Canada first: Trudeau, Trump, and a brewing election up north

Justin Trudeau chose Jan. 6, a day fraught with significance for Americans, to announce he will depart from the Canadian Office of the Prime Minister. He did so after last year’s visit to President-elect Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club spectacularly misfired.

Sitting at the table in Palm Beach in late November, Trudeau had begged the once and future president not to slap threatened tariffs on his country, America’s biggest trading partner. Trump clapped back that Canada could become America’s 51st state and thereby avoid the tariffs.

Trump continued to needle the Canadian head of state on social media with the offer of statehood. Trudeau took the bait, thus stoking further discussion and mockery. “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” he wrote on X.

Americans might, therefore, be tempted to believe that Trudeau’s resignation was about Trump rather than about the strange brew of Canadian politics that can be hard for outsiders to grasp at times. The truth of the matter is that Trudeau’s political prospects have been on the wane for some time.

“He had no choice,” Tara Dee Prince of British Columbia told the Washington Examiner. “We lost confidence in him ages ago.” (She added that while she is no fan of Trudeau and did not vote for him, “he did get pooped on too much” in popular discourse.)

Justin Trudeau on the Ropes was the title of a pamphlet put out by the Toronto-based publisher Sutherland House in May. “The new Conservative opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, has all but caved in Trudeau’s rib cage in the opening round,” former prime ministerial debate moderator Paul Wells wrote, and the numbers back him up.

Trudeau’s disapproval numbers traded places with his previously positive approval numbers in February 2021 and never recovered, according to the Angus Reid Institute’s long-running Canadian opinion survey. When the more combative Poilievre was elected leader of the Conservative Party in September 2022, 56% of Canadians disapproved of the Liberal Party leader. By December 2024, 74% of Canadians disapproved, and his own party was in what amounted to a sort of passive-aggressive open revolt.

That’s the month Chrystia Freeland, minister of finance and deputy prime minister, resigned her portfolio rather than deliver a major economic message to the House of Commons. (After which she was to be reshuffled to a less prestigious Cabinet position.) Mark Carney, former head of the banks of Canada and England and a possible future Liberal Party standard-bearer, turned the job down. Former Minister of Fisheries Dominic LeBlanc finally accepted it.

In his Jan. 6 remarks, Trudeau admitted that “Parliament has been paralyzed for months” and said he told his children the night before what he was sharing with the public that day. He would resign “as party leader, as prime minister” just as soon as his party “selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process.”

“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I am having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election,” Trudeau said in front of the official residence Rideau Cottage, explaining his decision.

Parliament would be “prorogued,” meaning out of session, until March 24, at which point a combination of Conservatives, NDPers, and maybe even a few Liberals are expected to fell the government through a no-confidence motion, setting up a May election.

At this point, Conservatives are the odds-on favorite to win an outright majority, though they have been disappointed before by last-minute swings. A lot hinges on whether Canadians are sick of Trudeau or sick of Liberal governance more generally.

NDP turns on Trudeau

Trudeau’s Liberal Party has formed three successive governments, spanning over nine years, but in only one of those did it win enough seats to form a majority government. It was able to pass budgets and legislation largely on the steadfast support of the New Democratic Party and its leader, Jagmeet Singh.

Poilievre charged that “Sellout Singh” was refusing to fell the government early for financial reasons. Singh was elected to Parliament in a British Columbia riding that is not considered a safe one. The allegation was that if the NDP leader allowed the early election and lost, his government pension would not vest.

Singh cast some doubt on that interpretation in a surprising Dec. 16 press conference, though his pension does vest in late February. “Right now, Canadians are struggling with the cost of living. I hear it everywhere I go: People cannot find a home that they can afford. They can’t buy their groceries,” Singh began, sounding notes quite similar to Poilievre’s criticism of Trudeau’s economy.

