How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau

Justin Trudeau had a special bond with Canadians, who had known him since he was born, on Christmas Day in 1971, as the son of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

That bond helped him get his Dad’s old job. In his first federal election as Liberal leader in 2015, his Conservative opponents warned Canadians that he was a lightweight, a celebrity with nice hair but no relevant work experience. Yet Trudeau had grown up in public, and he brought a welcome dose of glamor to the humdrum world of Canadian politics. Voters liked him, felt they knew him, and decided to give him a chance, in the form of a majority government.

It was a remarkable triumph, unprecedented in Canadian politics. Trudeau—a former high school teacher with an unimpressive resume—managed to take his Liberal Party from third place in 2011, its worst showing in history, to first with a resounding mandate, an echo of the “Trudeaumania” that gripped the country when his father won government in 1968.

Justin’s election was a restoration of his father’s vision of Canada as a bilingual, multicultural northern social welfare state. But in the place of his father’s Jesuitical intellectual precision, he brought glamour, openness, and fun. Trudeau promised Canadians “sunny ways” after a decade of dour, business-oriented Conservative government, and successfully pursued an ambitious progressive agenda, winning two more elections. But after nine tumultuous years as Canada’s leader, he was forced to announce his resignation on Monday to avoid a revolt from Liberal Members of Parliament, who are facing certain defeat in an election that must be called by October.

Trudeau will stay on until his replacement is chosen. But his stubborn refusal to recognize that his time was up has left him, his party, and his country in a terrible situation, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk bullying him and threatening to make Canada the 51st state. He will govern as a lame duck in the first months of Trump’s presidency while his party chooses a leader to take on the combative Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has had a double-digit lead in the polls for more than two years.

Trudeau leaves his country in peril, which means Canadians are not in the mood to celebrate his accomplishments as Prime Minister. He did do some things, though.

He enjoyed a long honeymoon, was briefly a global media darling, and won support for reducing child poverty, increasing taxes on the rich, and cutting taxes on the middle class. He legalized marijuana, brought in a carbon tax to cut emissions, and worked to improve the lives of Indigenous Canadians, whose difficult living conditions are a continued source of national shame.

Trudeau successfully managed the first presidency of Donald J. Trump, carefully negotiating a trade agreement similar to the one Trump inherited, and got the country through the COVID-19 pandemic, putting money in people’s pockets so they could stay locked down until the worst had passed.

But if Trudeau managed crises reasonably well, he also produced them regularly. He broke ethics rules with an ill-considered holiday on the Aga Khan’s private island, made a disastrous trip to India that was set up like a royal tour, was revealed to have worn blackface more times than he could say, lost two ministers and several senior aides in a scandal over an attempt to sideline the prosecution of SNC Lavalin, a corrupt engineering firm.

Yet what did him in was the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis. Like Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and practically every other incumbent in the West, Trudeau’s poll numbers went underwater with people’s household budgets.

Economic growth has been slower than in the U.S., and his mismanagement of immigration made matters worse. Canada has long prided itself on its careful and successful integration of newcomers, with Trudeau’s father Pierre making Canada the first country to introduce official multiculturalism. But to inject energy into the economy after the pandemic, Trudeau carelessly opened the gates too wide, letting in record numbers of temporary foreign workers and international students that exacerbated what was already one of the world’s worst housing crises.

His doom started to be clear in June when he lost a byelection in a normally safe Toronto neighborhood, and became clearer when he lost another in Montreal in September. Liberal MPs called for him to quit. He ignored them, shuffled his cabinet, tried out a holiday sales-tax-cut and mulled $250 checks for all working Canadians, but nothing he did could change the numbers.

Then it all came to a head in December. After Trump threatened to impose ruinous 25% tariffs on all Canadian imports, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, hoping his charm would win the day. Trump responded by repeatedly bullying him, threatening to annex Canada. With little support at home, Trudeau could not find a way to respond effectively.

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Canadians had had enough of him, and he wouldn’t get the message. His growing number of unhappy former ministers felt he had a bad case of l’etat c’est moi. Trudeau has “gotten to a place now where he actually believes what he’s doing is good for the country, irrespective of anything else, which I think is hugely scary and problematic,” one told me.

Eventually, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who saved the day during trade negotiations with Trump years earlier, forced the issue. She resigned on Dec. 16 amid disagreements over how to handle the incoming Trump Administration, triggering a crisis of legitimacy for Trudeau.

For years, Trudeau had been telling anyone who would listen that he had to stay on to fight the next election against Poilievre, whose right-wing policies and harsh attacks are outside the tradition of Canadian politics.

Trudeau despises Poilievre, sees him as a threat to the Canada his father built. He wants to fight him. And he is a fighter. The towering 6 ft. 2 in. Trudeau first won the Liberal Party leadership in 2013 after proving his toughness and unexpectedly triumphing 3-1 in a charity boxing match.

“I’m a fighter,” he said Monday. “Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians.”

But Trudeau had to acknowledge that it was time to throw in the towel. “It has become obvious to me that with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” he said.

That was an understatement. On Wednesday his MPs were to demand his exit. The polling has been so bad for so long that the Liberals need a new leader. Canadians need someone to manage the relationship with the U.S, which suddenly looks more difficult than at any time since the War of 1812.

But voters are clear they want someone else to do that.