Trudeau's Failure and Canada's Renewal

During Justin Trudeau's last days as Prime Minister, Americans have been following Canadian politics with more interest than usual. This is partly because Trudeau represents a brand of unrepentant identity politics in a way that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could never quite match. Has any American politician ever uttered the word “peoplekind”?

Trudeau is an irresistible target for American conservatives who want a woke jester. It also helps that his downfall is more dramatic given that it has taken place in the wake of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, when Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on the United States’ largest trading partner (i.e. Canada). But Trudeau has also been the topic of many New York Times op-eds and left-of-center opinion panels because American progressives are now in the early stages of grief and soul-searching about what went wrong in 2024. Launching an inquest into the causes of Trudeau’s imminent departure allows American progressives to play coroner for November 2024 on someone else’s body.

What should the inquest find?

It is easy to find points of almost comical identity politics and political correctness that stand alongside an incredible history of hypocritical scandals. Much more talented Canadian writers than myself have skewered this dubious legacy of play acting and bragging about socks. This scandalous mixture of woke piety and incompetence has been the subject of most of the American autopsies on the right and the left. But Trudeau’s identity politics antics can distract us from understanding what happened in Canada between 2015 and 2025. Two lessons may be of special interest to American readers:

Trudeau’s Initial Brand

The first lesson is that Trudeau’s rise to power in the 2015 election was not primarily driven by ordinary Canadians embracing identity politics. This does not mean that Trudeau has refrained from such politics, just that there isn’t much evidence that it was key to his electoral success, as some American progressives still appear to think. The 2015 election was about an electorate that felt comfortable spurning Stephen Harper’s Conservative fiscal discipline (perhaps Canadians felt flush after 10 years of such restraint and the fading memory of the painful austerity necessary to tackle debt in the 1990’s) and culture-war tactics. Many voters were drawn to Trudeau’s promise to reinvigorate the historically dominant but then endangered Liberal party of Canada.

The Trudeau Liberals ran on a platform with an undeniably aggressive neo-Kenynesian economic program with a strong environmental twist. This contrasted with the Liberal party’s brand in the 1990’s and early 2000’s (talk left, govern to something like the political center) and even more so with the fiscally disciplined Tories under Harper (who reluctantly ran deficits in the wake of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis but tried to keep some restraint). The Liberal brand as the party that talks left but tries to tackle out of control national debt-to-GDP ratios (at least during Paul Martin’s time as Minister of Finance and Prime Minister) blunted Harper’s attacks on Trudeau’s big spending promises.

Trudeau’s most memorable “identity politics” line during the 2015 election involved attacking a Conservative proposal to revoke the citizenship of Canadians convicted of terrorist offenses and policies allowing Canadians to report “barbaric cultural practices.” He scolded Harper for the divisive tactic by insisting that “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” This turned into an electoral trade-off: Harper expanded his seat count in the secularist immigration-skeptical heartland of Quebec, but in turn, Trudeau devoured Tory seats in the more vote-rich and ethnically diverse seats in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Trudeau was defending a kind of idealistic civic nationalism rather than the type of grievance politics he would adopt later.

If you are convinced that Trudeau was openly running as a woke ideologue from the outset, consider that Jonathan Kay, the editor of Quillette and easily the most influential (and funny) Canadian critic of the excesses of identity politics, ghostwrote Trudeau’s election fodder memoir. To the extent that Trudeau said excessively politically correct things, I bet that the median voter took these words with a grain of salt. Political scientists specializing in political behavior will one day look into this more rigorously. A very unscientific gloss on this is that Trudeau’s charm partly lay in his surfer boy persona, which was much more apparent and convincing in his early days as a politician. He used to fall down stairs on purpose as a party trick. It was just hard to think of him seriously becoming an evangelical advocate for political correctness. The basic take-away here is that Trudeau’s initial victory was about voters who wanted the old middle-of-the-road Liberal party back but with a pretty new face.

A Cascade of Incompetence

The second lesson begins by noting that while scandal after scandal dynamited Trudeau’s claim to be a “feminist Prime Minister” of the “first post-national state,” no one scandal dropped his polling numbers to levels that threw him out of government. He won a minority government in 2019 against Harper-style Conservative leader Andrew Scheer after apologizing for what would turn out to be just the first of a series of “brownface” and “blackface” photos of him (to be fair, voters would not see the video of the Prime Minister “in blackface acting like an ape” until after the election). He also kicked the first Indigenous woman Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, out of his caucus after she resigned from cabinet for refusing pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office to defer prosecutions for the Quebec-based company SNC Lavalin for allegedly breaking anti-corruption laws. Later, these actions led to the Ethics Commissioner finding that he had violated Canada’s Conflict of Interest Act. Trudeau lost the 2019 popular vote by a small margin but may have been anchored by support from the very ethnic voters in the GTA you might think a “brownface” scandal would enrage. Unlike seething columnists on both the left and right, voters did not care enough about identity politics to worry about their Prime Minister being a hypocrite.

The scandals took their toll eventually (there were more to follow), but commentators may be confusing voter disenchantment with basic job performance with a new-found rejection of identity politics that Canadian voters never really took seriously. That is probably the same mistake Trudeau made when he doubled down on identity politics as a way of staying in power. The fact that most Canadians are turned off or downright hostile to cancel culture, trans radicalism, the idea that Canada is “systemically racist” and in need of racialized “safe spaces”, means that identity politics could not save Trudeau because it never helped him much anyway.

