By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January 06, 2025
As of this writing, the Justin Trudeau era in Canada is approaching a rapid and bitterly disappointing conclusion:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau is increasingly likely to announce he intends to step down, though he
has not made a final decision, a source familiar with Trudeau’s thinking said
on Sunday.
The source spoke to Reuters after
the Globe and Mail reported that Trudeau was expected to announce as early as
Monday that he would quit as leader of Canada’s ruling Liberal Party after nine
years in office.
Trudeau’s departure would leave the
party without a permanent head at a time when polls show the Liberals will
badly lose to the official opposition Conservatives in an election that must be
held by late October.
There are 338 seats in Canada’s House of Commons;
Trudeau’s Liberal Party currently has 153, or about 45 percent. (Minority
governments, where a political party does not have an absolute majority of the
chamber but runs the cabinet and government, are common in Canada.)
A late December poll found that if Canada held parliamentary
elections, the “likely range of seats for the Conservatives begins at just over
200 and rises to over 240. There is very little chance that the Conservatives
would fail to secure a majority government if an election were held today.” Members of Canada’s Liberal Party have publicly written to
Trudeau, urging him to step down and “allow for a process to determine a new
leader to replace you.”
You see, after a long stretch of high inflation, economic pessimism, rising crime, unpopular lax enforcement of immigration restrictions, insufficient defense spending,
and a foreign policy more
focused on symbolic gestures than real and growing threats, Canada’s party
of the Left wants their increasingly hapless and poorly communicating leader to
step down before he steers his party into an election debacle. Clearly,
Americans have no idea what that’s like!
Canada’s Conservative Party is currently led by Pierre
Poilievre — the apple-eating member of Parliament who seems so preternaturally
calm and collected he probably uses Quaaludes to wake up. In that widely
shared video of him unflappably and repeatedly rejecting the premise of a
hostile interviewer, Poilievre sounds like he has a resting heart rate of about
six.
Pretty Boy overstayed his welcome. I’d say that at this
moment, Trudeau’s face must be awfully red with embarrassment, but we all know
that’s not the darkest his face has ever been. (Canadian culture
forgives bad judgment, but only if you’re on a certain side of the political divide.)
You have to wonder if, in addition to the looming
election wipeout, the prospect of spending the next ten months or so in office
dealing with the return of Donald Trump is spurring Trudeau to contemplate his
departure. It was just a month ago that Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago in
Florida, to meet with President-elect Trump, attempting to persuade Trump to
drop his threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on goods from his country. The
initial reports indicated the meeting went well, but afterward, Trump jokingly referred to Trudeau as “a governor” and Canada as “a state.”
Shortly thereafter, Trudeau responded by appearing at a feminist event and lamenting, “We were supposed to be on a
steady, if difficult, march towards progress. And yet, just a few weeks ago,
the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman
president.”
As I observed then, “That statement reads like an
endorsement of Harris, a month after she lost the election. Who does it
help and what good does it do? Sure, maybe it makes Trudeau and the feminists
in the audience feel better to sneer that Trump’s election was a setback for
women’s rights. But do you think Trudeau’s comment makes Trump more
conciliatory, or does it make the incoming U.S. president more determined to
slap a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada?”
Last month, Toronto-based Matthew Lau wrote at National Review that Trudeau
“seems committed to his reckless economics and endless blunders” — a politically
deadly combination of a massive expansion in government” with “a stagnant
economy.”
The U.S. will not be annexing Canada; as Rich observed:
The United States doesn’t need
another huge, misgoverned blue state. We already have California, where the
climate and the surfing are better.
Over the last several years, Canada
has managed to fall even further behind the United States economically. “The
IMF forecasts that Canada’s national income per head, equivalent to around 80
percent of America’s in the decade before the pandemic, will be just 70 percent
of its neighbor’s in 2025,” according to The Economist.
Writing on the same theme at the
website The Hub, University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe
notes that “the gap between the Canadian and American economies has now reached
its widest point in nearly a century.” The U.S., he continues, “is on track to
produce nearly 50 percent more per person than Canada will.” Canada would be
the fourth-poorest state per capita in the Union, beneath Alabama.
As
our Dominic Pino observed, “The media were telling us ten years ago that
Canada had figured out economics for the middle class. After nine consecutive
years of left-wing government, every Canadian province has lower median
earnings than every U.S. state. Maybe it’s time to give free markets and
limited government a try.”
The widespread public dissatisfaction and projected voter
backlash we see in Canada are not all that different from what we saw in the
November elections in the United States, and the increasing discontent in once
deep-blue places like California and New York City. In the end, the public
judges a government on the results it generates.
Way back in 2019, I noticed that you didn’t have to look
far or wide to find further-Left Canadians complaining that Trudeau had proven to
be such a compromising squish — irking environmentalists, cooperating with
Trump-era immigration policies, working on the ratification of the USMCA trade
deal.
The median voter from Topeka to Toronto just wants safe
streets, good schools, plenty of job opportunities and rising wages, low or at
least manageable inflation, immigration policies that welcome newcomers but
prioritize the country’s needs first, and a sense that their children will have
it better than they did. The sort of things that enchant the hard-Left
progressive activist class — DEI, climate change, amnesty for those who enter
the country illegally, BDS against Israel, “congestion pricing,” “abolishing the police,” calling for cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages —
prove to be pretty toxic among most voters in the long run.
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