Justin Trudeau's legacy unravels as Canada grows disillusioned with liberals
"Canadians have finally fallen out of love with Trudeau. The shine has come off a career that at times seemed to defy political gravity. Instead of Trudeaumania, the nation is suffering from Trudeau fatigue.
The Liberal prime minister’s approval ratings have slumped below 30pc among voters aged 18 to 34, according to national polling group the Angus Reid Institute. This is the group whose enthusiasm helped get Trudeau elected in 2015, re-elected in 2019 and again – just about – in 2021.
Voting intentions tell the same story, with a widening gap between the ruling Liberals and the Conservative opposition. Disillusionment has been fuelled by economic factors, including soaring interest rates and a housing crisis...
Under Trudeau, the Liberal Party lags up to 10 points in the polls behind the Conservatives.
The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, is popular but not populist, younger than the PM but without his baggage. He offers a modernising, moderately libertarian agenda, a change from the Liberals’ big state profligacy and fiscal incontinence. For the first time in eight years, Trudeau is up against a dangerous opponent.
Canadian voters have been slowly souring on their prime minister for a while. The cult of personality that has surrounded Trudeau, which was assiduously cultivated by him on social media, became a bad joke when historic photographs of the future PM in “blackface” surfaced in 2019.
Suddenly his wokery resembled hypocrisy and the idolisation of “Social Justice Justin” gave way to mockery.
Trudeau’s image as an all-Canadian family man was also dealt a blow this summer when news emerged that the PM and his glamorous wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, had separated. The former TV presenter’s occasional absence from his side at international summits had been noticed.
While a deeply personal matter, it has also become a political one because of how public the couple have been about their relationship. The Trudeaus did a photoshoot and interview with Vogue shortly after Justin was elected prime minister, featuring the pair in a close embrace and describing their first date. It helped cement a public image of the couple as a modern and open family – the face of Canada that many wanted to believe in...
Eight years ago, it all felt so different. Justin Trudeau swept into office aged just 43, the second youngest prime minister in his country’s history and the scion of its most celebrated family.
Justin Trudeau’s implicit promise was to recreate the golden era of liberalism from 1968 to 1984, when his father Pierre dominated Canadian politics.
The elder Trudeau, who had put the country on the global map, is fondly remembered by most older people for his social reforms. He legalised homosexuality and abortion, liberalised divorce and abolished the death penalty.
After General de Gaulle had stirred up Francophone Canadians in 1967 with his rallying cry in Montreal, Vive le Québéc libre (Long live free Quebec), Pierre Trudeau succeeded in killing Québécois separatism with kindness by transforming Canada into a bilingual society. It was arguably his greatest achievement...
A Research Co poll in July found that whereas Pierre Trudeau was the most popular choice for the best Canadian PM in modern times, Justin was by a considerable margin seen as the worst. ..
Despite grand pronouncements on social issues, the younger Trudeau appears to favour symbolism over substance.
Many of Trudeau’s policies reflect his centre-Left economic views but they often have a tinge of protectionism. For example, under a law introduced in 2022, non-Canadians are banned from buying residential property unless they themselves are permanent residents. There is scant evidence that this legislation will help to alleviate housing shortages, as the Trudeau government claims, but it has certainly sent a signal to foreign investors: keep out of Canada.
The same applies to Trudeau’s environmental policies. He wants to phase out the oil and gas industries, thereby eviscerating the economy of Alberta, and impose a draconian carbon tax which will handicap economic growth across the board.
The country lacks an entrepreneurial culture: a recent Financial Times list of 100 top global companies included only one Canadian firm. Unlike its larger neighbour to the south, Canada is falling behind by most measures. This is despite the emphasis placed by Trudeau on mass immigration. Indeed, some critics have suggested that his only strategy for economic growth is to increase the population by importing more “peoplekind” – a term he coined and which has attracted much ridicule.
In the case of Ukraine, he was so keen to attract those displaced by the Russian invasion that his officials issued far more visas than there were refugees willing to move to Canada. Five out of six Ukrainians offered Canadian visas have chosen to go elsewhere — fewer than 150,000 out of 650,000...
Canada’s immigration policy is a cynical gamble, which has been described as “human quantitative easing”. Last year its headcount rose by 700,000, just 200,000 fewer than the US – which has a population eight times as large.
For ordinary Canadians, it is per capita GDP that matters – and this has shown practically no growth per capita during his administration...
Trudeau is a self-proclaimed “cultural Catholic” but appears to disdain his own religion while pandering to others. When some 30 churches were burned down by Left-wing activists in response to claims of the discovery of mass graves of indigenous schoolchildren, Trudeau was accused of doing nothing to protect Catholic communities.
Instead, he buys into the darkest possible view of Canada’s colonial history: not merely a racist past, but a genocidal one. He claims that “Canada has no core identity” and thus reduces to absurdity his father’s carefully judged cultural pluralism.
Always eager to be woker than thou, in his Twitter feed the prime minister adds “2S” in front of the usual litany of LGBTQ... This acronym means “two spirits” and refers to the tiny minority of the indigenous First Peoples who do not identify as male or female, but with the spirits of both.
Just in case anyone was in any doubt, Trudeau told a Liberal Party conference this year that “transgender women are women”. He has backed the participation of trans athletes in women’s sports and their access to women-only spaces.
