Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dean of the G-7, has outlived a lot.
His tenure has coincided with the terms of two French presidents; four U.S. administrations; and a list of prime ministers—four in Japan, five in Italy, and a whopping six in the United Kingdom.
At his peak, Trudeau was hailed as the poster boy for a new global liberalism: hip, cosmopolitan, progressive, and a man fit for our current challenges. At his lowest, he has been skewered as patient zero of neoliberalism, a hollow and elitist system of politics that was long on rhetoric and light on deliverables.
Trudeau now sets off on his long goodbye. He announced on Jan. 6 that he would resign as the leader of his Liberal Party and, by extension, as prime minister—but not before his party picks a replacement. To buy his party some time, Trudeau has shut down Parliament, setting its return for late March.
Canada is set to host the G-7 summit in June, and it is far from clear who will be leading the country then. Will it be someone carrying the baton for Trudeau’s liberalism? Will it be Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has fashioned his reactionary populist politics to reject everything that Trudeau represents?
Or will Trudeau see himself off the stage?
From the moment of his birth on Christmas Day in 1971, there had been ample speculation about what Trudeau would do in life.
His father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had been elected prime minister three years earlier on a wave of “Trudeaumania” and was furiously making good on his plans to liberalize the country for a new era. He had reformed divorce laws, decriminalized homosexuality, expanded welfare, and enshrined multiculturalism as a Canadian cultural value.
While the prime minister had insisted for years that his family was off-limits, the infant Trudeau immediately became a minor celebrity. One columnist of the era complained in the paper that, while on vacation abroad, he couldn’t get any relevant Canadian news—except the birth notice for the prime minister’s son.
Before he even turned a year old, visiting U.S. President Richard Nixon toasted “the future prime minister of Canada,” while the Toronto Maple Leafs sent his parents a contract suggesting he try out for the hockey team. By the time he turned 1, newspapers were asking clairvoyants what he was likely to do in life (a doctor, one said) while a running joke in Ottawa went that Trudeau was being considered for various high-ranking government posts—helped by the fact that the prime minister would often let his son speak at press conferences.
Trudeaumania eventually faded. Pierre Elliott Trudeau grew unpopular yet clung on—serving more than 15 years in office over four nonconsecutive terms. When his father left office, Justin Trudeau went off to do everything except for politics: He taught snowboarding, volunteered, dabbled in acting, and went into teaching.
Trudeau would be in his mid-30s when he finally sauntered into political life. “I want to change the world,” he proclaimed in 2003. To do it, he would refashion the tired liberalism of the 20th century into something new: ecological, youth-focused, ambitious. Or something like that, anyway.
Joseph Brean, a National Post columnist, sat in on a speech that Trudeau delivered to an environmental health conference in 2006 and gave it a mixed review. “Canada’s crown prince came across as equal parts Kennedy and Zoolander,” he wrote.
But all the naysayers were proved consistently wrong. Trudeau won a seat in Parliament in 2008, handily succeeded in a leadership contest to take the helm of the Liberal Party that his father once led, and readied himself to run for prime minister.
In the 2015 election, Trudeau finally elucidated his vision for this new liberalism. Environmental action and middle-class prosperity would be his top priorities, but there was no limit to his ambition. He would change Canada’s electoral system, legalize cannabis, rectify past injustices visited on Indigenous people, build new mass transit systems, open the doors to asylum-seekers, and shoulder the new costs onto the wealthy.
And despite starting the election at a distant third place, Trudeau romped from behind to form a government. Trudeaumania had returned, and it was hell-bent on rebooting the liberal order.
When I sat down with Trudeau in his office in March 2024, I couldn’t escape how out-of-touch he sounded. That is to say: He sounded just like he did the day that he was elected.
“Politics is a very short-term business,” he told me, “where casting forward 10 years or 20 years is met with skepticism from voters.” So the tension, he said, was between convincing people that big things could be done while facing those immediate pressures—particularly in tough times.
“But I got into this job to serve and to get big things done,” he went on. “And that’s what we’re doing.”
Even on the day that he resigned, Trudeau was quick to rattle off his political accomplishments. He had, he said, grown the middle class, managed the COVID-19 pandemic, supported Ukraine in its war with Russia, reconciled with Indigenous peoples, fought climate change, put a price on carbon, modernized the economy, built a national child care program, constructed national dental care and pharmaceutical care insurance plans, and signed a new continental trade agreement.
To hear Trudeau tell it, there is no good reason to want him gone.
His critics offer the counterpoints: rising crime, a mounting debt, sluggish productivity, declining output, a cost-of-living crisis, an acute housing shortage, brain drain, worsening health care, and the looming possibility of a trade war with the United States.
In the chasm between its successes and all those problems is the empty center at the heart of Trudeau’s liberalism. While whole books have been written about how the prime minister’s reach extended his grasp, a few things ring true across his nine-plus years in power: He was easily distracted, slow to make decisions, unimaginative in how he executed policy, unwilling to delegate responsibilities to his cabinet ministers, and reticent to embark on real reform of Canada’s aging institutions.
