Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced the Liberal Party’s new campaign chair, as some MPs reportedly band together to ask their leader to step down.
Trudeau and the party say Andrew Bevan, a longtime Liberal staff member and volunteer, is taking the reins ahead of the next general election.
Bevan most recently served as an adviser to Trudeau and chief of staff to Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, which involved helping develop this past spring’s budget.
He replaces Jeremy Broadhurst, who quit as national campaign director last month, shortly before the Liberals lost a critical byelection in Montreal.
Following a June byelection loss in Toronto, those developments fuelled calls among some Liberals for Trudeau to resign, which reportedly intensified last week as MPs pushed each other to commit to calling on Trudeau to step down.
The Liberals also announced a deputy campaign director, Marjorie Michel, who specializes in election outreach in Quebec.
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Bevan previously served as chief of staff to former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion as well as former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne.
The next federal election is set to take place within a year but could be called much sooner following the NDP’s decision to withdraw from an agreement that supported the Liberals in confidence votes.
This past Friday, multiple media outlets reported efforts by Liberal MPs to band together to ask Trudeau to resign amid a sustained slump in the polls.
Details about the strategy and breadth of the bid were unclear, though one MP not involved in the revolt told The Canadian Press on Friday that the number of MPs involved was not insignificant.
