The Fall of Justin Trudeau

After uniting the Liberals and storming to a majority mandate in 2015, Trudeau has had a long decline in popularity. He leaves office with an angry public and the party with little time to regroup ahead of an election

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned as the country’s ruling Liberal Party leader. A once-feted scion of Canadian politics, his exit comes amid intensified political headwinds after his finance minister and closest political ally abruptly quit last month.

Trudeau, who said he will remain as prime minister until a new party leader is chosen, has faced growing calls from within his party to step down; polls show the Liberals are set to lose this year’s election to the Conservative opposition.

“It has become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” Trudeau said.

His exit comes as Canada faces tariff threats from US President-elect Donald Trump. The Republican and his allies have repeatedly taunted Trudeau in recent weeks, with Trump mocking Canada as the “51st state.”

The Story so far

Justin Trudeau rose to power in 2015 with a promise to unite Canada, heal political divides, and restore trust in government after years of growing dissatisfaction with the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. His victory was seen as a fresh start for the country, with the public embracing his vision of progressive policies, diversity, and inclusivity. Yet, nearly a decade later, the same leader finds himself leaving office with his party fractured, public approval at an all-time low, and many Canadians increasingly united in their anger toward him.

The optimism that marked his rise has been replaced by widespread disillusionment. While Trudeau's early years in office were characterized by bold policy changes, including legalizing cannabis and enhancing environmental protections, his later tenure was marked by scandals, missteps, and a growing sense of disconnection from the very people who once supported him.

Despite plummeting polling, a spate of by-election losses and the exit of a quarter of his front bench, he had been adamant that he was still the one best placed to lead the Liberals into the next election. Now, with just months before the campaign, he has left his party little time to regroup.

Still, for many Liberals, this was the preferred option to what a growing number believed was a near-certain massive defeat had Mr. Trudeau stayed at the helm. Neither the Liberal Party’s polling numbers nor the Prime Minister’s personal popularity ever recovered from his decision to call a snap election in 2021 – two years early and in the midst of a global pandemic. But the Liberal government’s standing came under the greatest pressure as inflation spiked and Mr. Trudeau was accused of ignoring the resulting cost-of-living crisis.

By the summer of 2023, and the Bank of Canada’s last interest-rate hike, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives had pivoted to an affordability message that the Prime Minister failed to counter. A major cabinet shuffle was criticized as superficial and his government ended a summer cabinet retreat saying it needed more time to come up with a response to the housing and affordability crunch gripping Canadians.

Since then, Mr. Trudeau and his party have weathered a precipitous polling slump. Even as the government shifted its focus to pocketbook issues, voters remained stubbornly cold to the Liberals and hopes of incremental gains with the electorate never materialized.

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Mr. Trudeau announced his intention to resign on Monday, yielding to the growing pressure that he take the same walk in the snow his father did more than four decades ago. He said he will remain as Prime Minister until a new Liberal leader is chosen. He is Canada’s 23rd prime minister and seventh-longest serving, wedged between Stephen Harper and Brian Mulroney by time in office.

By refusing to leave for so long, the Prime Minister gave up the chance to exit on his own terms, said Lori Turnbull, chair of Dalhousie University’s public and international affairs department. “This moment is entirely of Trudeau’s own making,” Prof. Turnbull said, noting he has for months rejected the urging of past allies and current MPs that he quit.

While the Prime Minister dismissed the polls, he promised to work harder in the wake of two by-election defeats in the Liberal heartlands of Toronto and Montreal. Flying under the radar of those losses was the clobbering the party endured in two other recent by-elections. In Winnipeg, the Liberals garnered just 5 per cent of the vote, and in B.C.’s Cloverdale–Langley City, where they were the incumbent, Liberals received just 16 per cent to the Conservatives’ 66 per cent.

That last defeat landed just hours after Chrystia Freeland’s stinging resignation as finance minister and public rebuke of Mr. Trudeau’s politics and priorities. Within days of that, more than 20 of his MPs had publicly called for the Prime Minister to quit. And while in the past Mr. Trudeau had quickly quelled internal dissent, this time he went into the Christmas holidays with no public comment on his future and with a restive caucus impatient for change.

“Trudeau lost control of his government and his legacy,” Prof. Turnbull said, “because he refused to acknowledge that his government was headed to defeat.”

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The oldest son of former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, he first won a seat in the Montreal riding of Papineau in 2008. Winning the nomination against the party’s preferred candidate and then the riding against a Bloc Québécois incumbent marked the first in a string of victories against the odds that helped cement his thinking as an underdog who performs at his best when he is on the ropes.

He took the helm of the Liberal Party in 2013, after it had suffered its worst electoral defeat, reduced to just 34 seats and third-place status in the House.

