Canadians had been calling for him to go since 2021. Members of his own party had joined them by early 2024. In September, realising it was time to leave Justin Trudeau’s sinking ship, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, ended the confidence and supply arrangement that had been agreed with the diminished Liberal Party in March 2022 (reportedly delaying until he qualified for his parliamentary pension). By December, calls to resign were emerging from Trudeau’s own cabinet, which he was still delusionally reshuffling. His personal poll ratings had slumped to 22%, down from a peak of 65%. On 16 December, one of his few remaining allies, the deputy minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland abruptly quit. Her resignation letter-cum-application for the party leadership spoke of being ‘at odds’ over how to handle Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs. A few days later, Singh promised to table a no-confidence motion when parliament reconvened in the new year. Still, Trudeau clung on.
Only on 6 January, having evidently had the time to mull the impending parliamentary defeat and intra-party mauling over the festive season, did he at last announce his resignation. Trudeau leaves his party in historically poor shape. In power for 93 of the past 129 years, the Liberals now languish in third place at 16%, projected to take just 44 seats in the next election, due by October, but likely to be held in spring. The Conservatives, led by the suavely combative Pierre Poilievre, are polling at 45% and on course for a landslide. Trudeau has prorogued parliament until 24 March, giving the Liberals just two months to elect a new leader who will inevitably be seen as less than legitimate, handing Poilievre more grist for his campaigning mill.
Although a long time coming, Trudeau’s fall has been dramatic. He was elected in 2015 promising ‘real change’ and ‘sunny ways’ to Canadians wearied by a miserly and divisive decade of Conservative rule under Stephen Harper. Eager to revive the Liberal Party’s fortunes, grandees like former finance minister Ralph Goodale, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge and rising stars like Freeland pulled out all the stops. Everything was on offer: increased public spending defying deficit dharma to create a ‘strong middle class’, social equity, climate change action, Indigenous reconciliation and replacing Canada’s first-past-the-post voting system with proportional representation.
Trudeau’s ‘I-don’t-read-newspapers’ lack of gravitas, hitherto a disqualification for high political office, suddenly became a virtue. He fronted the party’s progressive rebrand free of the baggage of personal convictions. As a former drama teacher and recreational pugilist, he acted the part and cut a fine figure. Electoral success catapulted him – young, telegenic and the son of the country’s most iconic Prime Minister – into Kennedy-esque celebrity. Vogue dubbed him ‘the new young face of Canadian politics’. He appointed a gender-balanced, diverse ‘cabinet that looks like Canada’. Asked why, he replied ‘Because it’s 2015.’
The image mesmerised the world, but Canada was soon out of love. Proximity to corporations and the rich made Trudeau scandal-prone: in 2016, an undeclared freebie family vacation at the Aga Khan’s Bahamas residence; in 2019, a directive to his attorney general to go easy on the construction giant SNC-Lavalin, contravening conflict of interest rules; in 2020, a near-billion dollar contract handed to a charity paying Trudeau family members as speakers; more recently, a torrent of government contracts channelled to McKinsey, often without competitive bidding. In the run-up to the 2019 election, with the SNC-Lavalin affair still fresh in the public mind, photos of a young Trudeau in blackface emerged; the Liberals lost their majority. A snap election called in 2021 to recover it on the back of generous pandemic income support failed. Polls showed that 55% of Canadians wanted Trudeau gone.
How could it be otherwise? Without a plan to address Canada’s lacklustre growth and productivity, Trudeau’s government became fixated on reducing debt. Pandemic era income support was wound up at the earliest opportunity. New social spending lined corporate pockets thanks to extensive outsourcing of health and social services. New investment largely took the form of public-private partnerships, opportunities for risk-free profits. The Canada Infrastructure Bank financed corporations building infrastructure they would own and run on user fees. The government’s most successful policy, a national child benefit programme, reportedly brought half a million children out of poverty. But child poverty still stood at 17.2% in 2021, rising 5 percentage points between 2020 and 2022.
