Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the perfect 21st-century progressive politician: illiberal and smug, antagonistic toward Judeo-Christian faith and values, and a self-styled technocrat whose best-laid plans failed.
Like so many other North American and European heirs of the radical ’60s, Trudeau had more neo-liberal economics than his Marxist forebears, but he had the same zeal for culture war. More importantly, he showed the Marxists’ top-down intolerance of dissent and antipathy toward rival sources of cultural, political, and economic power.
Trudeau persecuted truckers for objecting to his draconian COVID-19 policies, chastised the Catholic Church while arsonists burned their houses of worship, and generally sought to increase government power.
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Now, he is resigning, which is good news — not only for Canada and its allies but also for those who hold to the old liberal virtues of tolerance, pluralism, and deliberative democracy.
By the time Trudeau announced his resignation on Jan. 6, Canada had a higher violent crime rate than the United States.
A record of failure
Violent crime rose every year of Trudeau’s leadership except for 2020, the year he locked his country down. Canada’s Violent Crime Severity Index increased by more than 32% from 2015 to 2023. Homicides in Canada have hit a 30-year high.
This must have baffled the prime minister, who promised to make Canadians safer by taking away their rights.
Trudeau confiscated AR-15s and hunting rifles, imposed a handgun “freeze,” and spent billions on gun-grabbing. Shootings more than doubled from 2,358 in Trudeau’s first year to 4,741 in 2022, and gun homicides nearly doubled in that time. It turns out that grabbing folks’ deer rifles doesn’t cut crime.
The economy basically didn’t grow over Trudeau’s tenure. The GDP increase over eight years was 1.8%. Over that same period, the U.S. economy grew by 14%. As Canadian analyst Matthew Lau put it, “If Canada’s economy had tracked with the United States since Trudeau took office, national income per Canadian would be 11% higher than it is currently.”
That’s hardly the smart growth Trudeau promised.
Trudeau’s Liberal Party in 2015 attacked the incumbent Conservative Party for the high unemployment rate, which ticked up to 7.0% in the summer before that year’s election. “The economy has suffered and the middle class has fallen behind,” a Trudeau ally lamented at the time.
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On the day Trudeau announced his resignation this month, the latest data showed a 6.7% unemployment rate.
Meanwhile, the cost of the average Canadian home rose by 64% in the Trudeau era.
It’s a record of failure. And it wasn’t bad luck. Trudeau was the cause of much of this Canadian woe.
Best-laid plans
Trudeau was no mere victim of circumstances. Sure, the pandemic in 2020 caused short-term problems, but otherwise, he presided over an era of peace and economic growth — outside of Canada.
The rise in crime since 2020 was, in all likelihood, exacerbated by Trudeau’s extraordinary lockdowns. Of the 10 largest economies, Canada had the second-most stringent COVID-19 policies judging by Oxford’s “Stringency Index.” Most harmful, Canadian school closures averaged 51 weeks. Children deprived of school or sports, along with adults deprived of socialization, are bound to engage in more antisocial behavior.
Also, Trudeau undertook an ideological and racialized criminal justice project after George Floyd was killed by police. Trudeau’s Canada began a practice of giving lighter sentences to nonwhite criminals, on the grounds that they deserve extra mercy because of historic racism.
Mass immigration was another Trudeau policy. Trudeau’s government set a goal of 401,000 new permanent residents in 2021. In a country of fewer than 40 million people, this was a pace that would double the population in a decade.
Even if mass immigration didn’t contribute to the crime wave, it certainly drove up housing prices, stressed the government-run health insurance system, and, in some places, at least exacerbated unemployment.
That is, the problems of Trudeau’s Canada were largely the predictable results of policies the experts said would make things better.
This tendency of putting expert cleverness over the popular will was a pattern in the Trudeau era. Such an attitude inevitably leads to the belief that the state knows better than the public what is good for it, which leads to constraints on liberty and to censorship.
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Censorship
Censorship was a hallmark of the Trudeau government.
Canadian journalist Lorne Gunter in 2021 obtained internal documents from the Immigration and Refugee Board and published a column in the National Post blasting the IRB’s plans.
For instance, he reported the agency proposed to give precedence to would-be immigrants who had “intersectional claims” — that is, if they could check more than one special identity-politics box: gay and black, female and Muslim, et cetera.
IRB, a government agency, told Facebook and Twitter to cut off traffic to this column. This was a common practice of the Trudeau government, later reports found. About twice a week (more than 200 times over two years) the Canadian government asked social media companies to censor material the government disliked.
Most famously, Trudeau’s Cabinet waged war on truckers who protested his government.
On Feb. 14, 2022, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in the country’s history. The emergency in question was a convoy of truckers leading a protest against his government’s overly strict COVID policies. Among other policies, Trudeau declared that unvaccinated truckers were barred from trucking. This obviously wasn’t about contagion: By 2022, it was clear that the vaccine had little ability to stop spread, and also driving a truck is a fairly solo occupation.
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The Canadian government had already pressured the fundraising site GoFundMe to kill the fundraising page for the convoy and to freeze the accounts. Trudeau’s deputy, Chrystia Freeland, ordered banks to freeze the accounts of the anti-Trudeau protesters.
This was an obvious abuse of power. Two years later, a federal court ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.”
Trudeau and Freeland merely wanted to crush criticism of their policies. This intolerance of dissent is typical of today’s progressives.
In the more radical 1960s, the truckers would have been branded “counterrevolutionaries,” which would have justified stripping them of their rights. Fascism has no rights, after all.
In the 2020s, the terminology is different. Just as angry school parents in northern Virginia and traditional Catholics got branded terrorists under President Joe Biden, Freeland accused the protesters of “terrorism.” Likewise, the Trudeau government was fond of labeling inconvenient facts or non-progressive arguments “disinformation” and “misinformation” in order to justify censorship.
Trudeau was consistent in trying to increase his own power. At times, this involved crushing any rival center of power. One major rival power center is organized religion.
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Anti-religion
Trudeau’s government this fall banned God from many military services. Chaplains were instructed that they could not invoke a higher being during their prayers at any mandatory events. This was supposedly in the name of neutrality.
Progressives such as Trudeau believe that their own beliefs are not really beliefs — they are simply neutral common sense. That’s why they are fine banning dissent: Dissent from common sense must be nonsense. And so Trudeau believed that he could prevent the imposition of religion by imposing irreligion — as if godlessness weren’t a belief system.
This was a fitting bookend to a tenure that began with his shutting down the Office of Religious Freedom.
The Trudeau years saw the government creep into more and more corners of Canadian life and then declared that wherever there was government money, religion must be banished.
The government subsidizes employers to hire students for summer jobs. Trudeau barred any pro-life organization from getting this money, requiring any applicant to proclaim his dedication to abortion.
And, of course, Trudeau helped sic arsonists and vandals on Catholic churches during his tenure.
In 2021, an indigenous tribe in British Columbia declared that it had found evidence of 200 unmarked graves at a former residential school for natives that was run by the Catholic Church. The liberal media and the Trudeau administration instantly believed this charge, although the evidence was flimsy.
The flurry of news led instantly to a rash of arsons, in which vandals destroyed dozens of Catholic churches across Canada. Trudeau responded to these attacks with tepid finger-wagging, before returning to attacking the church and justifying the anger.
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More than three years later, after multiple excavations, not a single mass grave has actually been unearthed. Trudeau, the former “misinformation” cop, went silent on the topic.
What makes Trudeau’s tenure so noteworthy is how he seemed to distill the essence of the modern progressive: authoritarian, socially liberal, and wrongly believing he’s more competent than he is.