Conservatives wrote him off as a lightweight, with more hair than intelligence. But Mr. Trudeau took the political world by storm and in 2015, he ended nearly a decade of Conservative rule by promising voters positive and progressive politics. “That’s a remarkable recovery for a party that seemed to be on its back and if not dying, at least in pretty serious care‚” said historian and former Liberal MP John English.

But while Mr. English, who is also the author of the elder Trudeau’s official biographies, called the Liberal revival a major accomplishment, he cautioned that the younger Trudeau’s legacy “will depend on what happens to the Liberal Party after him.”

While the two Trudeaus have different styles and approaches to government, Mr. English said some parallels are inescapable, including the anger both stoked in the Prairies with their climate and energy policies. On the personal front, Mr. English noted that the two now share the painful experience of separating from their wives while in office. Mr. Trudeau announced his split with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau in August, 2023.

To fairly judge his government and leadership, more time is needed for the dust to settle, Mr. English said. Still what is clear is the charisma that won Mr. Trudeau the top job was not enough to combat the “10-year fact of Canadian politics” – the runway voters are willing to afford modern-day prime ministers.

In the memoir that helped launch his political career, Mr. Trudeau pledged a “new kind of politics.”

“One that sought to bring people together to build on common ground, rather than divide them into camps and exploit their differences for our political gain.”

It was an aspiration that Prof. Turnbull said the Prime Minister increasingly fell short of once in government.

“He became a wedge politician,” she said, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic in which she said he used masking and vaccinations “to appeal to some voters and shame other voters.”

To his supporters, he lifted kids out of poverty with the overhauled Canada Child Benefit; launched the beginnings of a national child-care program; took on Donald Trump during the U.S. president-elect’s first term; and led Canada through a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

To his detractors, though, he is the Prime Minister who ballooned the civil service and nearly doubled the federal debt; twice broke federal ethics laws; showed poor judgment in a series of lavish vacations, including a holiday on the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation; and mismanaged core government programs such as immigration.

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Mr. Trudeau rode to power making sweeping and far-reaching promises that the government has at times struggled to achieve.

That disconnect carried through even to the policy priorities that the Prime Minister personally took on: climate change and Indigenous reconciliation. Under his tenure, the Liberals rolled out widespread changes to Indigenous governance and programs, and federal spending on Indigenous priorities almost tripled – now outstripping defence spending. Despite that, the Prime Minister has yet to make good on his marquee 2015 campaign promise to end all long-term boil water advisories on reserves by 2021.

On the climate-change file, where Mr. Trudeau has spent much of his political capital creating and implementing a comprehensive plan to reduce emissions, the government has still had a difficult time meeting its own deadlines for policies and living up to its own targets.

That same policy also created one of the biggest cudgels now used against him: the consumer carbon price.

Since Mr. Poilievre won the Conservative leadership in September, 2022, “axe the tax” has been his top promise as he amassed support from voters by tapping into affordability concerns.

While the inflation crisis drove climate change out of the top issues for voters, historian J.D.M. Stewart said the vantage point by which the Prime Minister is judged on the issue could change dramatically with time. That would leave open the possibility that future generations will think of Mr. Trudeau as the one who put the climate front and centre for the first time.

“There are some things in history that happen where you don’t realize how important they are at the time,” said Mr. Stewart, the author of the forthcoming book, The Prime Ministers, a study of Canada’s leaders from Sir John A. Macdonald to the present.

On the international stage as well, Mr. Trudeau struggled to make his soaring early rhetoric a reality. He came to office highly critical of Mr. Harper’s foreign affairs record and famously told the world after his 2015 election win: “We’re back.”

He heavily criticized the former prime minister for failing to get on the UN Security Council, but Mr. Trudeau failed in his own bid, and was lambasted for what detractors called a naive approach to China that misjudged President Xi Jinping’s coercive and adversarial foreign policy. He first tried to strike a new free-trade deal but abandoned it amid an increasingly toxic relationship dominated by Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and Beijing’s retaliatory arrest of the two Michaels.

Mr. Trudeau’s state visit to India was roundly deemed an embarrassment by Indian and international press, as a series of family photo-ops in traditional Indian clothing made headlines around the world.

The relationships with both countries have worsened in recent years in the wake of Globe and Mail reporting on foreign interference in Canadian elections and institutions that led to a public inquiry into the matter. And revelations of diplomatic interference have led to the expulsion of both Chinese and Indian officials from Canada.

Mr. Trudeau’s domestic image was largely burnished by how he handled Mr. Trump’s first administration. However, the minority Liberal government’s approach to Mr. Trump’s second administration is markedly different. Top among the changes is Ottawa’s attitude toward the border and migrants. In 2017, as Mr. Trump was sworn in, Mr. Trudeau famously tweeted the hashtag “welcome to Canada.” After Mr. Trump’s 2024 election win, the minority Liberal government’s message was “Not everyone is welcome.”