While keen to talk up his progressive credentials on ‘soft’ issues around culture and identity, Trudeau has proved much less able when it comes to dealing with real-world crises.
The prime minister’s handling of the Freedom Convoy of truckers protesting about pandemic restrictions in January and February 2022 demonstrates his struggles under pressure.
Among those who converged on the capital Ottawa, some protesters were far-Right extremists brandishing Nazi symbols and Confederate flags; many were anti-vaxxers; and some engaged in violence. Some 64pc of Canadians saw the truckers as a threat to democracy.
However, 46pc shared at least some of the truckers’ views on lockdowns, compulsory vaccines or masks. Among younger people aged 18 to 34, that number was 61pc.
Trudeau was criticised by some for acting too slowly and “hiding” from the limelight, while others attacked his refusal to engage with legitimate opposition and argued that the government measures were too harsh.
The prime minister eventually decided to crack down by invoking the Emergencies Act 1988 for the first time ever. The act had its genesis during the two world wars and gives the government sweeping powers over public order at times of genuine crisis. Hundreds of truckers were arrested and many have been prosecuted.
When a Conservative MP, Melissa Lantsmann, took issue with his use of the Emergencies Act, Trudeau’s response was tone deaf. How, he asked, could she and her party “stand with people who wave swastikas”? The PM’s implicit reference to the fact that Ms Lantsmann is Jewish and so should be ashamed of herself went down badly among Canadian Jews.
The truth is that as the lorry drivers approached the parliament and seat of government in Ottawa, Trudeau panicked. The protesters were dispersed — but the mask had slipped. This is a prime minister who cannot tolerate dissent; who divides the country into woke sheep and fascist goats; who called an election during the pandemic to give his own standing a temporary booster jab, but now finds himself deeply unpopular.
Where does such a leader turn? Perhaps abroad, in the hope of distraction. But Trudeau’s standing on the international stage is hardly better than at home. ..
As a result, Canada is somewhat isolated in Nato. While Canada remains a member of the Five Eyes Intelligence-sharing group, it was not included in the Aukus defence agreement between the US, UK and Australia. Canada’s exclusion from this cornerstone of the Anglosphere’s security architecture promoted soul-searching in Ottawa.
It is the same story on the environment. Trudeau talks a lot about net zero, but in 2023 on his watch Canada endured the worst wildfires in recorded history – some 4pc of all the country’s forests burnt down. Toxic smoke from these fires has caused hazy skies as far away as Europe, while carbon emissions are also at record levels – 160 megatonnes in six months.
Naturally, Trudeau blames climate change, but he ignored warnings about poor forest management and refused to allocate the necessary resources.
Seasoned Trudeau-watchers notice a pattern of behaviour: extravagant rhetoric, followed by periodic bursts of hyperactivity. However, solid achievement is vitiated by a short attention span, a reluctance to face down opposition or to follow through.
A good example is the monarchy. Trudeau’s younger supporters would like him to press ahead with a referendum to create a Republic of Canada. Polls suggest that a majority of the electorate would support the replacement of constitutional monarchy by an elected president, although only the separatist Bloc Québécois actually proposed and voted for abolition in parliament.
After the late Queen’s funeral and the Coronation of King Charles III, Trudeau expressed lukewarm support for the “steadiness” of the institution. At the same time, he subtly undermined it by proposing a redesign of the crown that appears on bank notes and other official documents.
The new crown seems innocuous enough, with Canadian maple leaves instead of the Anglo-French fleur-de-lys, plus wavy blue lines to evoke the nation’s maritime past. But the arrows on the ermine base are reversed, pointing left instead of right. The Maltese cross that traditionally surmounts the crown has gone, replaced by a stylised snowflake to represent Canada’s arctic climate and pay homage to the indigenous peoples.
The choice of a snowflake suggests a sense of humour failure of epic proportions. Did nobody in the Trudeau entourage dare to say: “Mr Prime Minister, a snowflake? Really?”
And so the Christian symbol of self-sacrifice has been supplanted by the religion of ecology, with a consecrated snowflake emoji to proclaim the political correctness of the new secular order. Trudeau loves such gesture politics, but a bolder leader might have seized the opportunity of the Queen’s death to reopen the constitutional debate. Trudeau would doubtless love to stamp his personality on Canadian history, as his father did, by abolishing the monarchy.
Unlike Pierre, though, Justin is just too timid – a bit of a snowflake, in fact. Rather than a republic, Trudeau the Younger will bequeath a feeble bit of heraldic wokery...
A Globe and Mail poll last month found that 53pc of the public would like to see a new leader to take the Liberals into the next election. Even of those who normally vote Liberal, fewer than half (42pc) support Trudeau as party leader.
His invincible sense of entitlement means that Trudeau’s chances should never be written off. After eight years in office, his father was also unpopular – but he turned out to have another eight years to go. To match Trudeau senior’s longevity in office will almost certainly be beyond Justin, but that won’t stop him trying.
It is the need to equal or surpass his father that drives Justin Trudeau’s Hamlet-like ambition. Yet his time in office has demonstrated that there is precious little sitting behind that ambition.
Trudeau clings to office in pursuit of a chimera – the post-national destiny of a proud people who are growing weary of his identity-driven politics."