Shame on Us for Ever Believing Him

By Jonathan Kay

Tuesday, January 07, 2025

 

There are no term limits in Canadian politics. While this may sound like a boon to ambitious politicians, it’s actually something of a curse, as it allows them to cling to power long after their stars have dimmed and their legacies have been compromised. This is why ex-prime ministers and ex-premiers (Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien being two examples from the former category) are relegated to somewhat grubby professional after-lives as corporate pitch men and lobbyists in their dotage.

 

Justin Trudeau, who announced his resignation on Monday, presents a particularly sad case study. His Liberals won a commanding Parliamentary majority in 2015, and during the first term that followed, Trudeau did much to reward voters’ trust. He faced down Donald Trump’s protectionist threats with patience and tact, increased marginal tax rates on the rich as a means to fight income inequality, legalised marijuana, and passed legislation that allows adults to access medical assistance in dying (MAID, as it’s now commonly known)—all steps that I supported. Trudeau became a star on the world stage, positioning himself as something of an anti-Trump; but also (at least briefly) a unifying force at home. As I wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2017, the values he then channelled—liberal “in both the modern and classical sense of the word”—are widely shared across the Canadian political spectrum.

 

Trudeau’s reputation among Canadians is now at such a low ebb that it’s easy to forget how popular he was during this honeymoon phase. Had he quit politics in 2019, as his star was dimming, he’d likely be remembered fondly by most Canadians, and would now possess some gilded sinecure at a prestigious university, name-brand NGO, or even the United Nations. Instead, he went on to fight in two closely contested elections—losing the popular vote in each to the opposition Conservatives while cobbling together increasingly scandal-plagued minority governments.

 

I am one of the many Canadians who once truly believed in Justin Trudeau—so much that I put my then-career at a conservative newspaper in jeopardy by agreeing to ghostwrite his memoirs in 2014. Notwithstanding Conservative efforts to portray Trudeau as a pretty dilettante who was “just not ready” to lead Canada, I found him to be mature, well-informed, serious-minded—and, yes, very charming. I was especially drawn to his effusively expressed patriotic love for Canada—a prominent theme in the book we produced, Common Ground.

 

The 2014-era Trudeau who put his name to that book wasn’t “woke” in the slightest—and, in fact, he explicitly called out political opportunists who wanted to balkanise Canadian society according to skin colour or other superficial markers. “Identity politics might have been one way of establishing rapport with voters, the kind of divide-and-conquer strategy favoured by the other parties—but I had no intention of going down that road,” Common Ground asserts. “I tried to build common ground around common values that I believed were widely shared.”

 

These were words that I believed Canada needed to hear at the time. The incumbent Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, had shown Canadians that right-wing politicians were fully capable of going in for their own kind of “identity politics” when it suited them—as exemplified by his “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act,” and an associated snitch line that Canadians could call to inform on their neighbours. Many of my conservative friends seemed eager to turn Canada’s 2015 general election into a regional theatre of America’s culture war—or even of some grand struggle to save the soul of western civilisation from our enemies. By comparison, Trudeau’s focus on “sunny ways” and the relentlessly upbeat tone of his election campaign struck me as deeply attractive.

 

But we all know how this story ends. Rather than reject “identity politics” and “build common ground,” Trudeau jumped with both feet into the fever swamps of race and gender politics, eventually turning himself into Canada’s Chief DEI Officer. By his second term in office, he was trashing his (supposedly beloved) Canada as a genocide state, tarring conservative opponents as enablers of white supremacy, and telling Canadians that “systemic racism” infects “all our institutions.” If you disagreed with him on vaccines, this meant you were likely a misogynist and a racist. When it emerged that Trudeau himself had been a serial blackface enthusiast when he was younger—he couldn’t even count how many times he’d done it, he told reporters—Liberal media cheerleaders insisted that, well, it was really just a symptom of Canadian “anti-Blackness” writ large. Our fault, in other words.

 

When the false rumour that the physical remains of 215 dead Indigenous children had been unearthed from the grounds of a former British Columbia school in 2021, Trudeau turned it into an officially sanctioned lie, and lowered flags on federal buildings for almost six months. Trudeau also took the opportunity to slam Canada for another supposed “genocide”—this one (which is apparently still going on even as I type these words) against Indigenous women.

Trudeau created an “Anti-Racism Strategy” and “Anti-Racism Secretariat,” and showered millions on dubious left-wing groups that signal-boosted Liberal claims that Canada is awash with right-wing racists. His government funded such an enormous set of anti-racism slush funds that no one in Ottawa could keep track of who was at the trough: At one point in 2022, it emerged that Trudeau’s Heritage ministry was bankrolling an antisemitic bigot named Laith Marouf, who toured Canada purporting to educate audiences about community media, while viciously denouncing Jews on social media. Even once this fact was discovered by a prominent Canadian telecommunications consultant named Mark Goldberg, and then reported by Quillette, it took Trudeau’s government months to actually cut off Marouf’s funding.

