Why Justin Trudeau Had to Step Down

The resignation of Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister of Canada—or, at least, as the leader of the Liberal Party, until a new leader is chosen, which will amount to the same thing—took place this morning in front of the Prime Ministerial residence in Ottawa. It was a very Canadian setting, with the soon-departing figure of the still young Trudeau wearing an overcoat and gloves, and the smoky breath of winter rising from his mouth as he talked. He spoke in French and then in English and back again and, for Canadians abroad, there was something oddly moving in the easy bilingualism of the occasion. Taken as utterly normal in Canada, it still signals a remarkable and too easily taken for granted co-existence of two “founding peoples” that dates back to the early nineteenth century and the country’s beginnings. Canada, from far away, has always seemed the model liberal country, and this multiculturalism—extended since to the many ethnic tiles of the “Canadian mosaic”—is part of it.

For Canadians at home, of course, this rosy picture can seem misleading, even infuriating. Trudeau fils, son of Pierre, Canada’s dominant political figure of the past thirty or so years of the twentieth century, had clearly lost the confidence and even the affection of the country, and the sheer rage and resentment that was directed at him—somewhat surprisingly, given the limited nature of the Canadian crises—has been startling to witness over the past couple of years. His fall was triggered by the resignation, in December, of Chrystia Freeland, his long-serving finance minister and once close confidant, which was in effect an internal vote of no-confidence, tied to her concerns about the growing deficit and the oncoming train of Donald Trump’s tariffs. But it had been set in motion some time ago by what have by now become the familiar complaints that citizens of democracies make about all their leaders, particularly left-leaning ones, however moderate: that they represent an out-of-touch élite, that they are unresponsive to the economic necessities of ordinary people, that they are too sympathetic to outsiders at the cost of the native population, and all the rest. The same issues that doomed Kamala Harris—a perception that prices, particularly housing prices, were crazily out of control and that the immigration policy, a Canadian point of pride, was similarly no longer rational—doomed Trudeau. (Canadian immigration policy, long focussed on the highly educated, was relaxed by the Liberal government during COVID, leading to an influx of immigrants, and was, by a familiar if faulty logic, popularly blamed for the housing crunch.)

In truth, there is—or ought to be—nothing entirely surprising or even out of the ordinary about this phenomenon of the sudden “turn.” Trudeau had been in power for just over ten years, and this is about the limit, and then some, of a popular leader in a democracy. Tony Blair, not dissimilarly, had obviously lost the confidence of the Brits at around the same point, though owing to different triggers of course, and the once formidable Margaret Thatcher lost her party, too, after a little more than ten years in office. There may be a natural limit to tenure in a democracy, and expecting any more is unrealistic. Aside from Angela Merkel, the last democratically elected leader of a large nation who lasted longer was, really, F.D.R., who had the special circumstances of the war; even Charles de Gaulle, who invented the Fifth Republic in France, was allowed to preside over it for just ten years, from 1959 to 1969.

Though Canadian polemics against Trudeau are almost vengeful in feeling—“The Epic Tale of Trudeau’s Political Futility” was a recent headline in the Globe & Mail, the Canadian national Anglophone newspaper—his arc may simply have traced the natural life cycle of a parliamentary government. Stephen Harper, Trudeau’s conservative predecessor, was in office for nine years and two hundred and seventy-one days, to Trudeau’s nine years and sixty-three days, and even Jean Chrétien, their predecessor—and perhaps the most admirable and authoritative liberal figure that no one in the U.S. has ever heard of—lasted just barely past a decade.

What makes Trudeau’s resignation disquieting, at least from this distance, is that the new leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, is widely perceived as much further to the right than any previous Conservative leader, including his very conservative predecessor, Harper. Even stalwarts of the old Canadian Conservative Party are startled by how much it has changed. More disturbingly, Poilievre is seen by many as having presided over a “Trumpification” of the Canadian Tories, particularly in repeatedly attacking and threatening to defund the CBC—Radio-Canada, as it’s called in French—one of the pillars of Canadian life over the past century, an assault which frighteningly echoes Trump’s attacks on fake news, i.e., true news. Poilievre’s hatred for the CBC seems very real, and some Canadian insiders regard it, as one said, as “a dead man walking.”

Trudeau is perceived, by the Poilievre Conservatives, as unduly green, unduly woke—he had flags flying at half-mast in remembrance of the Indigenous people lost in the “residential schools,” an episode that, though still tragic, has since been revealed as having involved fewer actual deaths and graves than it seemed to at first—and, above all, unduly weak. To be sure, Poilievre rises as meaningfully from homegrown Canadian prairie populism—his power base is out west, where the Trudeaus, père et fils, have always been extremely unpopular—as he does from the far-right wave which infects the democratic world. John Diefenbaker, who was Prime Minister in the fifties and sixties, was of the same largely western Canada kind that emphasizes a suspicion of the Ottawa élite and their Toronto (and Montreal) paymasters. Now that divide turns particularly on the question of energy development. (The west wants more; the eastern “élite,” less.) But Poilievre’s endorsement of the occupation of Ottawa by a convoy of truckers during the pandemic—unpopular in the country, but popular in his party—was seen as pandering of a kind and had a note of Foxy demagoguery about it that was largely new to Canada. To be sure, the truckers earned sympathy, as similar figures did in the rest of the developed world, through the popular instinct that the pandemic restrictions had gone too far or lasted too long. In Canada, this is largely a provincial responsibility, but the national government shouldered a lot of the blame. The famous Canadian joke is that, asked on a binational commission to write something on elephants, the Americans wrote “Bigger and Better Elephants!” and the Canadians wrote “Elephants: A Federal or Provincial Responsibility?”

That question mark, against the excitable American exclamation, is very Canadian. There are many worrying consequences of the likely fall and defeat of the Liberal government in the coming election. The historic task of the Liberal Party of Canada was to keep Quebec within confederation. This seemed, until recently, largely and somewhat miraculously achieved—not least by the bilingualism programs that Pierre Trudeau had fathered and that his son put on such easy display in stepping down—but a Conservative government in place might well help spur on another referendum, within Quebec, on independence. Canada is naturally a divided country—given its scale, how could it not be?—but that is one division that it might be difficult to survive. Canada will never become, in Trump’s juvenile taunt, a “fifty-first state.” But remaining distinctly Canadian in a world no longer as well-made for liberal democracies as it once was remains, to use a very Canadian phrase, quite a challenge. ♦