Meanwhile, social progress barely went beyond Trudeau’s tokenistic cabinet. The distance between rhetoric and substance was widest on Indigenous issues. How else to serve settler-state extractive capital? Trudeau pursued the ‘new nation-to-nation relationship’ of ‘rights, respect, co-operation and partnership’ with Indigenous peoples by repressing protests against livelihood-destroying oil pipeline projects, themselves hardly in keeping with his ecological pledges. The much-touted appointment of Canada’s first Indigenous Attorney General ended with her resignation over the SNC-Lavalin affair. Boiled water advisories continue on reserves, polluted by extractive projects.
Trudeau’s ‘feminist’ foreign policy focused on ‘human rights’ didn’t exclude expanding arms exports to militarist and repressive governments and reducing foreign aid. It amounted to little more than overeager alignment with US aggression. Deepening economic subjection since the 1988 Canada–US Free Trade Agreement extinguished any embers of the independence that had enabled Canada’s official neutrality during the Vietnam war. After Trump tore up NAFTA, the Trudeau government, unable to contemplate the diversification of trade links so urgent for autonomy, accepted reduced market access, intellectual property rights concessions and restrictions on trade arrangements with other countries under the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), underlining its abjection by arresting Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at US behest. Relations with China, key to diversification as Canada’s second-largest trading partner, went into a tailspin that only accelerated with Biden’s hardening stance. With Trump threatening 25% tariffs, Trudeau, unable to match Sheinbaum’s spirited response, rushed to Mar-a-Lago to appease the bully. In conducting foreign policy in lockstep with the interests of the US and Canadian mining companies, Trudeau advanced reaction in Latin America, particularly – through the Lima Group – in Venezuela. Since 2014, but especially since 2022, it has supported US regime-change and proxy war in Ukraine, deploying 2,000 personnel to Latvia to shore up NATO’s eastern flank and providing military training to Ukrainian neo-Nazi units. And since October 2023, it has supported genocide in Gaza, repressing opponents as anti-Semitic.
Accelerating Trudeau’s fall has been the rise of a ‘soft’ populist alternative in Poilievre. In early 2022, after three weeks of paralysis and confusion, Trudeau ostentatiously invoked emergency legislation to disperse the darkly carnivalesque ‘freedom convoy’ opposing vaccination mandates that occupied Ottawa’s snow-covered streets with trucks, bouncy castles and hot tubs. Its most important political effects would unfold in the Conservative Party: shortly afterward, the unremarkable Erin O’Toole was unseated as leader, later replaced by Poilievre, who had come out in support of the convoy. Having failed to fulfil progressive hopes, and relying on an NDP equally invested in progressive posturing, Trudeau had no defence against Poilievre’s bare-knuckle attacks on him as a corrupt lightweight and trendy, ineffectual progressive beholden to ‘utopian wokeism’. With inflation rising, Poilievre criticized government inaction on price gouging and the competence of the Bank of Canada.
Amid a mounting cost-of-living crisis and chronically under-funded public services, Canadian sentiment has also soured against immigration, amply urged by Poilievre. After the service economy picked up with the easing of pandemic restrictions, the Trudeau government expanded low-skill immigration under the Harper-era temporary foreign worker programme. He also scaled up the international student programme, in cahoots with underfunded universities reliant on their sky-high fees. Unprecedented numbers now entered Canada, from a norm of about 300,000 per annum to nearly 500,000 in 2022. Health and social services were strained, and rents and house prices soared amid a shortage – from an average cost of $446,000 when Trudeau took office in November 2015 to $732,000 today. In a last-ditch volte-face in October, Trudeau announced a reduction in immigration targets over the next few years including by capping foreign student permits, a ploy regarded as an admission of failure.
Once seen as a bulwark against right-wing populism, and a foil to its figurehead south of the border, Trudeau is now the latest satrap in Biden’s Atlanticist ‘alliance of democracies’ to fall. With few sizeable left forces in the field, as these leaders have proved unable to legitimise an increasingly unequal, dysfunctional and militaristic neoliberal order, Trumpists have advanced easily into the vacuum of authority. Trudeau is not just the latest to succumb but the most emblematic. Few centrist leaders aroused more hope when he took the Liberal Party from 34 to 184 seats in 2015. Few have disappointed more. And few have more thoroughly exposed the mercenary irresponsibility of their political tribe, ruling over the political voids of neoliberal capitalist societies until power is wrung from them.
Read on: Wolfgang Streeck, ‘The Politics of Exit’, NLR 88.