The Liberal Party has held power in Canada for 68 of the past 100 years. That record is a testament to the party’s pragmatism and prudence. A satirist once mocked William Lyon Mackenzie King, the most enduring of Liberal prime ministers, for supposedly believing: “Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.” Not all the Liberal leaders were as very cautious as King, but almost all of them absorbed his lesson: Don’t overdo things.
Until recently, the Liberals rarely deviated from King’s guidance. The one major exception occurred during the prime ministership of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father. In 1980, the elder Trudeau was returned to office after a brief spell in opposition. The previous year, the Iranian revolution had caused a geopolitical crisis that spiked oil prices worldwide. The elder Trudeau convinced himself and his inner circle that the opportunity had now come to build a state-directed energy economy. His new government fixed prices, expropriated foreign holdings, and taxed producers to subsidize consumers.
This rattletrap project soon collapsed into economic ruin. The Liberals were crushed in the following election, in 1984, losing 95 of their 135 seats in Parliament.
Pierre Trudeau himself had retired just ahead of the implosion. For decades afterward, the 1984 defeat revived Liberal prudence: Don’t overdo things. When the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they delivered middle-of-the-road economic policy. When they lost power again, in 2006, they did so not for want of moderation, but because of a classic Canadian scandal of patronage and kickbacks in government contracting.
I recite this history to make a point: Justin Trudeau inherited not only a famous name and a handsome face, but also a detailed playbook of what and what not to do in Canadian politics.
Canada is a country that does not reward imported ideologies—the nation is too riven by its own native fault lines: French versus English, resource producers versus industry and finance, rural versus urban, central Canada versus the Atlantic east and the prairie and mountain west. The successful Canadian politician must bridge those divides. The work of doing so is never easy. If a would-be leader makes the mistake of adding too many borrowed ideological isms, the already difficult becomes practically impossible.
Successful Canadian governments mix and match. The Conservative government of 1984–93 undid Pierre Trudeau’s heavy-handed government controls. At the same time, it negotiated an agreement with the United States that hugely reduced the acid rain that poisoned lakes in Ontario and Quebec. Next, the Liberal governments of 1993–2006 exercised the fiscal discipline that balanced Canada’s budgets and reduced the huge debt accumulation of the Trudeau years. Then, the Conservative government of 2006–15 both cut taxes and enacted the most ambitious anti-poverty program in recent history, a generous child benefit for poor and middle-class families.
These Conservative and Liberal governments also did much that their base voters wanted, of course. But they always remembered: Don’t overdo things.
Enter Justin Trudeau. Trudeau gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013. His rise coincided with a sharp turn in U.S. politics. During Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals shifted in a much more radically progressive direction on issues of race, gender, immigration, and identity generally. Exactly why the shift happened cannot easily be explained, but it can be accurately dated. Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood patrol in February 2012. After Eric Garner was choked to death by police in July 2014, and Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the first Black Lives Matter protests and riots broke out. Social-media use intensified the new dynamics of online activism: The most striking early Twitter mobbing erupted in December 2013. By the early Donald Trump years, polling found that white liberals expressed more progressive views on race than actual members of the minority groups those liberals supposedly championed. Detractors named this progressive veer “the great awokening.” Trudeau absorbed the turn, and rapidly came to personify it.
At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2016, President Obama joked about the enthusiasm for Trudeau among progressives on both sides of the border: “Somebody recently said to me, Mr. President, you are so yesterday. Justin Trudeau has completely replaced you—he’s so handsome; he’s so charming; he’s the future. And I said, ‘Justin, just give it a rest.’”
Trudeau won a majority in the election of 2015: 184 of the 338 seats in Parliament. He won nearly 40 percent of the popular vote, a creditable plurality in a five-party system. Somewhere along the way, however, the playbook that warned Don’t overdo things got lost.
On issue after issue, the new Trudeau government implemented progressive ideas adapted from American activists, typically with harrowing consequences. In Canada, the federal government has a large role in criminal justice. The Trudeau government enthusiastically mimicked U.S. ideas about restorative justice. Canada’s incarceration rate dropped from about 86 per 100,000 adults in 2013–14 to about 72 in 2022–23. Over that period of nearly a decade, Canada’s rate of violent crime surged by 30 percent. From 2014 to 2022, the rate of homicides spiked by 53 percent. Residents of the greater Toronto area now share horror stories of violent home invasions. Invaders are typically seeking to grab keys to expensive cars. Toronto contractors now do a lively business in automatic driveway bollards designed to deter thieves from driving right up to the house and being able to make an easy getaway.
In 2018, the Trudeau government legalized the sale and distribution of cannabis. Enforcement of laws against the possession of harder drugs relaxed too. British Columbia currently permits personal possession of less than 2.5 grams of almost any drug, including heroin. In 2021, Ontario courts dismissed 85 percent of all drug-possession charges before they came to trial—this compared with only 45 percent of charges dropped pretrial in 2019, prior to a new policy directive in 2020.
