Prime minister resigns amid party revolt | 

Ryan Montgomery, Staff Writer | 

Few events in recent political memory have been so anticipated and so long coming. Few events have had such unanimous support. Few events have united East and West, rich and poor, liberal and conservative. Few events have been like the resignation of Justin Trudeau.

Many years ago, when the economy was good, Obama was president and the summer was going to last forever, a young, charismatic, well-pedigreed liberal came onto the scene. Son of the illustrious Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the man who wrote the Charter and moulded modern Canada, Trudeau the younger was sure to usher in a new age of Canadian progressivism.

He campaigned on a whirl of new popular progressive ideas that had long been the darling of the Canadian left—marijuana legalization, sweeping electoral reform, improved pharmacare, and more government transparency.

The buzz and blur of these early Trudeau years can best be summed up by his smug retort to a journalist’s question at a press conference as to why gender parity in his cabinet mattered: “Because it’s 2015.”

But alas, 2015 could not last forever. Over time, many of these illustrious promises began to be unceremoniously brought behind the barn and quietly done away with. Electoral reform and an elected senate were both ditched by the prime minister. His credibility took its first of many large hits with the SNC Lavalin affair, in which the large Quebec construction company allegedly provided prostitutes and millions of dollars to the son of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in exchange for construction contracts.

Trudeau allegedly ordered his attorney general to interfere in the case on behalf of the company. Discoveries of multiple photos of Trudeau sporting blackface killed any moral high ground he could have once claimed. Gradually the straws built up and the Liberal camel began to feel the weight mount.

Despite what your neighbour’s F*ck Trudeau bumper sticker will tell you, the Trudeau government did have several legislative wins throughout its reign — legalized cannabis, the championing of Indigenous reconciliation, the Canada Childcare Benefit, mild senate reform and a decisive response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, the only of God’s creatures more forgetful than the humble goldfish is the Canadian voter. Many, if not most, aspects of Canadian life began to slip under the Liberal’s watch. Rising inflation and cost of living made every working man and woman his enemy. Ballooning housing prices earned him the ire of the young. A decaying armed forces won him the opposition of both our own military and that of our NATO allies.

After a decade of decline, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a living person who will utter the accursed words: “I’m with Justin.”

Trudeau faced a coterie of conservative leaders over his three elections. The old and battered Stephen Harper, the beige and boring Andrew Scheer, and the eminently forgettable Erin O’Toole. Be honest, if I hadn’t written his name, would you have remembered who it was?

After these three musketeers of conservative failure went by the wayside, Trudeau finally met his political match, one Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre has seemingly based his political world around being the anti-Trudeau. Whereas Trudeau built his image on a wave of legislative promises doomed to be unfulfilled, Poilievre has largely avoided talking policy in his campaign.

Where Trudeau was Canada’s popular new golden child coming down from the ivory towers of the Laurentian elite, Poilievre has built his support among the populist movement of the trucker convoy and fringe thinkers like Jordan Peterson.

However, the most impactful way that he’s made himself the opposite of Trudeau is in his popularity. While Trudeau seemed to be in a competition with himself to see how unpopular a prime minister could really become, Poilievre’s approval among the public soared in the months after his becoming Conservative leader.

Both leaders sat around a 30 per cent approval rating until the summer of 2023, during which Poilievre began to rise and Trudeau began to fall. According to the CBC, in the three months between July and October 2023, Poilievre’s probability of winning skyrocketed from just around 45 per cent to a staggering 99 per cent.

Discussions of popularity and unpopularity raise the question, who really likes politicians? Cockroaches? Satan and his legions? Pundits? My answer would be, probably no one. But rarely are politicians truly hated with the vitriol Trudeau elicited. What caused the meteoric decline of the man who was once Canada’s Dauphin, the prince, the boy who would be king? The answer is: a lot.

The aforementioned broken electoral promises and political scandals were just the first shovelfuls of dirt out of the prime minister’s grave. The final nails in the coffin were the many mounting calls for resignation from within his own party. First, it was just a few wayward MPs, no doubt unhappy with the many displeased calls to their offices from their constituents.

Then on Dec. 16, the ice cracked and the avalanche finally went sliding with the resignation of Trudeau’s right-hand woman and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Freeland resigned after the Trudeau government’s haphazard attempt at vote-buying with the holiday GST rebate. Freeland cited Trudeau’s “political gimmicks which we can ill afford” as her reason for her resignation.

At this point for the prime minister, his conclusion was forgone and it seemed everyone in the country could see it but him. First came the Ontarians, with their Liberal Caucus calling for Trudeau’s resignation on Dec. 21. Then the Atlantic Caucus came sailing in on Dec. 23 with calls to resign. Finally, the prime minister had the joy of starting his new year with a resignation demand from the Quebec Liberal Caucus, his home province and the centre of his support base. This proved to be the silver bullet.

On Jan. 6, Trudeau, alone, out in the cold, poetically and literally, announced his intention to step down from the Liberal leadership and after a three-month leadership race, the Premiership.

At least for the moment, the politics of post-Trudeau Canada are shaping up to be those of Poilievre. His campaign based around what he isn’t as opposed to what he is may have paid off when he was facing the most unpopular prime minister of the 21st century. However, it remains to be seen what kind of candidate he will be when he doesn’t have the living embodiment of Canadian decline as an opponent.

Trudeau’s resignation has quickly turned a campaign of slogans into a campaign of substance. With the fear brought on by an alarmingly imperialist Trump presidency itching for some more destiny to manifest, Canadians very well may be scared by a populist whose main campaign slogan has been “everything feels broken.” Poilievre’s much-requested “carbon tax election” may have been usurped by a ‘51st state election.’

Currently, a high-stakes Liberal leadership duel rages in the halls of Ottawa. The two front runners are Freeland and former governor of both the Bank of Canada and England, Mark Carney.

At the moment Carney seems to be the Liberal favourite to square up against Poilievre. With Carney being from Edmonton and Poilievre being Calgarian, it’s looking like the Battle of Alberta means more than just hockey now.

Ryan Montgomery is a Staff Writer for The Reflector 2024-2025.