Justin Trudeau stood at a podium in front of an adoring crowd of supporters in October 2015 and made a vow. “Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways,” he said, echoing words from Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian prime minister, more than a century before.
The Liberal party had just won a commanding majority in Canada’s parliament, and Trudeau, son of one of the country’s towering postwar leaders, exuded a mood of progressive liberal optimism.
On Monday, in the midst of darkening days of economic stagnation and political turmoil, he resigned as leader of his own party, a move that will end his tenure as prime minister and draw a curtain on Canada’s latest Trudeau era.
Trudeau’s commitment to social causes, gender equality, indigenous rights and fighting climate change brought him global fame. Domestically the story was different: years of political infighting, scandals and a cost of living crisis eroded his credibility and ability to lead the G7 nation.
“Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa on Monday.
But Canadians’ view of Trudeau — like that of his father, who himself served more than a decade in two stints as the country’s prime minister — was always deeply mixed. Acclaimed by supporters as a paragon of Canada’s progressive values, he was reviled among conservatives especially in the country’s west, where scepticism of the political princeling ran deep.
In recent months, that scepticism became the predominant view among a majority of Canadian voters, who told pollsters that his time as leader should end.
Trudeau, 53, leaves the political ring after months of pressure from within his own party to resign. On Monday, he asked Governor General Mary Simon — King Charles’s representative in Canada — to suspend parliament until March 24 so the party can choose a new leader.
“There will be a national leadership process over the coming weeks,” Trudeau said, without adding who he supported as a successor.
Canadian pundits speculate that his onetime ally, former finance minister Chrystia Freeland — whose scathing attack on Trudeau as she resigned from his cabinet last month deepened his political peril — could be among those to replace him. Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England late on Monday said he was considering running for party leader.
But any new leader’s first task may be simply to prevent the party’s annihilation at an election that now appears likely in the coming months, with the opposition Conservative party far ahead in the polls.
With no clear succession plan in place and no date set for the next election, Canada enters a period of political uncertainty just as it contends with a volatile neighbour.
Trudeau had attempted to position himself as an experienced hand in dealing with Donald Trump, unexpectedly flying to Mar-a-Lago in November after the incoming president threatened to impose tariffs on Canadian goods.
But Trump’s threats prompted panic in Ottawa and big exporting provinces such as Alberta, and the president-elect proceeded to repeatedly mock Trudeau online — including after Monday’s resignation — describing the Canadian prime minister as a “governor” of the US’s “51st state”.
Apart from his own political difficulties at home, Trudeau’s resignation echoes the fate of leaders of other western democracies, where high inflation following the Covid-19 pandemic and anxieties about immigration have helped push incumbents from power.
Semra Sevi, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, said Trudeau’s domestic reputation had suffered irreversibly from lower- and middle-income families’ backlash against his pandemic policies and a mishandling of immigration policy that many voters believe had fuelled a housing affordability crisis.
The Liberal leader had at one point trumpeted Canada’s openness to immigrants and asylum seekers, inviting cameras to film him greeting Syrian refugees at airports in 2015. In October, Trudeau vowed to curb immigration.
“Trudeau’s initial rise was largely built on his charisma and progressive image. However, over the years, his reputation has been undermined by perceived hypocrisy,” Sevi said.
Trudeau’s progressive policies helped inflame opposition at home. He promised ambitious climate change action and his federal government imposed one of the west’s most aggressive carbon taxes, angering conservatives in Alberta, the western province that is home to Canada’s lucrative oil industry.
To appease those opponents, Trudeau’s government also supported — and funded — a huge oil pipeline from Alberta to the west coast. But its costs ballooned and it did nothing to stop the western provinces from relentlessly attacking Trudeau over regulation and environmental policy they said was stifling economic prosperity.
There were also controversies that eroded public trust, such as Trudeau’s holiday in 2017 on the private island of philanthropist and spiritual leader Aga Khan. In 2019, allegations that he improperly intervened to temper a fraud investigation into Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin, now AtkinsRéalis, skewered Trudeau’s moral authority.
Ultimately, said Robert Asselin, a former economic adviser in the Trudeau government, a combination of weak governance, economic underperformance and policy incoherence triggered his demise.
“Trudeau approached the prime ministership as a narrator and communicator, often leaving people with the impression he was acting rather than governing,” Asselin said.
In the past 12 months, five ministers have stepped down from Trudeau’s cabinet and his Liberal party has lost three safe seats.
Then came Freeland’s bombshell. Once viewed as a personal friend of the prime minister, her bruising resignation letter last month blasted the prime minister for “costly political gimmicks” to win popular favour, such as a sales-tax holiday.
The rebuke put a leader who had won three federal elections on the ropes. Within days, the Liberals’ parliamentary ally, the leftwing New Democratic party, called on Trudeau to quit and said they would no longer support the government in parliament. The prime minister moved on Monday before what seemed an inevitable no-confidence vote that would have collapsed his government and triggered a snap election.
Stephen Maher, author of The Prince, a biography of Trudeau, said the leader’s political arc speaks to his remarkable self-belief but also the “presidentialisation” of the Canadian prime minister’s role.
“Trudeau only has one gear. There are politicians who are able to pivot, shift and tell a different story to extend their shelf life. Trudeau just is: ‘Hey, here I am, love me’ — it worked for nearly a decade,” Maher said.
An Angus Reid poll released on December 30 showed that just 16 per cent of voters would support his party, while his disapproval rating had reached 74 per cent.
His Liberal government seems highly likely to be replaced — elections must be called sometime this year — by a Conservative party led by Pierre Poilievre, a rightwing politician polling far ahead of Trudeau who also now has Trump ally Elon Musk’s endorsement.
It could mark a sharp shift in Canadian politics, putting the country in the camp of western democracies lurching from progressivism into a new era of economic populism and anti-immigration.
Even so, Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s principal secretary from 2015-19, said he would be remembered as a leader who resurrected his Liberal party from the “political dustbin” after a decade in opposition.
“It was an astonishing achievement,” he said. “Government grinds you down, 10 years is a long time. He is not the first person in power to have his optimistic disposition eroded by government.”
+ There are no comments
Add yours