On being elected Canada’s 23rd prime minister in 2015, Justin Trudeau famously welcomed the adoring crowd that had gathered for his victory speech in Montreal with the words: “Sunny ways, my friends. Sunny ways.”
It was a phrase used by one of his predecessors in the late nineteenth century, evoking what positive politics can achieve: the triumph of hope over fear.
Trudeau announced his decision to step down as prime minister on Monday morning, standing conspicuously alone in front of his Ottawa home.
Those with a weakness for allegory will have read much into the dull grey sky above him and the absence of friends around him.
The one-time global icon for progressive politics who swept to power at just 43 was all but forced to resign this week. Trudeau admitted that growing calls for him to step down from within his own Liberal Party meant that he “cannot be the best option in [the next] election”.
With the sudden departure of a key political ally, plummeting approval ratings and a looming confidence motion in parliament that his minority government was set to lose, few would disagree.
Another affirmation, so it seems, of Enoch Powell’s sobering axiom that all political lives end in failure.
Trudeau’s critics have piled in since his announcement. Soaring costs, runaway house prices, reduced healthcare access — much of it put down to leaping immigration, which Trudeau avidly promoted until reversing course a few months ago amid a public backlash.
Also high on their list of things he got dangerously wrong are Canada’s energy and climate change policy — too onerous — and his approach to China — too timid.
The populist leader of Canada’s opposition Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, has relentlessly framed Canada as a “broken country”. He cites various social and economic ills, from high inflation and homelessness to crime and drug addiction. A recent Ipsos survey found that nearly 70% of Canadians agreed, a view especially common among young adults.
Never mind that Canada’s brokenness is a matter of perspective. Poilievre’s charge that Trudeau and the Liberal establishment are failing is landing well. He has a double-digit lead in the polls and is widely tipped to win the next election.
Hardly surprising. Democratic leaders everywhere look increasingly fragile in the path of global headwinds. Anti-incumbent sentiment, driven by popular anger over immigration and rising living costs, is pushing governments out of power across the world. Into the breach step mostly right-wing parties (the UK being a notable exception) with easy solutions.
Too much Trudeau
Trudeau had an additional burden: over-exposure. Leaders are more present in our visual lives than ever before due to 24-hour news and social media. It’s almost impossible not to grow weary of them over time. The urge to metaphorically punch even the most decent and honourable politician in the face can become irresistible.
Trudeau has a big personality. Under constant public scrutiny, many found him insufferable. What once seemed charming — his sock choices or yoga antics — eventually grated. Tellingly, Trudeau was never successfully coached out of his affectations — the random smile? — over nearly 10 years in office. Which suggests that they may not have been affectations after all. Just him.
A more serious charge levelled at Trudeau was that he was drunk on wokeism, virtue-signalling and performative politics. His frequent apologies to Canada’s indigenous people for past wrongs, his gushing embrace of cultural diversity, his advocacy of LGBTQ+ rights and strict gender equality — all grist to the mill for his critics.
In the minds of some of the best-known, such as Canadian psychologist and media commentator Jordan Peterson, these apparent obsessions made him not just misguided but a historical evil. “A curse on Canada” is how he described Trudeau after he resigned.
In an interview with CBS News shortly after becoming prime minister, Trudeau drew on his amateur boxing experience to explain how getting an actual punch in the face might be good for one’s character and resilience.
His life till that point had not been without trials: the mother who ran away from home, took up with rock stars and ended up in a mental hospital; the younger brother who died in an avalanche.
When you get knocked down or punched in the face, “you might learn a few things about yourself”, he told the interviewer.
Still just 53, Trudeau is unlikely to remain flattened for long. Another chapter in his political career could be written.
His wounded reputation at home — it’s much better abroad, as is often the way — will take further hits in the coming months, as his party elects a new leader and whoever becomes Canada’s next prime minister vows to rebuild all that is “broken”.
Assessing his legacy
But nothing written now is a reliable guide to how his reputation will look five, 10, 50 years from now.
When Angela Merkel bowed out as German chancellor after 16 years in late 2021, she was praised abroad and popular at home, seeming to defy Powell’s maxim. It was a settled assumption that Merkel would go down as one of the greatest statespeople of the post-Cold War era: the moral leader of the West, responsible for holding Europe together through various crises and elevating Germany’s power and influence.
Today, The Economist describes her legacy as looking “increasingly terrible”, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed numerous economic and political failings of her rule.
A potent reminder that assessing the legacy of our leaders contemporaneously is a fraught enterprise. Big decisions wisely conceived in the national interest can be very unpopular at the time they are taken, so much so their authors might lose their jobs as a consequence. Big mistakes can go all but unnoticed until much later.
Historians usually reserve judgment on whether this or that leader was “great” until long after they have left the scene. Even then, that assessment is rarely static and fixed for time immemorial. Rather, it gets continually filtered through the lens of new findings and events, as well as changing attitudes and mores.
William Faulkner said it best: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
All this is to say, discussions about Trudeau’s legacy have a long way to run.
Time will tell if the difficult balance he was striking for an oil-rich nation like Canada to meet its net-zero commitments was the right one; or if high government spending was necessary to tackle problems like child poverty, on which clear progress was made under his premiership.
Canadians from marginalised groups and communities who have long felt unseen will surely beg to differ with the cruder characterisations of Trudeau’s social agenda.
Justly faulted for trying too hard to please everyone, sure. But critics who mock Trudeau’s instincts or deride his intent need to come up with better arguments than Peterson’s.
Before Trudeau came to power in 2015, Canadians had grown weary of their capable though charmless prime minister, Stephen Harper. Only half-jokingly referred to as the “prince of darkness”, Harper had been at the helm for nearly a decade, a period when people felt that “Canada” had become aggressive, mendacious, bigoted. And less liked internationally, which stung.
It’s all about timing
Canadians wanted light and vision, a return to a nobler sense of themselves. Trudeau delivered that. And oodles of panache.
Timing is everything in the long seasons of politics. It was on Trudeau’s side 10 years ago. Were it not for Harper, Canadians may never have imagined Trudeau as their prime minister. Now that Canada needs “fixing”, it’s someone else’s turn.
Of the criticisms aimed at Trudeau since his resignation, surely the most bizarre is that he is somehow responsible for the potential mayhem that might be unleashed by President-elect Donald Trump once he enters the White House in a few weeks.
Trump’s threats against Canada — from sweeping tariffs to territorial annexation — are of a piece with his taunts and bluster about every other country on Earth.
No one anywhere knows what to make of them. Or what to do about them.
Trudeau’s late father, Pierre, himself prime minister of Canada for 15 years, once described being next to the US as like sleeping with an elephant. Due to its vast size and power, every little movement or twitch of the “elephant” can inflict a mighty shake on its northern neighbour.
He probably never envisaged an elephant like Trump.
Justin Trudeau managed relations with the first Trump administration admirably well. He secured vital trade agreements and maintained a constructive dialogue through numerous tensions, not least personal jibes by Trump, who now refers to the prime minister as “governor of the 51st state”.
Trudeau seems unfazed.
Maybe it’s because he knows a thing or two about operating in the world of celebrity politics. Or how best to depersonalise the business of running a country and pursuing the national interest.
If Canada-US relations fall apart during the second Trump administration, Canadians may come to regret that Trudeau is no longer next to the elephant.
We will know soon enough. DM
Dr Terence McNamee is a non-resident Global Fellow of the Wilson Center. He is also Canadian.