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In an interview in December 2022, Justin Trudeau allowed himself to talk about legacy.
He has typically avoided entertaining such stuff. But sitting in his West Block office a little more than two years ago, he spoke of “unfinished business” and a desire to “lock in what Canada is doing as an open, progressive, confident democracy.” And when it was pointed out to him that it sounded like he was talking about a legacy, he didn’t entirely run away from the idea.
“I don’t expect that when the dust settles and I’m a paragraph in some history book, 30 years from now, people are going to be able to point [to the equivalent of] multiculturalism or the [Charter of Rights and Freedoms] as the big legacies or the big consequence,” he told me.
Trudeau famously appointed the first gender-balanced cabinet in history. He was also the first prime minister to march in a Pride parade. He nominated the first Indigenous Governor General and the first Indigenous justice of the Supreme Court and his government made a deliberate effort to diversify all federal appointments (the face of the federal judiciary has markedly changed).
He also appointed the first Indigenous attorney general and the first female finance minister, though his ability to brag about those choices will forever be limited by how badly each ended for him.
In all, Trudeau may have run the most progressive and activist federal government since his father stepped down in 1984 or since Lester B. Pearson left office in 1968. But his time in office was deeply marked by two unforeseen and historic crises: the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the globe in 2020.
In the case of Trump, the government seemed to succeed at minimizing the potential damage — the renegotiation of NAFTA was broadly hailed as a victory. And while there are no winners in a pandemic, Canada’s response compared favourably with peers like the United States and the United Kingdom — aided in no small part by the federal government’s extraordinary financial support and an effective vaccination program.
Both crises showed a government that could be nimble, creative, proactive and thorough. But such qualities were not always in evidence.
The shortcomings and scandals
Trudeau seemed blessed of boundless enthusiasm, but his government could be slow, clumsy, platitudinous and lacking in both focus and the revolutionary transparency that was promised. To his detractors, Trudeau was preachy, arrogant, frivolous and phoney.
While the Liberals committed large sums of money to various pursuits, it wasn’t always clear what that money had actually achieved. While the public service regained some of the resources it lost in past cuts, its capacity and performance remains a concern. Subsidies for journalism organizations have become a point of political controversy and haven’t saved the media industry.
Having made a great many promises in 2015, the Liberals spent their years in power fighting the criticism that they were more talk than action. Whatever the Liberals did, it was not hard to find examples of things they hadn’t — not least that loud and categorical promise to change Canada’s electoral system, which collapsed after a long and aimless consultation process. Having wrapped himself rhetorically in high ideals — feminism, reconciliation, tolerance — he regularly found himself accused of falling short or outright contradicting himself.
There were big fights with the provinces. And Trudeau undermined one of his signature climate policies — the carbon tax — with a desperate bit of fiddling in 2023.
Every government gets its share of controversies and scandals, but Trudeau and his government displayed a certain gift for finding trouble — from the prime minister’s ill-chosen vacations to the explosive SNC-Lavalin affair to the WE debacle to the implosion of Julie Payette as Governor General. Whatever Trudeau’s penchant for public interaction — his first few years in office included annual town-hall meetings in which anyone in attendance could ask a question — he struggled to manage the personalities he attracted to government. Former ministers — from Jody Wilson-Raybould to Bill Morneau to Chrystia Freeland — had a habit of publicly airing their grievances and disappointment after angrily departing cabinet.
“One of the first things I said when I won my nomination [in 2008] is, look, there’s people out there who have incredibly high expectations, there are people out there who have incredibly low expectations,” Trudeau recalled in an interview with me in 2019. “I’m fairly certain I’m going to disappoint everybody by being somewhere in the middle between the stratosphere and the depths.”
On that, if nothing else, he was basically correct.
The slow and personal downfall
The pandemic culminated not in a moment of national relief and celebration, but in a divisive debate over vaccine mandates and then the acrimony and dysfunction of the self-styled freedom convoy and the siege of Ottawa. Someone somewhere has by now made a small fortune selling “F–k Trudeau” flags.
Then came inflation — at a level no one had experienced in a generation — as the global economy struggled to get back up to speed. And then the Bank of Canada rapidly increased interest rates to combat inflation.
Meanwhile, already high real estate prices had surged during the pandemic and housing affordability and availability, long a concern in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, became a national crisis — exacerbated perhaps by a surge in temporary immigration. The Trudeau government’s renewed investments in social housing proved sorely unequal to the task and its push for municipal zoning reform came late.
