National Review Online
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
The long, slow death of Justin Trudeau’s political career
has been mesmerizing. In 2015, he led the Liberal Party of Canada to its first
majority government since the 2000 general election. In 2019, he lost that
majority and has bitterly clung to power ever since. At long last, his
premiership will conclude, with the announcement on Monday of his resignation, pending the
Liberals’ selection of a new leader.
In the 2019 election and in a snap election Trudeau
called in 2021, the Conservative Party of Canada won more votes than the
Liberals, but due to Canada’s unevenly populated legislative districts and geographic
polarization, the Liberals won more seats. That alleged unfairness in Canada’s
election system is something the Liberal Party had wanted to reform — until it
became clear under Trudeau that the status quo benefited the Liberal Party.
Fear not, though: Under that same electoral system,
current projections show the Conservatives under leader Pierre Poilievre will
win one of the largest majorities in Canadian history at the next election,
which will need to occur by October 20. The Liberals might be so diminished
that they won’t even be the official opposition, with the Bloc Québécois as the
second-largest party. It would be a well-deserved fate after Trudeau’s
miserable tenure.
Under his watch,
Canada has made tax-and-spend fiscal policy a national tradition on par with
maple syrup. The government raised taxes on investment, furthering Canada’s lack of
competitiveness relative to the U.S. The cost of living has risen as income and
productivity have flatlined. Housing costs are among the highest in the world.
In 2014, Canadian median household income equaled U.S.
median household income for the first time, leading to a flood of commentary
from U.S. progressives about how the friendly Canadians had figured out
middle-class economics and dethroned the greedy, capitalist U.S. From a
progressive point of view, this didn’t make much sense at the time, since 2014
was the sixth year of the Obama presidency in the U.S. and the ninth year of
the Conservative Harper premiership in Canada. If anything, Canada’s success
demonstrated that center-right economic policy worked.
When Canadians threw the Conservatives out in favor of
Trudeau in 2015, the U.S. reasserted its lead in income and hasn’t looked back.
Today, every U.S. state has higher median earnings per person than
the richest Canadian province. By GDP per capita, Ontario would be the fifth-poorest and
Quebec would be the second-poorest U.S. state.
There was hardly a fashionable progressive cause on which
Trudeau didn’t go all-in. Canada committed to “net-zero emissions” by 2050, the
date countless leaders around the world have picked that just so happens to be a
nice round number and is far enough in the future to be practically
meaningless. To get to net zero, Trudeau’s government implemented a carbon tax. One of Poilievre’s top promises is to “axe the
tax.”
Canada’s points-based immigration system was a global
model for smart border management. Trudeau, while promising to make Canada “the
first post-national state,” opened the borders to just about everyone. The
deluge of immigration that followed has strained Canada’s welfare state and
exacerbated the housing shortage. Trudeau has tried to transform into an immigration hawk in the past few months
in response to voter backlash, obviously to no avail since he won’t be fighting
the next election.
Trudeau received international acclaim for his feminism
and even corrected a questioner at a 2018 townhall who used the word
“mankind.” “We like to say ‘peoplekind,’ not necessarily ‘mankind,’ it’s more
inclusive,” the prime minister said.
His first cabinet in 2015 was praised for its gender
parity, with 15 men (really 16 if you include Trudeau himself) and 15 women.
When two female ministers, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, resigned
from the cabinet in 2019 over Trudeau’s attempts to interfere with the
politically inconvenient prosecution of a major construction company, Trudeau
expelled them from the Liberal Party. Wilson-Raybould, the attorney general
whom the prime minister’s office had pressured to go easy on the prosecution and
who spoke out publicly against the corruption, was succeeded by a man.
You’ll hardly find a more zealous advocate for abortion
anywhere in the world than Trudeau. He called the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs
decision “horrific” and said his government is “proudly pro-choice and always
will be” in a September 2024 statement that also promised to “increase access
to safe abortion services for women, youth, and Indigenous, racialized, and
2SLGBTQI+ communities.”
That last term is the abbreviation Trudeau’s government
uses in all official communications for the “community” of two-spirit, lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people, with the “+” thrown in
for others who use “additional terminologies.” The official government website
defining this term says that “2SLGBTQI+ terminology is continuously evolving”
and “it is important to note that this list is not exhaustive.” Perhaps, but it
is definitely exhausting.
Canada under Trudeau expanded the culture of death to
adults as well, legalizing medically assisted suicide in 2016 and then
expanding the situations in which it is permitted in 2021. Euthanasia is now
among the leading causes of death in Canada. A country that likes to
think of itself as the world’s conscience has, under Trudeau, played a bigger role than perhaps any other in accelerating the global trend toward undermining the foundational principle
of medicine: Do no harm.
Trudeau’s Covid overreaches included a vaccine mandate
for truck drivers, which, along with the carbon tax and more general complaints
with his policies, spurred protests in 2022. He responded with emergency powers that suppressed speech and froze bank
accounts of protest leaders. The invocation of emergency powers was ruled unconstitutional by a Canadian court in 2024.
This premiership of big government, corruption, far-left
social values, and abuse of power will finally come to an end, and Canadians
have a worthy and able conservative leader in Poilievre ready to
take charge. Pleasurable as it may have been to make fun of Trudeau for the
past decade, the U.S. is better off when our neighbors are competently
governed. The electoral pounding the Liberals are about to receive will help
set Canada back on course to being “the True North strong and free.”
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