Having swept into office nine years ago, the downfall of Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has finally come not with a bang but a whimper. Amid byelection defeats, sagging poll numbers, and growing caucus unrest that ultimately culminated in the abrupt resignation of Chrystia Freeland, his deputy and Finance Minister, in December, Trudeau had repeatedly insisted on his intention to fight the next federal election. But on 6 January, at a downbeat press conference in Ottawa, he emerged from his holiday seclusion to confirm what has seemed increasingly inevitable for weeks: his resignation and the suspension of parliament until late March while the Liberal Party chooses a successor.
Trudeau’s downfall makes for a striking contrast with the dizzying atmosphere that accompanied his rise. Resurrecting Canada’s Liberal Party in the 2015 election after its worst ever result four years earlier, his national popularity was quickly converted into a sparkling international brand. Young, photogenic, and viral, Trudeau’s victory became a global sensation, as clickbait mongers swooned over his looks, yoga poses, and colourful socks and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic giddily anointed a new progressive standard-bearer. Not since Barack Obama’s election in 2008 had a Western leader received such an effusive and uncritical reception.
From these Icarus-like highs, however, the would-be saviour of liberalism will ultimately leave politics a deeply unpopular and disliked figure. His approval ratings are even lower than Joe Biden’s, while the Liberals are languishing at just 16 per cent in national polls (down from the nearly 40 per cent they received in 2015). If an election were held today, the Conservatives would win in a landslide.
What accounts for this stark reversal of fortunes? One view, widespread in the media and apparently held by some Liberal MPs, is that the Trudeau government drifted “too far to the left” over the years and, in doing so, lost the mythical centre ground that is supposedly the foundation for all political success.
Among other things, it’s an explanation that completely elides the government’s own image at the zenith of its popularity and success. Surveying the headlines in Canada and abroad back in 2015, you could easily have mistaken Trudeau’s victory for something seismic and era-defining, akin to Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide in 1936 or Clement Atlee’s in 1945. Despite his elite background and fairly traditional centrist platform, Trudeau was widely cast as a left-wing populist whose incoming government would represent “one of the most ambitious liberal premierships in modern history”. Both during and after the 2015 campaign, it was an image Trudeau himself was all-too keen to lean into: pledging billions for what he called “the largest infrastructure investment in Canadian history”; asking the country’s “wealthiest to pay more tax, so our middle class can pay less”; and promising to legalise marijuana and reform Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system. The campaign slogan “Real Change” may have been (deliberately) vague but for millions of voters it implied aggressive action on climate change, economic redistribution, and the all-too welcome return of activist government.
Authentically or not – the latter, as it turned out – Trudeau ran and won as a reformer. That both he and his government have since become deeply unpopular is less a reflection of their having abandoned the centre ground than of their dogmatic desire to cling to it. If you read the fine print, it was always obvious Trudeauism would be a status quo project. Notwithstanding a few genuinely progressive policies — notably a new benefit for families with children, a still nascent national childcare programme, and a suite of concessions offered as a part of a parliamentary agreement with the social democratic NDP — his political project’s animating ethos has mostly been centrist and technocratic; its objectives and aims more cosmetic than transformative.
In Justin Trudeau, Canada elected a pin-up prime minister perfectly crafted for the social media era of the 2010s: a photogenic, patrician leader whose fundamentally conventional style was deftly obscured by a focus-tested message of reformist ambition and progressive uplift. In a particularly (if accidentally) revealing comment on the one-year anniversary of his first election win, Trudeau himself characterised the success of his administration as follows: “We were able to sign a free trade agreement with Europe at a time when people tend to be closing off. We’re actually able to approve [the building of new oil] pipelines at a time when everyone wants protection of the environment. We’re being able to show that we get people’s fears and there are constructive ways of allaying them — and not just ways to lash out and give a big kick to the system.”
In keeping with this MO, the Trudeau government’s progressive posturing across a range of issues — from Indigenous reconciliation and climate change to housing and price gouging by large grocery chains — has tended to be more rhetoric than substance. Much like Trudeau’s own airbrushed image, worn down by various corruption scandals and the 2019 revelations about his past donning of blackface, the government’s popularity has waned. After nine years in office, the Liberal preference to gesture at social injustice rather than actually addressing it has increasingly fallen flat with an electorate paying exorbitant rents and lining up at food banks in record numbers. For all the supposed progressive zeal of 2015, Trudeau will leave behind him a country whose social fabric is seriously frayed and the wealthy are wealthier than ever before.
The narrative of a government doomed by the leftward tilt of its now ousted leader will be a convenient one for some, and is likely to be taken up by several of the candidates — including Freeland, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, and former British Columbia Premier Christy Clark — jockeying to succeed him.
But, in the final estimation, the story of Trudeauism’s fall is less a cautionary tale about the dangers of progressive profligacy than it is a warning about the weakness and inadequacy of centrist liberalism in the 21st century. “Allaying people’s fears”, it turns out, is a poor substitute for the messier and more contentious business of pursuing genuine structural change — and one that may soon be taken up by Canada’s right with devastating consequences.
[See more: Jean-Marie Le Pen, grandfather of France’s far-right]
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