In the sunny beginnings of Justin Trudeau’s time in power, a journalist asked him why his cabinet was 50 percent female. Mr. Trudeau gave a now well-known response: “Because it’s 2015.” If you want to know why on Monday he announced his plan to resign as prime minister, the answer is just as simple: Because it’s 2025.
Mr. Trudeau’s political career has followed the arc of global progressive politics over the past decade, reflecting its transformation from a pose of optimistic cool to its present state of despair. At the beginning of his time in office, New York magazine depicted Mr. Trudeau as a cutout paper doll with costumes, which seemed about right. Now he’s increasingly the butt of jokes from the manosphere.
In 2015, Mr. Trudeau was at the forefront of a new kind of politics, both in terms of how he came to power and how he chose to use it. He harnessed the emerging force of social media with his easygoing celebrity to win his first election. Once in office, he stressed the gender and ethnicity of the people he put in important positions as much as what they planned to do with the power they possessed. Now, identity politics have helped bring about his downfall, and social media networks have soured on him.
Mr. Trudeau stayed who he was. The times changed around him. The worst you can say about him, and I have, is that he could not face the realities of a newly polarized world. But that inability has roots in what brought him to office in the first place.
“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2015. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first post-national state.”
This vision, when he articulated it, seemed powerfully contemporary, steering Canada in the same direction as an opening, borderless world of expanding cross-cultural and economic exchange. He did not ask himself — few did — what a “post-national state” would look like, or if it would work.
The term itself sounds glamorous, a way of existing politically without the various insanities of nationalism. In practice, however, it is unclear how a post-national state could survive. Mr. Trudeau’s tenure has seen patriotism decline significantly. Only 34 percent of people in the country today say they are “very proud” to be Canadian, down from 52 percent in 2016.
The failure of Mr. Trudeau’s inclusive vision is more than a culture war question. Canada’s economic superpower has always been its widespread, cross-party support for well-regulated immigration, which has been vital to replenishing the country’s small, aging population with skilled workers. His government’s policy since Covid of bringing in half a million immigrants a year, without any firm plan on how to manage their impact on housing and infrastructure, has been a disaster; his faith in immigration as a positive force may have been too naïve to allow him to inquire about its limits. The result has been that the number of Canadians who believe there is too much immigration has increased more than 30 percentage points in the past two years alone.
At times, Mr. Trudeau seems to embody virtue signaling without effective policymaking, the worst feature of progressive politics as they have devolved over the past decade. During his time in office, land acknowledgments became common practice across Canada, while Indigenous life expectancy rates plummeted. I might add that virtue signaling is now, and has always been, a Canadian affliction, not just Mr. Trudeau’s. What Canadians have come to hate about Mr. Trudeau they have come to hate in themselves, which explains, at least in part, the intensity of the hatred.
Canadians have a tendency to turn on their prime ministers every 10 years or so. The Harper government fell brutally in 2015, the Liberal government under Paul Martin with similar harshness in 2006. Before that, Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government lost all but two seats in the 1993 election. Mr. Trudeau’s departure is traditional: The way Canadians thank their leaders for their service is by kicking them out the door with the pointiest boots they can find.
Mr. Trudeau is, in a sense, a tragic figure — what made him great is destroying him. At his best, he was capable of using his photogenic charm to serve the implementation of serious and important policies.
In the first half of his time in office, the Trudeau government cut child poverty in half; legalized marijuana and medical assistance in dying; made important investments in child care. The second half was defined by crises: negotiating with the increasingly chaotic first Trump administration, Covid and inflation. By any reasonable assessment, Mr. Trudeau’s government handled all three as well as could be expected. Leaders in power during the aftermath of Covid have been rejected around the globe. That rejection makes sense, but that doesn’t mean that it’s sensible.
Mr. Trudeau will be a lame-duck prime minister until his party chooses a new head. (He also announced on Monday that he would resign as the leader of his Liberal Party.) The year 2025 does not seem, at least so far, to be a year devoted to nuance and sympathetic understanding of events in context. Nonetheless, two things can be true at the same time. Mr. Trudeau’s politics of representation have imploded in a fit of the best intentions, and yet he leaves behind a legacy that has shaped Canada for the better. Canadians might someday be able to recognize that duality. But it may take until 2035.
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