Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement Monday that he’s resigning as leader of Canada’s Liberal Party comes as a shock for many abroad. “I cannot believe Trudeau is stepping down!” reads the first text I got from an American friend this morning.
But it’s not shocking to Canadians. If his resignation is a monumental moment for Canadian politics, it’s also a reminder that the values cherished from afar don’t always guarantee approval at home.
Why We Wrote This
The resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a marked reversal of fortunes for a leader still seen by much of the world as a force for progress. But Canadians had anticipated it for quite some time.
While the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history electrified voters in 2015, especially young ones, missteps in the international arena, corruption scandals, and a controversial carbon tax eroded his popularity.
Canadians rallied around him during the pandemic, but ensuing vaccine mandates led to angry “trucker” protests in Ottawa, Ontario, and created new kinds of divisions in Canadian society. The postpandemic story in Canada has been one of inflationary food prices, rising housing costs, and migration cuts.
A party leadership race will now take place, and Parliament will convene March 24, almost certainly leading to a springtime election.
It was essentially because of Justin Trudeau that I was sent to Canada as a foreign correspondent in 2018.
At the time, the Canadian prime minister stood for optimism and hope – what he had dubbed “sunny ways” leading to the Liberal Party’s 2015 victory – in a world in which leaders were clinching victories on pessimism and divisive politics.
In those first years, the juxtaposition between Mr. Trudeau and the United States’ then-president, Donald Trump, was stark. Liberal Americans often expressed a certain envy to me, that I lived now in a country that pronounced its aspirations of diversity and democracy, combating climate change and forwarding Indigenous reconciliation. (I also found that conservative Americans loved to point out any faults they could in Mr. Trudeau – and there were plenty of faults to find.)
Why We Wrote This
The resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a marked reversal of fortunes for a leader still seen by much of the world as a force for progress. But Canadians had anticipated it for quite some time.
His announcement Monday that he’s resigning as leader of the Liberal Party comes as a shock for many abroad. “I cannot believe Trudeau is stepping down!” reads the first text I got from an American friend this morning.
But it’s not shocking to Canadians. When I arrived in Toronto, Mr. Trudeau had already passed a peak of popularity at home. And if his resignation is a monumental moment for Canadian politics, it’s also a reminder that the values cherished from afar don’t always guarantee approval at home.
Andy Blatchford/The Canadian Press/AP/File
In a Dec. 30 poll, nearly half of Canadians said it was time for Mr. Trudeau to step aside.
While the second-youngest prime minister in Canadian history electrified voters in 2015, especially young ones, missteps in the international arena, corruption scandals, and a controversial carbon tax – and the struggle to balance an environmental ethos in an oil- and gas-producing nation – eroded his popularity. Many Indigenous communities bristled at rhetoric around equality that was much louder than action.
Canadians rallied around him during the pandemic, but ensuing vaccine mandates led to angry “trucker” protests in Ottawa, Ontario, and created new kinds of divisions in Canadian society. And the mood has soured ever since. The postpandemic story in Canada has been one of inflationary food prices, rising housing costs, and migration cuts that would once have been unthinkable by the Liberal government.
He’s also been in office for nearly 10 years. Canadians expected he wouldn’t be the country’s next prime minister after upcoming elections, which had been due by October 2025.
Justin Tang/The Canadian Press/AP/File
He’d been under pressure to quit from lawmakers within his own party – pressure that grew after Chrystia Freeland, his deputy prime minister, stepped down Dec. 16, saying she was at odds with his economic policy decisions.
“I don’t easily back down faced with a fight, especially a very important one for our party and the country,” Mr. Trudeau announced to Canadians Monday outside his official residence. “But I do this job because the interests of Canadians and the well-being of democracy is something that I hold dear.”
A party leadership race will now ensue, and Parliament will convene March 24, almost certainly leading to a springtime election. “A new prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party will carry its values and ideals into that next election,” Mr. Trudeau said.
But not everyone is assured.
The political upheaval comes as Canada faces Mr. Trump’s threat to impose a 25% tariff on all Canadian imports on his first day in office if Canada doesn’t fortify the northern border to prevent migrants and drugs from crossing into the U.S. Mr. Trump has goaded Mr. Trudeau in recent weeks, calling him governor of America’s “51st state,” Canada.
Adrian Wyld /The Canadian Press /AP/File
At the time of Mr. Trudeau’s rise, the world watched the ascent of Mr. Trump in the U.S., the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, and growing authoritarianism around the world. Since then, the globe has been strained by the COVID-19 pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the continued fraying of democracy around the world.
“I thought he was the golden boy?” a family member texted me about Mr. Trudeau this morning.
He might be for her. But as with Germany’s Angela Merkel, who was lauded around the globe for her welcome of Syrian refugees – which ultimately undermined her support among Germans – the values that leaders espouse don’t hold the political weight at home as they do farther afield.