One bright spot has been Canada’s efforts to rally NATO support for Ukraine, which is in the midst of the third year of war with Russia.

Mr. Trudeau started his tenure with a natural ally in Washington, Barack Obama, but 2016’s election of Donald Trump came as a shock to Ottawa. The Trudeau government had to adapt to a new, changeable vision from Washington on trade, foreign affairs and other issues.Reuters, Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Mr. Trudeau’s early years in government were marked by major changes that permanently altered the country – from massive societal moves such as legalizing cannabis and implementing medical aid in dying to smaller changes such as reinstating the long-form census and automating access to government benefits.

But he also leaves a litany of broken promises and other self-inflicted wounds that quickly dented his brand. He shelved his commitment to change the first-past-the-post electoral system and “make every vote count,” further centralized decision making in the Prime Minister’s Office rather than the promised reversal of the trend started by his father, and never made good on a pledge to subject his office to the transparency of the access-to-information system.

His leadership faced one of its most serious challenges in the SNC-Lavalin affair in 2019. In that case, he was found to have inappropriately pressed Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to grant the Montreal engineering firm a deferred prosecution agreement to settle criminal charges. The scandal also weakened his arguments of being a feminist prime minister given his treatment of Ms. Wilson-Raybould, her resulting resignation and the subsequent exit of his then-treasury board president Jane Philpott.

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With the electorate souring against him, the Liberals eked out a narrow minority victory in 2019 but lost the popular vote.

Two years later, and in the midst of a global pandemic, Mr. Trudeau called a snap election in which he was expecting to ride buoyant pandemic polling to a second majority government. Instead, he almost lost it all by failing to explain why the election was needed amid a chaotic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and as he turned COVID-19 vaccinations into a political wedge against the Conservatives.

Voters returned him to government, but he again lost the popular vote and the makeup of the House of Commons was virtually unchanged.

Within months of the campaign ending, anti-vaccine-mandate blockades gripped the capital’s downtown and several border crossings. In response to the intractable protests, the Prime Minister took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act.

Despite Mr. Trudeau’s previous concern that a vaccine mandate was too divisive, his former policy director Marci Surkes said the Liberals did not anticipate the vitriol it would unleash.

“I don’t think the effort to wedge was intended to create as stark a division as clearly ended up happening in the convoy context,” she said.

A subsequent public inquiry found that Mr. Trudeau acted appropriately by invoking the emergencies law, but the government last year appealed a separate court ruling that found the use of the act was not legally justified.

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Soon after the blockades, the Prime Minister struck a deal with the New Democratic Party to support the minority Liberals in the House in exchange for policy concessions on dental and pharmacare programs. The Liberals believed that deal would hold them well into 2025 and the next federal campaign, but NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh abruptly announced its end in September as the party tried to hold onto a riding in Winnipeg.

Ms. Surkes said the time in office has hardened the Prime Minister, in comparison to the hopeful and sunny attitude that he presented when he entered the role. That’s in part, she said, because of the scale and speed at which he has had to make tough decisions: from managing Mr. Trump, trade talks and retaliatory tariffs, to the rail blockades, and the pandemic, in which the government in quick succession decided to unleash widespread spending and subsidies, shut down the border and called in the military to backstop hospitals and long-term-care facilities.

“He has been forced to become adept at making tough calls and sometimes unpopular calls and sometimes calls that he has personally had to account for and revise,” Ms. Surkes said.

She argues that his upbringing uniquely prepared him for the position. From the start, she said, Mr. Trudeau was a polarizing figure who needed no introduction with Canadian voters. That also meant he had a tougher skin as public opinion shifted over his tenure from a majority positive view to the opposite.

“He’s remarkably unfussed by the haters,” Ms. Surkes said, adding that Mr. Trudeau can refocus and compartmentalize “in a way that I think would be very difficult for most other people.”

As Mr. Trudeau’s tenure was hitting the rocks in the summer of 2023, Mr. Mulroney forcefully came to his defence, dismissing the “trash” talk against him and saying history would remember the current Prime Minister more kindly.

Both those leaders left office in similar positions, Mr. Stewart said. The former Progressive Conservative prime minister resigned in 1993 facing pronounced voter dissatisfaction and outright hatred, but was widely feted when he died last year.

“As was the case with Brian Mulroney, there is a lot of emotion wrapped up in opinions of Justin Trudeau, and a lot of it is negative,” Mr. Stewart said.

“A lot of Canadians have a visceral dislike of him. But he might take some solace in the fact that when history renders its judgment in years to come, the emotional part usually gets stripped away.”

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