Canadians flocked to food banks and inequality rose as corporations profited under Trudeau. He wasn’t “far to the left.”
HE IS NOT EVEN A SOCIAL DEMOCRAT;
LIKE MOST CANADIENS
By Nora Loreto ,
January 8, 2025
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, Canada, on January 6, 2025.
DAVE CHAN / AFP via Getty Images
Legislative action has ground to a halt in the Canadian Parliament, which has suspended its work until March. The legislative stop is now the Liberal Party’s de facto deadline for selecting a leader to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced on Monday that he will resign as soon as his replacement has been chosen.
But despite the political turmoil, Canada’s wealthy are still having a field day. Corporate earnings are at record highs. In 2022, profits made in Canada were CAD$275 billion higher than they were in 2019. Profits in 2022 were the highest they have ever been in Canada’s existence. And while the jury is still out for where 2024 will land, Canada’s main stock exchange, the S&P/TSX Composite Index was 18 percent higher than last year and also reached record high levels at various points in the year.
Canada’s most important sectors have made huge financial gains since 2015, when Trudeau took office. Bank profits have trended higher. (For example, the Royal Bank’s 2023 profits were record-breaking, and at $16.24 billion, 62.4 percent higher than in 2015.) Oil and gas moved from a net income of $11.8 billion in 2014 to $63.1 billion in 2022 and benefit from a new, publicly funded pipeline that cost Canadians more than $34 billion to build. Insurance companies’ profits are breaking records. Profits in telecommunications hit a record high in 2022. You get the idea.
And CEOs are rolling in it. In 2024, Canada’s 100 top paid CEOs made $13.2 million, on average. It’s the third highest payout of all time — after 2021 and 2022.
Of course, there’s a flip side to this wealth accumulation: record-breaking numbers of visits to food banks; a housing crisis that exists in every single town and city across Canada (a crisis that, in the winter especially, leads to death and amputation); record-breaking income inequality. The Canada of 2025 is in a delicate, precarious state. People are on thin ice.
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Legislative action has ground to a halt in the Canadian Parliament, which has suspended its work until March. The legislative stop is now the Liberal Party’s de facto deadline for selecting a leader to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who announced on Monday that he will resign as soon as his replacement has been chosen.
But despite the political turmoil, Canada’s wealthy are still having a field day. Corporate earnings are at record highs. In 2022, profits made in Canada were CAD$275 billion higher than they were in 2019. Profits in 2022 were the highest they have ever been in Canada’s existence. And while the jury is still out for where 2024 will land, Canada’s main stock exchange, the S&P/TSX Composite Index was 18 percent higher than last year and also reached record high levels at various points in the year.
Canada’s most important sectors have made huge financial gains since 2015, when Trudeau took office. Bank profits have trended higher. (For example, the Royal Bank’s 2023 profits were record-breaking, and at $16.24 billion, 62.4 percent higher than in 2015.) Oil and gas moved from a net income of $11.8 billion in 2014 to $63.1 billion in 2022 and benefit from a new, publicly funded pipeline that cost Canadians more than $34 billion to build. Insurance companies’ profits are breaking records. Profits in telecommunications hit a record high in 2022. You get the idea.
And CEOs are rolling in it. In 2024, Canada’s 100 top paid CEOs made $13.2 million, on average. It’s the third highest payout of all time — after 2021 and 2022.
Of course, there’s a flip side to this wealth accumulation: record-breaking numbers of visits to food banks; a housing crisis that exists in every single town and city across Canada (a crisis that, in the winter especially, leads to death and amputation); record-breaking income inequality. The Canada of 2025 is in a delicate, precarious state. People are on thin ice.
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While we can’t give credit to or blame any single politician for where we find ourselves today, there’s no question that the policies of the federal government play an important role in reducing or exacerbating income inequality. The proof is in the pudding: Justin Trudeau has overwhelmingly served the interests of corporations and their leaders.
And so, when a narrative emerged from corporate media and analysts that Trudeau had to go because he had moved too far to the left, I did a spit take: What in the universe are they talking about?
