAU HIMSELF to the riding to promote the local candidate with a clear message: we can win this. They promoted their appearances with an aggressive social media campaign. Their Ontario caucus pushed a media article stating that they were "going to do everything that they could to win" and that they had raised tens of thousands of dollars within their associations to push their campaign. Mr. Trudeau also made the highly unusual decision to single out the local candidate in a weird diatribe during his party's first caucus meeting of the winter session.

This was no low key campaign. It was a high key as it gets.

Said differently, at a time when the Liberal central campaign probably should have been working to manage expectations for the outcome of the byelection, their strategy was to deliberately raise them. And then they epically failed to deliver.

2.) Come on. It doesn't matter if expectations were raised. This will be forgotten in a week and there won’t be any lasting impact for the Liberals.

Again, complete BS.

It’s rare to see a political party go full bore on prepositioning byelection result, precisely because they can be unpredictable. So, for starters, for the Liberals to aggressively float that Durham was winnable in their current political reality makes the fact that they delivered their WORST-EVER RESULT IN THE HISTORY OF THE RIDING that much more acute. Not only did this boneheaded move effectively remove the ability of the party to downplay the loss, but it made the enormity of the loss that much more spectacular to behold. Read, they tried hard to win this riding and still delivered their worst ever result, and they vaporized their only remotely plausible communications option in the process.

Second, choosing to raise expectations for the outcome of this byelection suggests a level of hubris that can only come from losing complete grasp on reality on the part of the Liberal central political operations. Mr. Jivani is a heavyweight contender - a prominent public figure with a long history in the Canadian conservative political movement and a powerful resume. The political strength of Mr. Jivani, the electoral history of the riding, the favourable personal approval ratings of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, the Liberal's low polling levels, the vigor and tenacity in the Conservative party campaign, and the multiple scandals facing their tired and worn Liberal government should have given pause for thought for even the most junior Liberal political operative when thinking about suggesting that a Liberal victory was all but assured. 

That level of central party hubris will not still the jitters of a single Liberal candidate, or frankly for anyone hoping the Liberals still have the type of jam needed to pull their shit-show of a government together before then.

Third, Jivani's historic, record-setting win against what was billed by the Liberals as the full strength of their machine is a huge boost for the Conservative caucus (as I can attest). It will probably feel more like a punch to the gut to the Liberal backbench.

So yeah, the Liberal’s decision to over-promise and under-deliver in Durham matters.

3.) But the voter turnout was so lowwwwwwww!

Any Liberal who is talking about low turnout numbers as an excuse for epically losing the Durham byelection has either a) given up or b) is living in a magical plane of reality that the rest of Canada doesn’t have access to.

Yesterday’s turnout was about what it usually is for any byelection in Canada, around the 30% mark. But much, much, more importantly, even with this level of turnout the spread between the Conservatives was a whopping record 35%.

That delta between the two parties means that Liberal voters either a) didn't turn out or b) switched parties, no matter what the turnout was. Both these things likely happened in Durham yesterday. Every Liberal incumbent in the blast radius of Durham with any modicum of sense left should realize that this is very, very bad news.

Political polling shows Canadians are unhappy with Mr. Trudeau's government and are looking for change. And despite knowing that, the Liberals STILL objectively offered nothing significant in way of new policy that would suggest a fresh approach to earn the votes of this cohort. In fact, quite the opposite happened. Instead of offering innovation, the Liberals actually attempted to downplay their party brand in the local campaign. They sent their local candidate out to campaign with literature conspicuously free of prominent images of Liberal logos or Justin Trudeau and was distinctively blue (i.e. the colour of Conservative Party branding).

These are not the traditional tactics of a campaign convinced in its ability to motivate an electorate to get out and vote. These are the tactics of a party unwilling to recognize the world has changed.

In contrast to this approach, the Conservatives ran a strong campaign promoting four clear policy objectives (i.e., axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime) that Mr. Poilievre has steadfastly articulated and that reflect national voter priorities. Mr. Jivani and his team worked hard and the stuck the landing.

4.) The only election that matters is the general election!

While a single byelection can’t always be assumed to predict the outcome of another election, the Durham byelection could prove to have certain impacts on the current political landscape.

That's because the litany of dumb mistakes made by the Liberal campaign, coupled with the insane arrogance of setting high expectations for the outcome without any acknowledgement of the scandal or crises facing the government, neatly reflects what the public is seeing in the Liberal government right now. That is, dumb mistakes and a governing style that's heavy on hubris and light on solutions to address the real-life, acute problems millions of Canadians face.

(At least Mr. Trudeau can take solace in the fact that his coalition partner, New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, achieved an equally bad result in Durham yesterday).

But again, Mr. Trudeau was once a boxer. He should know it's harder to win a fight when you're tired, have pushed yourself into a corner, and are out of ideas. So, he has no real excuse to have allowed his Liberal party to enable the Durham byelection to play out as it did, just as he has no excuse for the train wreck of a government he presides over.

So hearty congratulations to Mr. Jivani on a well-fought match.

But if I had to wager, I don’t think he expects to get much rest. None of his team does, myself included.

After all, there’s a lot more work to do to get Canadians out of the corner Mr. Trudeau seems to have dragged them into with him.