In the last 12 months, complaints have spilled over to the greater economy — the national discourse has quickly become very interested in GDP-per-capita and the chattering classes have returned to worrying about productivity. (Trudeau’s macroeconomic record will take a longer time to sift through, but he and Bay Street were never the best of friends.)
The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, said all of these maladies could be blamed on Trudeau’s policies and choices. The carbon tax, the most prominent element of the Liberal government’s climate agenda, was turned into a scapegoat for the higher cost of groceries and other goods (even if expert analysis undercut Poilievre’s claim).
In December 2022, Trudeau was looking ahead to a time when Canadians would begin to see and feel the benefits of his government’s climate policies and investments in clean technology and energy. But that proved to be wishful thinking. The national mood turned sour. Many incumbent governments across the Western world can empathize right now. But as dramatically as many Canadians had rallied behind Trudeau in 2015, many now turned angrily against him.
Support for the Liberal Party fell back to 2021 levels. Trudeau didn’t seem to have the words or the policies to save himself. The party lost what should have been a safe seat in Toronto. Trudeau could have taken that as his cue to leave, but he persisted.
“He’s an extraordinary individual and probably, in retrospect or in history, he’ll be treated very well,” Liberal MP John McKay told the CBC’s Power & Politics in December, a few days after Freeland’s exit. “But his perception after 50 years of living in a — if you will — political aristocratic bubble is different than the perception or the reality that you and I live in. And it enables him to do extraordinary things and I think he has done extraordinary things. But it also leaves a bit of a blind spot and so, where others might see peril, he sees opportunity.”
What comes next?
Trudeau’s unified theory of everything — of both his own political success and for advancing the cause of progressive, liberal democracy — was based on economic security. Journalists came to roll their eyes at mentions of “the middle class and those working hard to join it,” but it was more than just a slogan.
“Regular Canadians were worried about their future, and we made a promise to support them through these uncertain times,” Trudeau said in a speech in Hamburg, Germany in 2017. “But that worry — that anxiety — isn’t unique to Canada. It’s everywhere.… Increasing inequality has made citizens distrust their governments. Distrust their employers. It turns into ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ And we’re watching that anxiety transform into anger on an almost daily basis.”
The anger is now directed at him and voters are looking elsewhere for reassurance.
How much of that frustration is specific to Trudeau — how much Canadians are simply tired of his face, his voice, his manner, his accumulated baggage — might now be tested by a new Liberal leader. But in gambling on his own ability to hang on, Trudeau has given his party very little time to prepare for the next election.
At times, over the last nine years, Canada was held out as an island of progressive reason and openness amid a world roiled by populists, demagogues and anti-establishment backlash. But it’s now very likely that Trudeau will ultimately be replaced by a combative populist who loudly opposes “wokeism” and attacks his political opponents as “wackos.”
It’s impossible to know exactly which pieces of Trudeau’s agenda will survive a change in government. If nothing else, Poilievre seems determined to put into action the conservative ideology he’s been thinking about since he was a teenager — and he has already committed to repealing a number of climate and environmental policies.
However much Canadians have come to reject Trudeau, it’s not clear how much of a change in direction they desire. A poll in December 2023 suggested strong majorities did not want Poilievre to scrap the Trudeau government’s investments in child care and dental care and did want Poilievre to take climate change seriously.
In a major political development, Justin Trudeau has announced he will step down as both prime minister and Liberal Party leader once a replacement is chosen, likely delaying a federal election until the spring. Andrew Chang breaks down what led to this announcement and the implications of proroguing Parliament amid growing tensions with the U.S and president-elect Donald Trump. Images gathered from Reuters, Getty Images and The Canadian Press.
But if the path of federal policy now changes dramatically, it will inevitably be asked whether Trudeau should have done something more or something different — whether he should have promised less or brokered greater compromises or made more institutional changes.
What of the “processes” that might “extend forward in the right direction?”
However imperfectly, Trudeau’s liberalism might be said to have rested on a handful of ideas: that government should actively seek to address economic and social inequality, that pluralism and diversity should be embraced, that the past must be reckoned with, that evidence and expertise should be respected, that Canadians had both a responsibility and an incentive to combat climate change, that divisive populism should be rejected.
Not everyone will agree that those ideas — or how Trudeau’s actions aligned with them — constitute the right direction for Canada.
But some part of Trudeau’s legacy might be written in how much those ideas are reflected in whatever comes next.
Source: cbc
