After nearly a decade in power, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as leader of the Liberal Party and as prime minister on Monday, triggering a leadership race to select the next prime minister. Year-end polls showed Trudeau’s personal popularity at 22%, with a mere 16% of Canadians indicating that they support the Liberal Party, setting them up for electoral catastrophe. Even the Liberal Party’s worst showing in their 157-year history in 2011 had them receiving 18.9% of the vote.
Trudeau, a progressive of herculean hubris, did not go willingly. His deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland abruptly resigned from cabinet on December 16 after he attempted to remove her from the finance portfolio, and discontented murmurs in the Liberal caucus grew to a roar. Trudeau headed into the holidays defiant; a growing number of demands for his resignation apparently changed his mind. He requested that Governor General Mary Simon prorogue Parliament until March 24, meaning that the House of Commons will not sit while the Liberals select a new leader.
With polls indicating that the federal Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre is poised for a massive electoral victory, Canada will likely have three prime ministers in 2025. Every poll indicates that Canadians are angry and want an election; the Liberals are hoping that swapping Trudeau for another leader will salvage their party from the devastating drubbing that now seems inevitable (especially considering the fact that the Conservatives won the popular vote in the last two elections).
It is a brutal fall from grace. In 2015, Trudeau’s Liberals won 184 of Parliament’s 338 seats, forming a majority government. In 2019, Trudeau was reduced to 157 seats and formed a minority government, supported by smaller parties such as the New Democratic Party. In 2021, Trudeau called another election in the hopes that campaigning on vaccine mandates and demonizing unvaccinated Canadians would win him a majority; he failed and won only 160 seats. Since then, he has governed with the support of the NDP, which has resolutely refused to bring down his government in a vote of non-confidence.
Trudeau made it clear during his resignation announcement that he is “a fighter,” but feels forced to leave because he cannot simultaneously fight the Conservatives and his own divided caucus. Indeed, he appeared convinced until the last that his progressive credentials—which had somehow survived a blackface scandal (he donned the makeup so often he couldn’t recall how many times), revelations that he had groped a female journalist, and his record-breaking five ethics violations—would somehow carry him through. During the 2019 blackface scandal, he procured an endorsement from Barack Obama. This time, nobody came to his defence.
Trudeau’s last diehard supporters are already claiming that he ably led the country through the pandemic; that, too, is a sick joke. Trudeau’s decision to call an election and campaign on vaccine mandates divided the country so starkly that he triggered the Freedom Convoy, in which hundreds of semi trucks and other vehicles descended on the capital in early 2022 and stayed there for weeks. Instead of talking, Trudeau invoked the Emergency Measures Act—once called the War Measures Act—and sent in police on horseback. His government also froze the bank accounts of Canadians and smeared all involved. A federal court affirmed that he had violated the basic rights of Canadians.
Canada’s euthanasia regime has also attracted international horror. Since 2016, over 60,000 Canadians have been euthanized. Canadians have been euthanized because they cannot access the healthcare they need; because mental health supports are unavailable; because disability assistance is nearly impossible to obtain. Reports of impoverished Canadians desperately opting for assisted suicide prompted the progressive Toronto Star to dub the regime “Hunger Games-style social Darwinism.” Around half of the 15,300 Canadians euthanized in 2023 cited “fear of being a burden” as one of the reasons they accepted it.
