By the time you read this, it should be official: Justin Trudeau’s leadership is no more.
Justin Trudeau is reportedly set to announce his resignation as Canada’s Liberal Party leader as early as Monday (local time) after an internal revolt led to increasing calls for him to stand down.
The embattled prime minister will likely announce his decision before a national caucus meeting on Wednesday, the Globe and Mail reports.
Who knows where 2025 will go, but this news is at least the first ray of sunshine breaking through the grim clouds of 2024.
Of course, this is all (so far) just political scuttlebutt, but the very fact that Trudeau’s government is leaking like a sieve shows just how shaky his hold on power has become. That’s on top of a wave of resignations from senior ministers, which triggered the current crisis.
If the rumours are true, Mrs Trudeau’s Little Boy is jumping before he’s pushed.
Three sources knowledgeable of internal party matters told the newspaper Mr Trudeau realised he had to make an announcement before he met his caucus to avoid looking as if he was being forced out by his MPs.
They said it was unclear whether he would leave immediately or stay on as prime minister until a new leader was elected.
The party’s National Executive is set to meet this week, probably after the caucus meeting.
The only real question is just how Trudeau has managed to hang on so long. Mostly, he’s been the lucky beneficiary of circumstance. One-term governments being rare in Commonwealth parliamentary democracies, Trudeau, elected in 2015, hung on with a reduced ‘Covid factor’ in 2021, although his majority was reduced even further (although the Liberals’ share of the vote fell behind the Conservatives’ for the second election running).
There was nothing to save Trudeau as his government went into a slow-motion collapse through 2024.
[For] months he has trailed his main rival, Conservative Pierre Poilievre, by 20 points in public opinion polls. One recent survey by polling firm Abacus found more Canadians hold a favourable view of Donald Trump than Mr Trudeau.
Ouch. Ha ha ha.
And he has been has been engulfed in a political crisis for weeks after the resignation of his finance minister Chrystia Freeland in December over his approach to Mr Trump’s proposed tariffs and other spending proposals.
A growing chorus of voices from within his party, including longtime allies, called on him to resign even as he named a new cabinet days after Ms Freeland quit, changing one-third of his team in a bid to settle the political turmoil.
At the same time, a key ally in the coalition that kept Trudeau in power twice, even as his party’s vote fell behind the opposition’s, is not just deserting him, but preparing to stick the knife all the way in.
In a further blow Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party and an erstwhile ally of the prime minister, announced just before Christmas his party’s decision to abandon Mr Trudeau and the Liberals.
Mr Singh said the NDP would seek Mr Trudeau’s removal as soon as possible, potentially by a no-confidence vote. The NDP, the Conservative Party and Bloc Quebecois together would have enough votes to pass a no-confidence motion against Mr Trudeau when Parliament reconvenes in late January.
The more-popular-than-Trudeau Trump has also been landing some killer punches from south of the Canadian border.
In November, [Trudeau] traveled to Florida to meet with Mr Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in a bid to head off a trade war. But since then the president-elect has also landed humiliating blows against Mr Trudeau on social media, repeatedly calling him “governor” of Canada and declaring that the United States’ northern neighbor becoming the 51st US state is a “great idea.”
More pointedly, though, Canada has become the latest in the wave of revolt against ‘progressive’ left hegemony sweeping Western democracies. Canadian voters are as ropeable as Brits and Americans over the cost-of-living and housing crises, twinned with a tsunami of immigration, both legal and illegal, which incumbents have done nothing to stop. If anything, Trudeau’s government, like too many others in the West, has doubled down on mass immigration.
Voters have had enough.
Anthony Albanese and Christopher Luxon should be eyeing Trudeau’s fall with great unease. The same bell tolls for thee, too, fellas.