Canada’s public sector, for example, ballooned by 100,000 workers over his time in office (about a 40 percent increase), yet its ability to keep things running worsened considerably. As the government hired legions of new civil servants, so too did it bring on high-price management consultants such as McKinsey, with generated plenty of PowerPoint decks but few big wins.
Trudeau talked incessantly of building big things. And yet Canada’s housing crisis has zapped its economic mojo, made its youth anxious, and dumped the poor onto its streets. As the problem worsened, Trudeau fiddled. While he incessantly promised to build more affordable homes, his government only managed to finance the construction of about 27,000 homes since 2018. It needed to build millions of units.
He talked, too, about the need for a clean energy transition. Yet Canada has ambled along as one of the world’s largest oil producers. The country has failed to build the huge amount of mass transit infrastructure necessary to get its many cars off the road, and it remains off track to meet its Paris climate targets.
But the biggest frustrations with Trudeau are over the things that he didn’t even try to fix. Canada’s many oligopolies are charging more and offering worse. He favored public-private partnerships, even when it made sense for the government to do the work; yet he plunged the government in to fund corporate work whenever possible.
In the end, Trudeau’s time in office showed the limitations of what a neoliberal vision like his can do. When it came time to send out stimulus checks or to have the government order goods in bulk—as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic—Ottawa scored easy wins. Its signature programs, meanwhile, often meant shuffling money or responsibility to other levels of government to put the plans into action. That set Trudeau up for long, costly, drawn-out jurisdictional squabbling.
When Trudeau moved to do things himself—build big infrastructure projects, procure complex machines, or fundamentally change the way that the government did business—things often floundered.
While he talked like a progressive, but he was hopelessly mired in the belief that the government had to partner with corporate Canada to deliver big projects. The government grew, yes, but it actually did less.
Still, Trudeau scored some solid successes, especially in the first half of his administration. But as things got more difficult, as they did everywhere, his government seemed to break down.
And maybe that’s the greatest problem with the scion: He ended up being bad at working with others. He pushed out a long list of cabinet ministers and alienated senior advisors when they fell offside. In allowing his inner circle to shrink to a chosen few, he just made everything worse.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump didn’t end Trudeau’s political career, but he sure helped.
The prospect of Trump’s return to office was met with disbelief in Ottawa, then bewilderment, and then a smug sense of calm. Trudeau’s team came to believe that Trump 2.0 would be great news for their Liberal Party. Because the president-elect is so unpopular in Canada, it might cast a pall over Conservative leader Poilievre, who has occupied a similar role as an anti-elite, anti-institutional, anti-liberal populist.
When Trump began threatening 20 percent tariffs on all imports, Ottawa frantically flew into motion. It drew up plans to calm Trump by pitching money into defense and border security.
But Trudeau’s inability to marshal the forces of the state to get things done made those plans look like jokes. Ottawa had assembled the scaffolding of a budget for Canada to hit NATO’s 2 percent target, but it wouldn’t come until well after 2030. (If ever.) The keystone of its border package, a fleet of U.S.-made drones, aren’t supposed to start arriving until 2028.
As his government raced around, looking busy in response to the extraordinary economic and political threat, the Trump bump never came. Trudeau’s popularity continued to crater. His attempts to improve his marketing—he joined late-night host Stephen Colbert on his show and taped an edition of YouTube interview series Hot Ones Québec—had come to nought. So he reverted to the same lever he had come to rely on: sending people money.
In late November, Trudeau announced plans to send every working person in the country 250 Canadian dollars (about $175 in the United States), ostensibly to offset inflation, at a cost of 4.7 billion Canadian dollars (about $3.3 billion).
Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, balked at the cost. Citing the incoming costs associated with keeping the U.S. president-elect happy, she refused to go along with the plan. Over a Zoom call, Trudeau tried to demote her—shuffling her into the insulting role of coordinating U.S-Canada relations.
Instead, Freeland declined the new job and, in a terse letter, resigned—sparking the beginning of the end for Trudeau.
Trudeau’s likely replacements may come from a less impressive lineage, but they are, thus far, ideologically indistinguishable from him.
Several likely contenders—such as Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Minister of Transport Anita Anand, and Freeland herself—have served in his government since nearly the beginning, and they are just as responsible for many of his foibles. Outsiders, such as former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney, don’t carry the same baggage but still represent exactly his brand of liberalism.
Polling suggests that none of them are likely to reverse the Liberals’ declining fortunes.
It’s more likely that Trudeau will be replaced by his antithesis: Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Conservative Party has styled himself as anti-woke, an enemy of Trudeau’s brand of liberalism, and he has vowed to undo almost everything that Trudeau has stood for over his time in office.
The tumultuous next six months will see Canada with a lame-duck government as its senior liberals duke it out to see who will carry the mantle of an unpopular and unproductive form of liberalism and face off against the man promising to lead the backlash against it.
Whoever comes out on top will sit across Trump as the liberal order tries to keep itself together. If the government falls first, and the country finds itself in an election, it could be Poilievre welcoming Trump to Kananaskis, Alberta, where the summit is to be held.
But with no date set for when Trudeau’s replacement will be named, and with another election not formally scheduled until October, no one yet knows who will be sitting in the host chair in June. For all we know, it could be Trudeau.