Canada: Trudeau Leaves Liberals in the Lurch

Labour Hub Edito

JANUARY 10, 2025

By George Binette

After weeks of speculation and months of plunging poll ratings, Justin Trudeau’s announcement on 6th January came as little surprise. Trudeau, who turned 53 on Christmas Day, will soon be vacating Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, his de facto residence for nine years. In the meantime, however, the Canadian House of Commons will not reopen on 27th January as previously scheduled with the nation’s Parliament prorogued until 24th March.

The intervening two months will provide Liberal Party members with the opportunity to elect a successor to their leader of the last dozen years, who first gained the premiership in 2015. In 2021 Trudeau gambled on a snap election in the hope of consolidating his position after two years at the helm of a minority administration. Instead, he again found himself at the head of a minority government with the Liberals holding 160 of the 338 seats (the next Parliament will have 343), having won a slightly smaller share of the popular vote than the opposition Conservatives for the second consecutive election.

Since autumn 2021, the Liberals have lost seven of those 160 seats through defections and by-election defeats last year that claimed two historically safe Liberal seats – one to the Tories in metro Toronto, the other to the main Quebec nationalist party in Montreal. By late 2024, the New Democratic Party (NDP), a rough approximation to a west European social democratic formation, had indicated that it would no longer support the Liberals in a confidence vote. The NDP had previously opposed two Tory motions of no confidence in the Trudeau government, the most recent at the start of October.

The Trump Factor

Trudeau’s personal popularity was already in freefall prior to Donald Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election and now hovers barely above 20%. More than two dozen MPs, including Cabinet ministers, had already signalled their intention to stand down at the next federal election. But the Canadian PM’s late November visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate proved an exercise in public humiliation that may well have hastened his departure.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to impose 25% tariffs on imports from Canada unless the Ottawa government takes unspecified steps to stem the flow of synthetic opiates and ‘illegal’migrants across the US border. Trump is presumably joking when he talks of Canada becoming the 51st state of the USA, but few Canadian politicians believe the tariff threat is in jest.

Among those voicing alarm has been Trudeau’s erstwhile ally and personal confidante, Chrystia Freeland, who until mid-December was both his deputy and Finance Minister. She resigned in spectacular fashion, issuing a scathing letter that was surely the final nail in Trudeau’s political coffin.

Poisoned Chalice

Freeland is now widely regarded as a frontrunner to succeed Trudeau, alongside former Bank of England chief Mark Carney, who has never been elected to political office, but has recently served as a special advisor to Trudeau’s administration. To date, there seems little of substance to distinguish between Carney and Freeland, both pillars of a highly educated liberal establishment, though Carney has yet to set out his leadership stall.

Freeland’s resignation letter hints strongly that she will push for austerity as an ostensible response to Trump’s threats. She argues that Canada should keep its “fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war.”  

There could be another half-dozen candidates for the Liberal leadership, according to commentators at the CBC (Canada’s state broadcaster), but whoever eventually emerges as the winner in the Liberal leadership contest looks set to inherit a poisoned chalice. So far, Pierre Poilievre, historically one of the most right-wing Canadian Tory leaders, has been the main beneficiary of Trudeau’s woes. Opinion polls in recent months have shown the Conservatives ahead by 20 or more points and the universal assumption is the Tories will command a solid majority in the next Parliament after an election that must take place by 20th October.

Post-Pandemic Immigration Backlash

What factors drove Trudeau’s protracted fall from his position nearly a decade ago as the “poster boy” for a vague centre-left in the G7? The passage of time, combined with the accretion of scandals, had done much to erode his reputation prior to the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic. His administration’s handling of the health emergency contrasted favourably with the record of its neighbour under Trump and contributed to a modest recovery in the Liberals’ fortunes.

But by the start of 2022, mounting anger over extensive Covid-related restrictions and vaccine mandates had fuelled anger among independent lorry drivers culminating in a truckers’ blockade of Ottawa and roadblocks near some border crossings with the US. Soon after, Canada proved far from immune to the international inflationary surge unleashed as restrictions eased and in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While the official inflation rate has now dropped to 1.9% (November 2024), so lower than that of the US or Britain, this masks the sharp rise in housing costs, which shot up by nearly 20% in two years. In addition, Canada’s unemployment rate – in contrast to the US – has risen since April 2023, reaching 6.8% in November last year. A predictable media narrative has developed blaming the shortage of affordable housing and pressures on social welfare provision on notable but far from dramatic increases in immigration.

Levels of overt hostility to immigrants have not reached proportions seen in the US and much of Europe, but in this sparsely populated nation of some 41.5 million opinion polls suggest that a clear majority want tighter restrictions on migration for the first time since the 1990s. Trudeau’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, had already announced a cut of more than 20% in the target for new permanent residents in 2025, but this has done little to stifle criticism from an aggressively confident Conservative party.

The Legacy

Trudeau’s nine plus years atop Canadian politics will undoubtedly pale in comparison with his father’s 15 years as prime minister. The younger Trudeau’s premiership was always likely to prove a triumph of style over substance. Symbolically, at least, he served as a pillar of liberal tolerance, especially on race and immigration. in stark contrast to the first Trump presidency. Notable elements of his legislative legacy include the legalisation of cannabis and a controversial move towards assisted dying along with a carbon tax programme that has proved both ineffectual and politically damaging. (Canada is the lone G7 nation with higher carbon emissions than 30 years ago). His first administration did, however, see significant investment in childcare provision and a sharp fall in child poverty rates.

As the Trudeau premiership enters its final weeks, both his national and global status are much diminished, but he also embodies the intractable challenges faced by the centre-left across the advanced capitalist world as it proves both unable and unwilling to address ever increasing inequality through redistributive taxation and maintain working class living standards amidst environmental crises.

George Binette, a Massachusetts native, is a retired union activist, vice-chair of Camden Trades Council and former Trade Union Liaison Officer of Hackney North & Stoke Newington CLP.

Image: Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Source: 170923-D-DB155-040. Author:DoD News, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.