Putting the Trudeaupocalypse in some context

I’ve listened to a whole bunch of people giving their takes on why Trudeau fell from grace. Was it the carbon tax? Invoking the Emergencies Act? SNC Lavelin? Trump? And a lot of them lack basically any context. So here’s my take on the rise and fall of Trudeau and why he’s resigning now in particular.

I want my readers to know that I say this as a leftist: Nobody liked Trudeau that much to begin with or really wanted him per se to have power. Trudeau was just at the right place at the right time to become the PM in the first place, and forces more powerful than him were the cause of both his rise and fall.

To see what I mean, you gotta cast your mind back to the summer of 2015.

Stephen Harper, racist dog-whistle enthusiast, oil industry advocate and enjoyer of the LEGO™ man standard haircut was the prime minister of Canada, and the tides had turned squarely against him. Journalists referred to him as “man in blue suit” to avoid using his name when he went to self-serving photo ops. He was being rightly criticized for “muzzling” scientists when the science disagreed with his policies. His government lacked transparency so severely that the Harper government was even found to be in contempt of Parliament for outright refusal to provide our representatives with information on what they were even doing. In the death-throes of his government, he proposed a transparently racist “barbaric cultural practices” snitch-line so that white people could tell on non-white people to the government and make their lives worse. There was a lot to hate, and he was flailing.

The “orange wave” of NDP support had just swept across Québec and large swathes of the country. The Syrian refugee crisis was in full swing, and, if you can believe it, Canadian political parties were competing against each other to promise that their policies would welcome more Syrian refugees than other parties’ policies. Thomas Mulcair was ascendant. At the beginning of August of 2015, smart money was on the next prime minister of Canada having a beard. (Mulcair had a big beard. We’re literally talking about facial hair. Canadian journalists got weird about that.)

The Liberal Party was pretty much dead and forgotten at this point in history, except that Trudeau II had taken the leadership, and he was a household name because his father was prime minister.

The bulk of Mulcair’s support was in Québec, and he was Harper’s main worry. So, Harper cried “niqab.” That is to say, he announced that his government would ban federal employees from wearing a niqab. Almost no-one in Canada wears them to begin with, and they are absolutely not a problem here, but politicians use the fear of niqabs for political gain. These policies have also, unfortunately, been somewhat popular in Québec and provincial politicians have used them with success to make life worse for certain groups and to give white people license to be racist.

In response to Harper’s announcement, Mulcair did the right thing: He said this was a racist ploy on the part of Harper and the Conservatives and came out against such a transparently xenophobic policy. As a result, Mulcair’s poll numbers dipped in Québec, at first ever so slightly.

You have to remember that at the time, for progressive voters in Canada, we were desperate for a change from a decade of Harper, and we were terrified that splitting the vote between the Liberal Party and the NDP would allow Harper to eke out another minority government. In fact, this exact fear was crystallized into the 2015 electoral reform campaign promise of the Liberal Party, which Trudeau II famously reneged on.

And so, when Mulcair’s poll numbers dipped in Québec after the racist Harper niqab policy proposal, it was like all the progressives in Canada looked at each other and in a panic we all said, “Okay so we’re voting for Trudeau then? It’s Trudeau? Okay here we go.” And then Trudeau II was elected to a majority government.

I can only speak for me and the people I know, but I’d bet that very few outside the Liberal Party faithful actually wanted to give Trudeau a majority government in the first place. A majority government in Canada is a very strong mandate, with few checks on their power. And we’d lived through the iron grip of Harper for long enough that, at least to the people I knew, a minority government with someone other than Harper as PM sounded pretty good. From the perspective of a progressive but non-party-affiliated voter in Canada, we weren’t picky about who it was that replaced Harper, as long as it was someone progressive.

And that’s why I hear people saying that everyone loved Trudeau so much in 2015 and wonder what election they were watching. We didn’t all fall in love with Trudeau. It felt more to me like we were just terrified of another Harper government and overshot the mark to give him a majority.