The real electoral toll of the scandals turned out to be a kind of feedback loop of incompetence within the Liberal government. Over time Trudeau has indeed turned up the volume on identity politics, along with older culture-war issues such as abortion (which divides the Tories but not the contemporary Liberals). But this is at least partly explained by how each scandal required Trudeau to defensively signal his commitment to ideas he failed to realize were unpopular, even as each scandal led to the removal of more competent members of his cabinet, along with the relatively diverse perspectives they brought to the table.

Cabinets often feature political attrition over time, and this is usually somewhat offset by shuffling better-performing ministers to higher-profile ministries and shuffling out incompetents. Liberal ministers with more diverse policy backgrounds and basic competence, such as Justice Minister Jody-Wilson Raybould, Minister of Health Jane Philpott, and Minister of Finance Bill Morneau, were forced out of cabinet under the various scandals. (Morneau’s was of his own making.) Meanwhile, Trudeau made increasingly disastrous mistakes with important portfolios, such as handing the Ministry of Immigration to Sean Fraser in 2021. Fraser amped up immigration to historic and unsustainable levels during a housing crisis while presiding over a scandal involving the exploitation of international students by predatory colleges. Instead of kicking Fraser out of the cabinet or demoting him to Minister of Sport, he was given the Ministry of Housing, Infrastructure, and Communities. Fraser was given the very policy area he helped devastate while managing immigration. Trudeau then appointed his groomsman Marc Miller to take charge of the immigration file.

The public perception of Trudeau soured through the mishandling of the immigration and housing files, especially when compounded with a sclerotic economy featuring enormous new levels of public debt and a dramatic expansion of the federal civil service. Scandal after scandal encouraged Trudeau to talk more about the kinds of identity politics issues that voters gave him a pass on during his initial successes. This has led to initiatives that significantly reshaped Canadian elite opinion and restructured universities to pursue DEI hiring and “research,” but ordinary Canadians remain hostile or indifferent to such ideas. Suppose Canadians have recently lost their sense of identity and self-confidence. In that case, it is because their elites turned to an unpopular form of American self-flagellation (“Canada is systemically racist”) and gave up on the very kind of positive vision that led Canadians to vote for Trudeau in 2015.

It turned out that relentlessly trying to call critics of rising immigration levels racist while the public increasingly worried about ballooning immigration levels was a bad idea. Going on the attack on social issues turned out to be a blunder, not a Machiavellian distraction. Trudeau may have now linked identity politics to wider disastrous policy outcomes in the minds of many voters, including a generation of young voters who have been locked out of home ownership and economic opportunity. The Prime Minister misjudged where the social wedges lay and ended up wedging voters against himself.

Post-Mortem?

Trudeau has prorogued Parliament until March 24. In the meantime, the Liberal party is holding a leadership contest in which the leading candidates appear to be Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland. Carney is the former governor of the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, and Freeland held ministries throughout Trudeau’s time in government (including Deputy Prime Minister). Freeland publicly resigned as Minister of Finance in December, effectively launching her leadership campaign, after Trudeau told her on a video call that she would soon be replaced by Carney, an appointment which Carney had apparently not yet accepted. Neither stands much of a chance against Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who figured out that talking about “gatekeepers” and housing was the ticket to victory as early as 2020.

Freeland has served alongside Trudeau’s Chief of Staff, Katie Telford, as a member of Trudeau’s political inner circle, two people who have probably had their advice ignored quite often by the Prime Minister and then cleaned up the mess. Her reward was to be politically defenestrated. Her weakness in the campaign will be her association with Trudeau’s inner circle, and her strength will be how she kick-started Trudeau’s resignation promise with an act of last-minute defiance.

Trudeau has apparently been trying to get Carney signed on as Minister of Finance since Bill Morneau resigned with the “WE Charity scandal”. Carney advised the government on its economic response to COVID-19 in 2020 and officially served on the Liberal party’s “task force on economic growth” in 2024. Carney’s views are probably fairly similar to Trudeau’s, but he will present himself as a competent and measured antithesis of Trudeau. His experience as the head of two central banks should be enough to convince voters that he is not Trudeau, and he has shown political cunning by making his first campaign appearance on American television with Jon Stewart. This is cunning because he claimed to be an “outsider” to a credulous Stewart because Jon Stewart knows less about Canadian politics than the squirrels who live in my backyard.

The smart money is probably on Carney to be the next Liberal leader and Prime Minister of Canada, but Freeland could surprise him. If he wins, he will become Prime Minister without a seat in Parliament, and when Parliament next sits, his government will likely fall. The New Democratic Party that has supported Trudeau’s minority government has pledged to vote against the next confidence motion, and the Tories and Bloc Québécois will eagerly join them. If that happens, there will be an election, and unless something shifts dramatically, Pierre Poilievre will be the next Prime Minister of Canada with a smashing majority.

In that case, Poilievre will have a historic opportunity to reform Canadian politics in a way that responds to the prospect of an American trade war and even bullish threats of annexation. Trudeau’s failed experiment with his own version of American style identity politics presents Poilievre with a mandate to offer a renewed sense of Canadian identity. Even Harper, elected on promises of incrementalism and prudence, did not enjoy such a mandate to clear away a broken vision. For the first time since the days of John Diefenbaker, the idea of Canada will be refashioned on Tory terms. Trudeau can take some credit for that.

Geoffrey Sigalet is the Director of the UBC Research Group for Constitutional Law and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan Campus.