 

In his manic fervour to get onside with post-George Floyd hash-taggers, Trudeau started pegging government spending to recipients’ skin colour—a race-segregated approach completely alien to Canadian values (but which his cabinet ministers still brag about to this day). Under Trudeau’s watch, the CBC, Canada’s government-funded national broadcaster, abandoned all pretense that it was anything but a mouthpiece for American-inspired social-justice agitprop. This included the creation of a special media vertical called “Being Black in Canada,” which naturally was marked with a set of raised black fists. On gender issues, CBC news coverage became a catalogue of self-parody, featuring articles such as—and I am not making this up—Cutting through the binary: Photographer documents transgender and gender nonconforming people’s experiences with haircuts and As a nurse and a drag artist, Anita LandBack blazes a trail in the name of Indigenous resilience. Thanks to these offerings, the CBC has become so mocked and disdained by ordinary Canadians that an incoming Conservative government will likely face little opposition in killing the CBC off entirely, a fate that would have been unthinkable before Trudeau’s social-justice apparatchiks fatally contaminated its brand.

 

the idiom of a gender-studies grad student, Trudeau told cabinet ministers that their policy-making had to be “developed through an intersectional lens, including applying frameworks such as Gender-based Analysis.” Men with female pronouns were allowed into women’s prisons and sports leagues, drag queens were paraded around Parliament, Pride Week was turned into a months-long “Pride Season,” “LGBT” was replaced in official government documents with the comically unpronounceable term “2SLGBTQI+,” and fringe misogynists such as Fae Johnstone were showered with government handouts. The Canada that Trudeau inherited in 2014 was a socially liberal place where gay marriage had (thankfully) become widely accepted, even among conservatives. Yet thanks to the toxic messaging of government-funded trans activists and the Liberals’ non-stop avalanche of gaudy rainbow propaganda, Canada’s LGB&T communities now face a significant backlash.

 

Trudeau even performed his social-justice shtick on the international stage, where he made a pest of himself by hectoring other leaders about white supremacy. When asked what he’d contributed to a G20 meeting in 2023, he said “gender language” and “Indigenous reflections.” Trudeau took a knee to Black Lives Matter when George Floyd died, then performed the same mawkish act when visiting an Indigenous reserve in 2021 with a teddy bear. That year, largely thanks to Trudeau, Canada’s national birthday on 1 July was transformed from a celebration into a morbid ritual of repentance.

 

The rise and fall of Justin Trudeau isn’t just the sad story of one politician, but a cautionary tale about the corrosive effects of social-justice dogma on mainstream politics. Trudeau’s main message—the title of his book, the basis of his appeal, the reason I agreed to help him—was that Canada is a great country and that Canadians should focus on their common goals and values. But the whole doctrinal basis of the (again, largely American-imported) social-justice movement he embraced is utterly incompatible with that unifying spirit—as it presents the divisions between races in stark, dystopian, unbridgeable terms. Forced to decide between these two mutually exclusive ideas, Trudeau picked the one that seemed more fashionable, completely betraying his previously articulated values in the process.

 

Which Trudeau was the real one, Canadians asked themselves—the upbeat patriot who took office in 2015, or the joyless social-justice hypocrite lecturing them about their whiteness?

 

If Canada is indeed a genocide state, and Canadians truly are inveterate racists permanently stained by the original sin of white supremacy (not to mention the follow-on ideological crimes of sexism, transphobia, and all the rest)—what hope is there for “common ground”? What hope is there even for patriotism itself in a land of genocide? After listening to Trudeau babble on for so many years about these topics, many of us—myself included—have wondered openly why he’d even want to lead this wretched moral wasteland of “unmarked graves” we call Canada.

 

This is personal for me, and not just because of some book project I wrapped up more than a decade ago. Both of my parents hail from immigrant families whose forebears faced murderous antisemitism in Europe and Asia. Comparatively speaking, Canada offered a paradise of safety and tolerance. And it’s offered me and my own children numerous wonderful opportunities to build happy lives. Watching Trudeau casually trash this incredible country—the one we elected him to run, on the apparently false assumption that he actually liked or even respected it—has been a painful spectacle.

 

While it’s absolutely true that the history of this Canadian paradise is stained with injustices visited upon Indigenous populations, Canada is not a genocide state. Nor is white supremacy a mainstream creed among my fellow citizens. These are lies dressed up as social-justice slogans. And the fact that Trudeau trafficked in them constitutes his defining disgrace.