Opioid-overdose deaths in British Columbia reached a new peak of 2,500 in 2023. Canadian cities—once famously safe and orderly—are now crowded with homeless addicts. In the three years from 2020 to ’23, Vancouver reported a more than 30 percent increase in homelessness. Vancouver’s permissive policies and mild weather have lured thousands of people who are vulnerable to addiction to a city notorious for Canada’s most expensive housing. The grim spectacle of people lying unconscious on streets, of syringes and needles discarded in parks and public places, has earned Vancouver the unenviable title of “fentanyl capital of the world.”
Canadian-government efforts at reconciliation with Indigenous populations predated the Trudeau administration: The Conservative government of the early 2000s had paid $2 billion to settle claims of abuse from Indigenous Canadians who had attended residential schools. But the Trudeau government redoubled such initiatives, paying tens of billions of dollars more to settle additional claims. Over nine years, the Trudeau government tripled spending on what it labeled “Indigenous priorities” to nearly $32 billion annually, more than Canada spends on national defense. It negotiated settlements to Indigenous lawsuits that have added an estimated $76 billion to Canada’s future liabilities.
Indigenous groups have also been granted significant approval rights over major resource projects. During the Trudeau years, land acknowledgments have become a near-universal feature of public life in Canada. Public, academic, and corporate events habitually open with an expression of obligation to Indigenous groups that once dwelt on or near the meeting place.
Yet over this period of fervent commitment to restitution, Canada’s Indigenous people have suffered a catastrophic decline in life expectancy. As I noted recently:
From 2017 to 2021, average life expectancy for Indigenous people in British Columbia dropped by six years, to 67.2 years (the average for non-Indigenous Canadians in 2021 was 82.5 years). From 2015 to 2021, Indigenous people in Alberta suffered a collapse in life expectancy of seven years, to 60 for men and 66 for women. The principal culprit: opioid addiction and overdose. In Alberta, Indigenous people die from opioids at a rate seven times higher than non-Indigenous Albertans.
The Trudeau government faces its gravest problem because of Canada’s poor economic performance under his leadership. Fifteen years ago, Canada made a strong and rapid recovery from the global financial crisis. Of the Group of Seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), Canada was the first to return to pre-crisis levels of both employment and output. But Trudeau has not succeeded so well with the crisis that erupted on his watch. Measured by growth in GDP per capita, Trudeau’s Canada has posted some of the worst scores of the 38 most developed countries both before the coronavirus pandemic and after.
The Trudeau government has tried to accelerate weak productivity growth by a lavish surge in federal spending and a massive increase in immigration.
Canadian public expenditure of course spiked during the pandemic. Yet even now, three years after the pandemic emergency, Trudeau’s government is still spending 2.5 percentage points more of its GDP on programs other than interest payments than it spent when Trudeau entered office. Because tax revenues have not kept pace, deficits have swelled, and the country’s overall debt burden has grown crushingly.
The immigration trend is equally arresting. Before Trudeau, Canada accepted about 250,000 new permanent residents a year. Relative to population, that figure was already substantially higher than the corresponding U.S. number. The Trudeau government raised the level past 300,000 after 2015, and now to nearly 500,000.
Canada under Trudeau has pivoted from what economists call “intensive” growth (which involves each worker producing more) to “extensive” growth (which means producing more by increasing the number of workers). There are three big problems with the extensive-growth strategy.
The first problem is that it does not raise Canadians’ living standards. The country produces more in aggregate, but the individual does not, so there is no basis for paying workers more.
A second problem is that the new immigrant workers are also new immigrant consumers, who compete with the existing population for, among other things, housing. Relative to people’s incomes, housing in Toronto is now more expensive than in New York City or Miami. The nearby new metropolis of Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, now ranks among the 10 least affordable cities in North America, as people priced out of Toronto relocate westward around Lake Ontario.
A third problem is that new immigrants may welcome Canadian opportunities, but they do not always share Canadian values. When privately reproached for the Trudeau government’s weak response to anti-Semitic outrages, his foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, reportedly replied, “Have you seen the demographics of my riding?” (Canadian electoral districts are known as “ridings.” Joly’s riding is 40 percent foreign-born, with Algeria the top source of migrants, followed by Morocco, Haiti, Syria, and Lebanon.) Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, Canadian cities have been disgraced by anti-Semitic incidents of accelerating violence. Shots have been fired at synagogues and schools, though mercifully nobody has been hurt. One Montreal synagogue has been firebombed twice. Police have given broad leeway to anti-Israel protests that would likely have been suppressed as prohibited hate speech had they been targeted at any other minority group but Jewish Canadians.
These specifics do not, however, quite capture all that has gone wrong for Trudeau. His party now stands at about 22 percent in the polls, six points worse than the Liberals’ share in the wipeout election of 1984. Look back through Trudeau’s personal-approval ratings, and you see a much earlier break point: the spring of 2018. Until then, Trudeau was remarkably popular, scoring a peak of 65 percent in September 2016. (The contrast with Trump probably helped him a great deal that fall: Trump was, and is, a widely despised figure in Canada.) Trudeau was still polling at and above 50 percent in the fall of 2017. Six months later, his rating had collapsed, to just 40 percent.