Worse, “On top of that, we have Trump threatening tariffs at 25%, which put hundreds and thousands of Canadian jobs at risk,” Singh said. “And instead of focusing on these issues, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are focused on themselves. They’re fighting themselves instead of fighting for Canadians.”

Then came the rhetorical frag grenade. “And for that reason, I’m calling on Justin Trudeau to resign,” Singh explained. “He has to go.”

Reporters, of course, had questions. Singh initially held them back with some bilingualism. “I’m-going-to-do-it-in-French,” he said.

One question that was not pursued by the shouting reporters was why this hadn’t happened much sooner. The NDP and the Liberals are sometimes coalition partners, but they are also rivals.

When Trudeau took the reins of the Liberal Party, the Liberals had been so reduced in seats that they were only the third-largest party in Parliament behind the majority Conservatives and the NDP.

Canadian voters had grown tired of three-term Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who chose to contest the 2015 election rather than let someone fresh step in. This was a fateful decision that may have influenced Trudeau’s recent choice to bow out.

It was arguably the NDP’s turn to try running things, but Trudeau’s entry changed everything. As the son of former prime ministerial heavyweight Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Justin was the closest domestic thing that Canada had to royalty and a heartthrob to boot. He leveraged his celebrity to take over a moribund party and to slingshot the Liberals past the NDP and into Ottawa’s halls of power.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but the Liberal-NDP alliance was an odd one. In its messaging, the NDP would often criticize the Liberals as corrupt plutocrats. But in the day-to-day workings of Parliament, the two parties were joined at the hip. How that relationship develops, post-Trudeau and post-elections, is anyone’s guess.

Poilievre’s progress

One thing that observers inside and outside Canada don’t have to guess is what Conservatives would do with a majority in Parliament in broad strokes. They will “ax the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, and stop the crime,” to quote Poilievre’s short and oft-repeated catechism.

The “tax” is the carbon tax, enacted in 2019 with yearly ratchets every April 1, a date that perhaps the drafters didn’t dwell on at great enough length. Poilievre contends that this tax has done great harm to Canadians and his party would repeal it outright.

On housing, Poilievre wants to create carrots and sticks to drive a construction boom. His government would reward or penalize Canadian municipalities based on how many houses are constructed yearly.

Spending will be capped for the length of the government, with dollar-for-dollar reductions required for any new initiatives. Central banks are more or less obliged to fund the spending binges of their governments, thus triggering more inflation. Poilievre is verging on paranoid about price hikes and believes government spending restraint is an important part of the answer.

Poilievre has said he is something of a libertarian, and he observed the price that the Harper government paid for resisting marijuana legalization. It was a major issue that helped draw in young voters and sweep Trudeau into power.

At the same time, he believes that two initiatives of the Trudeau government, the decriminalization of hard drugs and the watering down of bail requirements, spiked Canadian crime in a way that is simply unacceptable. His government would move to reverse.

Among other matters that are more complicated are relations with the Trump administration. Trump said in a Jan. 7 press conference that he would prefer Wayne Gretzky as the next prime minister or perhaps “governor” of Canada.

Asked about a statement by Poilievre denying that Canada would become a state, Trump said, “Maybe he won’t win, but maybe he will. I don’t care.”

Trump was a thorn in Trudeau’s side, and he won’t necessarily be easy to manage for Poilievre, either. The Conservative leader recently showed that he has given some thought to this dilemma.

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“We have an American president who has always put America first,” Poilievre said in an interview with psychologist and gadfly Jordan Peterson. “He’s very blunt about it. I’ll put Canada first. The good news is that there is immense overlap in the two countries’ respective interests and values. We’re both liberal democracies. We both value freedom. There’s no reason why we can’t both win.”

“If you look at the history of President Trump, he negotiates very aggressively, and he likes to win. But in the end, he doesn’t appear to have a problem if his counterparty also wins. And so I think we can get a great deal that will make both countries safer, richer, and stronger,” the likely future prime minister of Canada added.

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice-Presidency.