“I’m a fighter,” Justin Trudeau said on Monday on the snowy steps of his official residence in Ottawa, looking like a man trying not to cry. “Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians.”
But the next time the bell rings, Justin Trudeau will not answer it.
“It has become obvious to me that with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” he said.
Trudeau was giving the speech, looking pained as he repeated his lines in both official languages, English and French, announcing his forthcoming resignation, because his MPs — who are looking at certain defeat with him as their leader — were to turf him on Wednesday. They hope that a leadership race will give them a champion who might stand a chance against Pierre Poilievre, the pugnacious Conservative leader, who is all but certain to become prime minister whenever Canadians get a chance to vote.
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Trudeau no longer has many people in his corner. Ever since Poilievre was elected Tory leader, two years ago, Trudeau has trailed in the polls by double digits. Liberal MPs want Trudeau gone because they are all going to lose their seats. Unless a new leader can miraculously win over Canadians, the Liberals are going to find themselves after the election where they were when Justin Trudeau rescued the party back in 2013 — in third place.
The Liberal Party of Canada used to be known as the Natural Governing Party because of its long dominance. Because Canada is so big and so diverse, divided by language and geography, the Liberals long played an unusual brokerage role, a centrist party that managed to dominate because it formed a coalition between French and English Canada, winning the votes of Catholics and immigrants, much to the frustration of the largely rural-based protestant anglophone voters, particularly those in western Canada, where the farmers and oil workers can’t believe they rarely get to run the country.
While the United Kingdom and the United States divided along ideological and class lines, Canada was dominated by a centrist blob that carefully maintained the balance between regions, religions and language groups, advancing progressive social programmes when that seemed politically advantageous, punctuated by the occasional Conservative interregnums.
The system shifted after the election of 2011, when Conservative Stephen Harper won a majority, the left-wing New Democrats formed the opposition and intellectual Michael Ignatieff returned briefly to Canada to lead the Liberals to a disastrous third-place showing.
That’s where the Liberal Party was when Trudeau decided to take it over. The telegenic, energetic and supremely confident eldest son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin single-handedly brought the party back from the brink of ruin.
He had always seemed like he was destined for greatness. Born on Christmas Day, 1971, he was famous from birth. Canadians started to think he would one day govern when he stole the show at his father’s televised state funeral in 2000, which featured Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Leonard Cohen and the Aga Khan as pallbearers. Justin gave the eulogy, concluding with a plaintive “Je t’aime papa”.
After that, he bided his time, worked as a bouncer, snowboard instructor, back-country rafting guide and, eventually, a teacher — living as a carefree playboy — until he eventually decided to buckle down and seek election in Papineau, a gritty working-class immigrant neighbourhood in Montreal, a quartier of shawarma shops, curry houses, mosques, and temples. He defeated an incumbent separatist and served without much distinction in the House until after the election in which his party was relegated to third place.
Before he launched his leadership bid, he first made his name with a charity boxing match against Conservative senator Patrick Brazeau, a muscle-bound Algonquin with a black belt in karate.
The smart money was on Brazeau, who looks like a tougher guy than Trudeau, but Trudeau, who had been boxing regularly for 25 years, says he knew he could beat him. “He’s got a black belt in karate, but we’re not doing a karate fight,” he told me later.
Trudeau ended up bloodying Brazeau’s nose, establishing himself as sufficiently masculine and courageous, and he easily took the leadership of the party. The scion of a famous family, having demonstrated his courage with his fists, handsome and open, he was interesting, a glamorous figure skateboarding to the Canadian parliament buildings, doing yoga poses in caucus rooms. Canadians felt they knew him, and although his opponents attacked him as an intellectual lightweight in the 2015 election, Canadians liked him, didn’t want him to fail, and were ready to believe he had what it took.
He made mistakes, often had to apologise for callow or ill-considered statements, but people were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, and they had grown weary of the dour Harper, who was grimly warning — accurately, it would turn out — that Trudeau would be a big spender.
Trudeau won a majority and was briefly a global media darling, getting thronged on overseas trips and winning glamorous coverage in Vogue and Rolling Stone. His first cabinet was half female. When reporters asked him why, he said: “Because it’s 2015” and won praise from feminists around the world.
He legalised marijuana, reduced child poverty, was notably inclusive toward new Canadians and women, brought in a carbon tax to reduce emissions, worked toward reconciliation with Canada’s long-mistreated Indigenous people. For a while, he was much-loved, but political gravity eventually did its work.
He made errors of judgment, broke ethics rules over a holiday on the Aga Khan’s Caribbean island, made a disastrous trip to India, where he was mocked for his excessive costume changes. More seriously, he eventually lost two ministers and several senior aides in a scandal over an attempt to sideline the prosecution of SNC Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering firm that had been involved in corrupt business with Muammar Gadafy’s family.
Trudeau did a good job negotiating the first presidency of Donald Trump in the US, successfully managing to keep his cool and maintain the vital trade relationship in the face of Trump’s juvenile provocations, and saved a lot of lives during the Covid pandemic, paying people to stay home, which kept the death rate in Canada much lower than in the US.
But the post-Covid cost-of-living crisis wore away at his popularity, and to many conservatives, in Canada and abroad, he came to seem like a woke hypocrite, virtue signalling as an anti-racist although he had worn blackface, for example, flying in a private jet while imposing a carbon tax. His post-pandemic surge in temporary immigration exacerbated a housing crisis, and suddenly there were tent cities everywhere. For young people especially, Trudeau looked like a barrier to housing.
So for the past two years, he has been on borrowed time, and everyone but him seemed to know it. He lost once-safe seats in Toronto and Montreal in byelections, weathered an aborted caucus rebellion, brought in a gimmicky sales-tax holiday and then, suddenly, lost his deputy prime minister Chyrstia Freeland, when he tried to replace her with central bank superstar Mark Carney.
On December 16th, the morning she was supposed to release a fall economic statement, Freeland, who was a vital guarantor of competence in the public mind, resigned and denounced him, leaving the government suddenly without a finance minister.
It was all over but the crying. Trudeau had hung on too long, and over the holidays he was forced to make his peace with that.
That’s politics. He is not the first politician to refuse to read the writing on the wall, but this is an unusually difficult moment for the country to be led by an ineffectual lame duck.
Trump, who is promising to bring in ruinous tariffs on Canadian imports to the US, is to take office January 20th. If he follows through on his threat, Canada would immediately be plunged into a recession.
He likely won’t do that, because the economic pain would be brutal in the northern states that Trump needs to keep sweet, but the threat is rattling Canadians, whose livelihoods depend on the smooth transhipment of goods across the 9,000km border. In December, Trudeau flew down to Mar-a-Lago to try to smooth things over, a mission that led Trump to launch an online bullying campaign, repeatedly proposing that Canada be annexed.
Trudeau’s election in 2015 was in a sense a restoration of a vision of a bilingual, multicultural, tolerant welfare state, the kind of Nordic country that would be at home in the European Union if it wasn’t for an inconvenient ocean.
He leaves it rudderless at a moment of great uncertainty because he was a fighter who didn’t know when to throw in the towel.
Stephen Maher is a longtime Canadian political journalist and the author of The Prince, The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.
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