What changed in the spring of 2018? During the school break of that year, Trudeau took his wife and three children on an eight-day tour of India. On that trip, Trudeau and his family were repeatedly photographed wearing the local costume. Trudeau had already gotten into some trouble when an image surfaced of him—then in his late 20s, working as a teacher at a private school—clad in Aladdin costume, his face darkened by makeup. But here he was, as prime minister of the country, playing dress-up in ways that looked simultaneously foolish and patronizing, all at taxpayers’ expense.
Canadians who paid closer attention to Indian politics noticed something even more disturbing on the 2018 visit. The Canadian embassy invited a notorious Sikh extremist to its dinner honoring Trudeau in New Delhi. The invitation was rescinded and blamed on an unfortunate misunderstanding. Then it turned out that Trudeau had met with the extremist before, apparently as part of an ill-considered political strategy to woo Sikh ultranationalist votes in Canada.
For Canadians, the photos of the India dress-up drove home the sting in Obama’s joke about Trudeau’s preening: “Give it a rest.” Meanwhile, the implausible explanation of the invitation to a murderous terrorist cast a shadow upon the high ideals Trudeau so often professed.
Trudeau lost his parliamentary majority in the election of October 2019. Thereafter, he governed with the support of the more left-wing New Democratic Party. Although his poll numbers would sometimes rally, especially in the first shock of the coronavirus pandemic, the gloss never lasted. Trudeau tried to regain his majority in a post-pandemic election in September 2021 and failed again.
At the beginning of his prime ministership, Trudeau described Canada as a post-national state: “There is no core identity, no mainstream, in Canada.” In his mind, no membrane seemed to exist between “foreign” and “domestic.” Hence his apparent belief that Sikh extremism in India might be used as a political resource in Canada.
In 2023, however, Trudeau learned that the Chinese state had been interfering in Canadian elections for some time. China was accused of funding pro-Beijing Chinese-language media in Canada, and of pressuring individual members of the Chinese Canadian diaspora. The then-leader of the Conservative Party would later estimate that the clandestine Chinese effort cost his party at least five, and as many as nine, seats in the election of 2021—not enough to change the outcome of the election, but a significant impact nonetheless. The Chinese government also allegedly intervened in the Liberal Party’s internal politics to replace a Beijing-skeptical Liberal member of Parliament with a Beijing-friendly one in 2019.
Reportedly, the Chinese government made veiled threats to Chinese-citizen students in Canada that their visas might be revoked if they did not join the Liberal Party and back the Beijing-friendly candidate in the nominating contest. Some of those students were allegedly provided with false documents to make them eligible to vote. At a public inquiry last year, the Beijing-friendly member of Parliament testified that he’d known international students were bused in to support him but said that he did not—at the time of his nomination—realize any impropriety was taking place.
The Canadian public knew nothing of this until more than a year after Trudeau had received an intelligence briefing about it all—even then, the government seemed more outraged by the report’s leaking than by the Chinese interference. Trudeau in fact praised the Liberal lawmaker who’d been elected with Chinese help, and scolded journalists that their questions about Chinese interference verged on racism.
Yet Trudeau sometimes could discover the limits of post-nationalism. When right-wing U.S. backers provided financial support for a truck blockade of Ottawa in early 2022 to protest COVID-19 restrictions, Trudeau invoked emergency powers and froze hundreds of bank accounts associated with the protests. The two cases of foreign interference were different in many ways, but it was not easy to quell suspicions that one difference was that the 2019 interference had helped Trudeau’s party, whereas the 2022 interference did not.
As he sought Canada’s prime ministership a decade ago, Trudeau proudly described himself as a feminist. Half of his cabinet appointees would be female, because—a formula he often used—“it’s 2015.” In office, however, Trudeau tended to assign his female appointees the dirty work that men avoided. In the worst scandal of Trudeau’s leadership, Canada’s ethics commissioner found that the prime minister had pressured the justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to save an important corporate backer from criminal prosecution; Trudeau has denied that he ever ordered her to do so, but the scandal led to her resignation. Then, in his government’s terminal crisis, he forced from office via Zoom call his loyal female finance minister, Chrystia Freeland—after asking her to deliver one more round of bad news for him even as he offered her a demotion. For the self-advertised feminist, the gap between image and reality appeared wider and wider.
Trudeau has resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, but not yet as prime minister. The party will now choose a new leader to face the election that is expected sometime soon this year. For whoever wins the job, impending Liberal defeat seems impossible to avert. More likely, he or she will have signed up for the long work of reinvention and rebuilding. Trudeau’s successors will have to decide: Should the Liberal Party return to its historic pragmatism and prudence, or should it continue on his path of valuing declared intentions over measured outcomes?
The post-Trudeau Liberals may do well to rediscover the foundational rule of Canadian party politics: Seriously, we weren’t kidding. Don’t overdo things.
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