The Undoing of Justin Trudeau

For a brief moment, the re-election of Donald Trump must have given the unpopular Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a shiver of hope. He could be forgiven a flashback to the happier days of 2016 when, still fresh off his own victory, the world’s press hailed him as the progressive answer to the glowering challenge of Trump’s presidency. And he would hardly be human if he didn’t wonder, briefly, if history—and public opinion—might in fact be cyclical.

But any hope Trudeau may have had that Trump’s return would work a corresponding turn in his electoral fortunes did not last long. There has been no movement in his poll numbers, which remain at the bottom of the psephological trough where they have languished for nearly three years. Even more discouraging, Canadians believe that his opponent, Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, is the better candidate to handle Trump.

Americans curious about Trudeau’s fall from political grace should first understand that he hasn’t been very popular for a while. We’re a long way from 2015, when Trudeau’s Liberal party replaced a Conservative government that had been in office for almost a decade and was beginning to fray at the seams. The voters wanted change, and Trudeau offered it with a seducer’s grin and a blithe promise of “sunny ways” ahead.

The good will—and good press—lingered a little longer than usual for a new prime minister. But three years into his first term, Trudeau’s approval ratings had sunk to the low thirties, where, except for a temporary surge during the pandemic, they have stayed. By the 2019 election, Trudeau’s image had been dented by ethics violations and tarnished by the blackface scandal. His Liberals won a lower share of the popular vote than the Conservatives but managed to form a minority government, a feat they repeated in 2021.  

Between 2019 and 2022, Canadian politics was in limbo. The Conservative party of Canada was generally more popular than the Liberal party, but not popular enough to win the majority of seats in Parliament that would have allowed them to form a government and replace Trudeau as prime minister. Then, in 2022, the Conservatives chose a new leader and everything changed. Shortly after Pierre Poilievre took over, the Conservatives gained a clear lead in the polls, which they have held ever since.

The Conservatives’ success can be explained in part by Poilievre’s relentless and effective attacks on Trudeau—in the House of Commons, at public rallies, in ad campaigns, and on social media. But the attacks wouldn’t be so successful if they weren’t hitting real targets. Trudeau’s biggest problem as he heads into an election year in 2025 is that all the bad policy decisions he made in the early years of his government have come home to roost in ways that are clear to Canadian voters. 

It doesn’t help that Trudeau’s glib charm and over-rehearsed passion got old fast. Or that his embrace of vanguard social causes has become a liability with a public tired of being lectured by politicians who sound less like civil servants and more like corporate HR minders. But despite all this, Trudeau would not be in the hole he is in today if his signature policies hadn’t backfired so spectacularly. 

To adapt James Carville’s old line, it’s the ideas, stupid. On issue after issue—from taxes and spending to crime and immigration—Trudeau’s ideas have been consistently and floridly wrong. And the consequences of having been so wrong, so badly, so often, have finally caught up with him as Canadians feel the real-world effects on their paychecks, in the streets, and on the social fabric of the country. 

Trudeau’s carbon tax raised the price of gas, as intended, but it also raised the cost of the groceries and consumer goods that have to be packaged and transported using taxed energy. His deficit spending added fuel to the inflation fire; his lavish corporate giveaways to favored industry players exacerbated Canada’s productivity problem; and he increased the size of the federal government by 40 percent while service standards somehow declined.

On crime, Trudeau repealed laws passed by the Conservatives that kept serious criminals in prison longer; and he made bail easier, even for repeat offenders. He responded to an addiction crisis by experimenting with legalizing hard drugs and approving new drug injection sites, each of which casts a penumbra of crime and disorder over neighborhoods. And he has done nothing to stop anti-Jewish crowds running riot in the streets.

Most impressively, Trudeau managed to break Canada’s bipartisan pro-immigration consensus. This consensus was always more superficial than the media’s belief in it, but even so Trudeau’s record has been so appalling that even journalists have noticed. Not content with a level of permanent immigration that was already close to the highest in the developed world, Trudeau nearly doubled it, while also increasing the number of temporary foreign workers and international students. 

There are 2.3 million more people in Canada today than there would be if Trudeau had maintained the previous government’s immigration levels. Adjusting that number to the American population, it would be like adding 23 million people, or approximately the combined populations of Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unsurprisingly, housing demand has so outstripped supply that home prices in Toronto have doubled since 2015 and rent has increased by 40 percent in the last two years alone.

Even Trudeau seems to have realized that, at least in some cases, he may have gone too far. In October, he announced that his government would be lowering immigration levels for two years, but the announcement came across as what it was: a half-hearted half-measure. He blamed the problem on “bad actors”—specifically greedy employers and universities—even though every visa is issued by his government, and the projected cuts still don’t come close to returning to the immigration levels when he took office. 

Some politicians are brought low by circumstances, others are eliminated by rivals, but Trudeau is the only author of his own decline. For a while his posing and prinking distracted Canadians from the fact that behind the scenes he was systematically undoing two decades of dutiful policy work by both Liberal and Conservative governments. Now that the dire results are undeniable and his charm has curdled to smarm, Trudeau finally appears to be out of ideas. Given his track record, that is good news for Canada.

Howard Anglin was deputy chief of staff to the last Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper.

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Image by Falcon Photography, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.