The Long Road to Trudeau’s Resignation
In a wintry Ottawa, the Canadian prime minister contemplated his political future. Much had changed since he was first elected. The excitement around his youthful vigor, avowed multiculturalism, and sex appeal that had propelled him to office—“Trudeaumania,” the press had dubbed it—was gone. Critics called him arrogant and out-of-touch. The sheen had even worn off his personal life, with he and his glamorous wife in the midst of a divorce.
His political fortunes had fallen for substantive reasons, too. Canadians were fed up with the high inflation and growing government deficits that had characterized his economic stewardship. Many disliked his energy policy, especially in Western Canada. Many worried about bad relations with the United States under a Republican president.
Within his Liberal Party, the knives were coming out; conservatives, for their part, were reenergized under their younger leader. Indeed, around the world, conservatives seemed to have the momentum, with liberals facing backlash for their unpopular policies. The times had moved past Trudeau. And so, after a tenure that spanned multiple decades, he decided: it was time to step down.
This is not just the story of Justin Trudeau, who announced Monday that he is resigning as leader of the Liberal Party, paving the way for Canada’s first new prime minister in nearly a decade. It is also the story of his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who stepped down in 1984 after having been in power, apart from a nine-month period in opposition, since 1968. Ultimately, both prime ministers were felled by global trends they struggled to respond to.
There are differences, of course. On immigration, both Trudeaus made a point of welcoming refugees, especially from non-white-majority countries, but compared with his son’s, Pierre’s immigration policy was miserly. The number of immigrants actually fell in each of his final three years in office, ending at 89,000 in 1983—or 3.5 per 1,000 people. In 2024, some 485,000 immigrants moved to Canada—or 12 per 1,000 people.
On energy, Trudeau père’s undoing was his National Energy Program, a statist plan entailing price controls that alienated Canada’s Western provinces. Trudeau fils tried nothing so radical or unpopular, although his carbon tax has divided Canadians. The specific economic ailments also differ: inflation and unemployment were much higher when the elder Trudeau resigned, while today, GDP growth is in worse shape.
Yet in both cases, shocks to employment, prices, and growth generated a fierce backlash against incumbents the world over. In the 1980s, it manifested in the Reagan-Thatcher free-market revolution, a wave that swept far beyond the United States and the United Kingdom—provoking France’s socialist president, François Mitterrand, to embrace austerity, and sending the leader of Canada’s conservative party, Brian Mulroney, into the prime minister’s office after Trudeau.
The current anti-incumbent backlash is even more powerful, and Justin Trudeau is merely its latest victim. Add his name to the list of democratic leaders who have suffered electoral setbacks or outright defeats in the last year: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the United States, Rishi Sunak in the United Kingdom, Emmanuel Macron in France, Olaf Scholz in Germany, Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Narendra Modi in India, Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea, and Fumio Kishida in Japan. Like voters in the rest of the world, Canadians punished their political elites for COVID-19 policies they considered too restrictive and fiscal policies they considered inflationary (and in many, though not all, cases, immigration policies they considered too permissive).
Canada is a progressive country, one where socialized medicine, abortion, gun control, and gay rights are not hot-button issues but questions settled long ago. Yet this is not an unalloyed progressivism. As Trudeau discovered, there are limits to Canadians’ liberal inclinations. On immigration, it turned out that the median voter held more conservative views than he did (a lesson Harris also learned). His policy was decidedly unpopular, particularly for the way that the growing population was raising housing prices and straining the healthcare system. In October, he made a U-turn, announcing that he was dropping the annual targets for the number of new permanent residents by more than 100,000.
This identity crisis is most evident in economic policy. The nature of the Canadian economy has always tugged the country rightward. While not quite Saudi Arabia with snow and elections, Canada depends heavily on oil and gas production, along with mining, which explains why its environmental policies have long been more industry-friendly than one might otherwise expect, and why Trudeau’s climate policies were less popular than they might have been in, say, Denmark. Canada is also a major manufacturing exporter, which explains why Canadian prime ministers of all political stripes have been avowed free traders.
Yet unlike other fallen leaders, Trudeau faced a particular second-order effect of the anti-incumbent wave: the change of government it produced in Canada’s neighbor, closest ally, and biggest trading partner. Pierre Trudeau once quipped that living next to the United States was like “sleeping with an elephant: no matter how friendly or temperate the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” And in November, Americans reelected a leader whom most Canadians considered neither friendly nor temperate.
Pursuing Canada’s interests without offending the United States is hard in the best of times, but that task became impossible for Trudeau with Donald Trump’s second electoral victory. The two leaders had a poor relationship during Trump’s first term: in 2018, after Trudeau promised that Canada would “not be pushed around” on tariffs, Trump called him “weak” and “dishonest,” and at a 2019 NATO summit, Trudeau was caught on camera joking with other leaders about Trump’s erratic ways. And relations were on track to be even worse during Trump’s second term.
In November, after Trump pledged to slap a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods, Trudeau made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, promising enhanced border security to appease the incoming president. It didn’t work: the following month, Trump belittled Trudeau on social media, calling him the “governor” of the “state” of Canada. Any Canadian prime minister was destined to have a strained relationship with Trump, given his protectionist impulses, but none more so than Trudeau, given their history, a reality that even his supporters recognized. Trudeau probably wouldn’t have lasted long during a Harris administration, but Trump’s election sealed his fate.
Historically, relations between Canada and the United States have been frosty when their leaders hail from opposing political tribes. Richard Nixon called Pierre Trudeau “a pompous egghead” and a “son of a bitch.” (Trudeau responded in his memoirs by saying he had “been called worse things by better people.”) Trudeau got along better with Ronald Reagan, although the American president later recalled being “horrified by his rudeness” at a G-7 summit in London.
Mulroney came to office promising to “refurbish relationships with the United States, our best and closest friend” and ended up becoming a personal friend of Reagan’s. There has perhaps never been a greater display of warmth between the two countries’ leaders than the “Shamrock Summit,” which began on St. Patrick’s Day of 1985 and ended with the two leaders, both of Irish heritage, singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” (Fittingly, Mulroney delivered a eulogy at Reagan’s funeral.)
Mulroney’s eventual Liberal successor, Jean Chrétien, got along famously with Bill Clinton, spending hours with him on the golf course. But Chrétien and his successor, Paul Martin, also a Liberal, clashed with George W. Bush over Iraq and a U.S. missile defense plan. And so the hot-and-cold pattern continued, through the elections of Stephen Harper, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Trump, and Biden. If Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, is elected prime minister this year, as polls suggest he has a good shot of doing, then one can expect a measure of cross-border calm to prevail. In a podcast interview with the psychologist and conservative commentator Jordan Peterson, he pitched Trump on the “great deal” the two leaders could make on trade.
With Trudeau’s resignation, Trump may now imagine that just as he has the power to tip GOP primaries and kill Congressional legislation, he can bring about the downfall of foreign leaders. In this way, by treating the leader of a close ally as a subservient political opponent deserving of mockery, Trump was acting out the fantasy he relayed to Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago and repeated Monday: that Canada is “the 51st state.” But for the most part, Trudeau was swept out of the prime minister’s office by the same global wave that Trump rode back into the White House.
Stuart A. Reid is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Lumumba Plot.
Image: Shutterstock.