The members of Parliament (MPs) who made this claim mostly spoke under a cloak of anonymity. Global News’ David Akin reported, “Almost all of the MPs Global News spoke to believe Trudeau has moved the party too far to the left and that shift has played a key role in the decline of the Liberals.” Akin didn’t say who or explain how these MPs were defining “the left.”
How can it be that a prime minister whose tenure saw record-breaking corporate performance paired with widening social inequality is also “too far to the left”? What kind of left-wing doctrine supports extreme income inequality and a tax structure that has failed to redistribute profits?
No one could reasonably believe that Trudeau’s economic policy was too far to the left. What they’re really saying is that Trudeau’s vibes were too far to the left. From the moment he took office, Trudeau draped himself in the language of the left but then never put that language into any useful action. Remember his famous mic drop moment when, after a journalist asked him why his cabinet had an equal number of women and men, he declared, “because it’s 2015”? Many concluded that Trudeau’s reply signaled that he was a feminist, unlike the previous prime minister, who flirted with anti-abortion activists and who would probably shrivel up and die if he found himself the lone man in a room full of trans-inclusive radical feminists.
But Trudeau’s policies weren’t even particularly feminist. And when his first justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould resigned, his feminist bona fides were called into question. Wilson-Raybould’s account of their confrontation painted a downright unfeminist portrait of the man.
One can coast on vibes for a bit, but vibes are not enough to support political regimes. From marching in Pride parades to taking a knee among Black Lives Matter activists, so much of Trudeau’s left-wing politics were vibes, and many of us could see through them.
In fact, in nine years, his government only accomplished one major progressive victory: the Canada Child Benefit. This benefit instantly lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. It offers the lowest-income Canadians $648.91 per month for every child under 6 years old. However, combined with broader social forces, even this benefit isn’t enough: Child poverty has been on the rise in the post-pandemic period.
Otherwise, Trudeau’s biggest promises were far more bluster than they were helpful. The Liberals’ pharmacare plan only covers two drugs at the moment and hasn’t been put into force through provincial agreements. Their new dental benefit isn’t yet fully operational, but when it is, it will only help low-income Canadians, many of whom won’t have the resources or access necessary to benefit from it. Universal daycare is great, if you’re lucky to be at a daycare that’s part of the program (and most aren’t) and still, it’s expensive.
A change to the tax code to subject more profits to tax hasn’t yet passed a vote in the House of Commons. (And if it doesn’t get passed before the election is called, it will die.) And promises to change the electoral system or create real changes within the housing market have been swept under the carpet.
Even pandemic-era benefits, arguably the most significant financial supports that the Trudeau government created (indeed, they built the most expensive social program in the history of Canada virtually overnight), collapsed after it was clear that the program turned into a mass transfer of public money to private coffers, with large businesses being the principal winners. The poorest Canadians received nothing, the Canadians who made more than $5,000 annually and lost a salary due to the pandemic received a monthly benefit that hundreds of thousands were forced to pay back, and small businesses who couldn’t pay back their business loans were thrown into chaos as they tried.
The cynicism around these programs was the quiet fuel that simmered the campaign that led to Trudeau’s demise. All this, while profitable companies like telecoms, and even some long-term care facilities that managed waves of mass death in their facilities, were each handed tens of millions of dollars in pandemic aid, no questions asked.
Half-measures have been the undoing of Trudeau’s popularity. Indeed, the vibes have run out, and people are realizing that their government isn’t exactly interested in helping them. And with few options on offer for help, many Canadians have parked their support with Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, despite the Conservatives’ record of failure in reducing poverty or helping average people.
Mainstream media has pushed out most progressive journalists and commentators. This has created a world where what is or isn’t left-wing is defined by the right, and it’s usually a caricature of what left-wing politics really are.
The fact that Trudeau has occupied the place that journalists call “progressive” has left no space for Canadians to have a serious and credible conversation about progressive politics. Instead, mainstream journalists boost members of Parliament who look at the world, look at their party’s record and look at their leader and conclude: oh, the problem is that he was too left-wing.
Of course, there’s no truth in that. But what does truth matter, when you’re priming the next person to be just as friendly to the corporate world as the last one was?
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Nora Loreto is a writer and activist based in Quebec City. She is also the president of the Canadian Freelance Union.
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