Michael Bonner Justin Trudeau’s Legacy: a Weakened Canada On almost every measure, he leaves the country poorer, less productive, angrier, and more divided than he found it.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/justin-trudeaus-legacy-a-weakened-canada
Justin Trudeau, possibly the worst prime minister in the history of Canada, has resigned. Sort of. He has stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party and won’t run in the next election but will remain at his post until a new leader is chosen. Meantime, Parliament will be prorogued—or discontinued without being dissolved—to avoid the possibility of a successful no-confidence motion, which would surely topple the Trudeau government. The next election is scheduled for October of this year, but in all likelihood it will take place earlier, at some point this spring. So, Canadians will still have to endure another few months of Trudeau—a ham-fisted resignation if there ever was one.
Trudeau’s Liberal Party also seems bound for electoral destruction. All the polls are dire, but some suggest that the defeat will be so thorough that the Liberals may not even win enough seats to be a recognized party. This is a spectacular decline. What makes it even more striking is that Trudeau almost singlehandedly revived the old Liberal Party in 2015 after about a decade of successive defeats, turning a seemingly moribund third-place party into a government. Now the restorer has become the euthanizer. How did it happen?
Trudeau came to power after years of ever larger and increasingly stable Conservative governments under Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Conservatives had been in power before, if rarely, in the twentieth century, but Harper’s party had taken a more ideological and populist turn after an electoral wipe-out in 1993. The renewed Conservative Party was anchored in western Canada, far from the Liberal strongholds of Toronto and Montreal, whose elites had governed Canada for most of the twentieth century. Western Canada’s concerns—agriculture, oil and gas, and other commodities—rose to prominence as never before, and so did a new governing class.
But the old Liberal elite hated them and never saw the new Conservatives as legitimate. The reaction was often hysterical, with some partisans proclaiming that Harper was a more dangerous threat to Canada than ISIS. Trudeau himself captured the Liberal mood when he mused about the possibility of “making Quebec a country” if Canada were genuinely “Stephen Harper’s Canada,” and he insisted on the need to put Quebeckers rather than western Canadians in charge of our “community and socio-democratic agenda,” whatever that meant.
The Liberal Party, as the old Canadian elite believed, was the “natural governing party,” the only one that deserved to be in power. And yet, the Liberals couldn’t win for a decade. They churned through four leaders, including the internationally known Michael Ignatieff, who led them to their worst defeat in history (so far). Then came Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. By 2015, the country was ready for change, and Trudeau seemed like an appealing contrast to the apparent rise of populists and demagogues abroad. He was the Canadian answer to Barack Obama, and his was a long-delayed victory for progressivist liberalism.
At first, Trudeau seemed unassailable. He coasted on goodwill and the strong economy left to him by the Conservatives. But the inheritance was soon squandered: borrowing, spending, taxes, and deficits rose, and so did inflation. Housing costs skyrocketed, as did low-skill immigration. Trudeau’s administration was characterized by gaffes, sanctimonious hectoring, faux-feminism, and ethical scandals. It also saw blackface and groping allegations, draconian Covid-19 lockdowns and politicization of vaccines, a moral panic about “mass graves” at Indigenous residential schools, foreign interference by India and China, and unswerving commitment to the worst excesses of identity politics and gender ideology.
Those crises and failures would be enough to undermine any government. But even without them, Trudeau was probably doomed anyway.
Liberalism has long been intellectually defunct. Trudeau himself is a convincing symbol of this decline, but it’s also obvious in the transformation that the Liberal Party has undergone since the twentieth century. This was the party that led the defense of the British Empire in World War II, that built the Canadian social safety net, and that entrenched libertarian principles in the national constitution through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. More recently, the Liberal Party balanced the budget in the 1990s and set Canada on course to weather the global financial crisis of 2008.
But all the big liberal ideas are long gone. In the absence of policy, a cult of personality took hold. Star power replaced political skill. And liberalism came to mean mindless loyalty to Trudeau at any cost. In return, Trudeau offered an endless series of dull platitudes, good vibes, and positive politics (or “sunny ways”) to keep up the illusion that the good times had not ended.
Trudeau’s first campaign slogan was the Obama-esque “real change”—a new chapter in Canadian history. It was a lie. Liberalism is no longer a creative force. The party is now a gerontocracy, weary of responsibility, and offers nothing but nostalgia for the late-twentieth-century triumph of liberalism and mock-serious fear of a new Conservative government. Guarding the past achievements of more competent ancestors seems beyond the party’s powers. And liberals invoke the Conservative backlash only resignedly, as though even Trudeau knows that nothing can be done about it.
Trudeau is apparently delusional enough to believe that he accomplished something in his nine years in office. But on almost every measure, he leaves Canada weaker, poorer, less productive, angrier, and more divided than he found it.
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