There was a brief moment of hope after Trudeau II took office, where he did a bunch of progressive-leaning things, like having equal numbers of women and men in his cabinet or legalizing recreational pot use. But even those things sort of lose their shine when you look too close. The SNC Lavelin scandal and the whole thing with Chrystia Freeland more recently show that Trudeau will burn up the careers of women around him if it comes to that. And the legalization of pot happened in such a haphazard way that it almost seemed like it was designed to maximize the number of people whose lives were ruined by it.

Trudeau was never well-loved by the left, because he kept appropriating the language and aesthetics of progressives, like anti-racism and environmentalism, but he lacked much meaningful action in that direction. Trudeau never did figure out how many times he did blackface, for example, and his environmental credentials are somewhat marred by the billions he spent on investing in oil pipelines.

As far as the right, they hated him just because he was a progressive voice who even paid lip-service to feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism etc. to begin with. This all got super-charged by the global political lurch to the right that happened during and after the Covid pandemic. Best I can tell what happened there is that there’s always been conspiracy theory types on the internet, and when public health measures started being put in place to address an actual real global problem, that poured gasoline on all those tiny, already-existing fascist-adjacent fires, and gave them the space to say, “Look, we told you. It’s happening, see? We were right all along!”

So that’s how you end up with the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa in 2022. It was a generic racist/xenophobic/anti-government/right-wing/proto-fascist inflammation of the already-existing problem of a certain kind of mostly white male entitlement that we never really fully addressed because it was in the fringe, and this gave it the space to go mainstream. (And I swear if I hear one more journalist tells me that they were gullible enough to buy the “vaccine mandates” pretext, I will scream. Trust me friend, this was not a gathering of public health policy enthusiasts.) The Freedom Convoy gained national and international attention, money and support from like-minded people, and Trudeau was antagonistic toward them.

This is the political moment where the ugly “Fuck Trudeau” flags came from, for example. And while I was never a loyal follower of Trudeau’s, I’m glad that those things have a much decreased political relevance, now that he’s resigned.

Enter Poilievre, the fast-talking Conservative politician, who will do anything it takes, cross any line, speak any falsehood that he has to, to grab the reins of power. (There’s still part of me that wonders if Poilievre was “Pierre Poutine” in 2011. He was a junior politician in Harper’s Conservative Party at the time, trying to make a name for himself. He’s exactly the kind of too-clever-by-half politician who would pull a stunt like that and use his own real name to take credit for it too. Anyway, I’m not making accusations, just asking questions.) Poilievre has harnessed the anti-Trudeau animus that was present and widespread for all the above reasons and turned it into a political campaign for office. (And wealthy right-wing Americans love it. I am kind of terrified of the idea that the Elon Musk’s support of him will translate into election interference that warps our democracy here.)

The infamous Liberal carbon tax that Poilievre constantly complains about, despite being mostly a pretty decent policy, was originally a Conservative idea. The left wanted stringent industry regulation on carbon emissions, so the counter-offer from the Conservative Party was a carbon tax. The Liberals compromised and implemented the Conservative carbon tax. Poilievre has complained about it ever since. Just shows you never to compromise with conservatives—they’ll just change the goalposts.

So these are the headwinds that Trudeau was pushing against recently when his party started losing by-elections, and calls started to come for him to resign.

The nail in the coffin was the Mark Carney incident. Basically, they wanted to bring in a new, big name to breathe life into a party that’s gotten stale after 10 years of power, and that was gonna be Mark Carney. Trudeau was gonna push Freeland out of her spot as Finance Minister and he was going to install Carney. Freeland has been Trudeau’s biggest supporter, and the one who stood by him through all his scandals. She’s the “adult in the room” in the government. And he decided to push her under the bus, so she quit on the day she announced her budget. Trudeau hadn’t got Carney to officially take the Finance Minister spot, and Carney didn’t want to look like the guy who used Freeland as a rung on his ladder to success, so he turned it down, leaving Trudeau looking bad, and having precious few allies and no credible path forward.

So, he asked the Governor General to prorogue parliament until the Liberals can choose a new leader, and he announced his resignation.

And there you have it, the rise and fall of Trudeau II as seen by a Canadian progressive voter who is not affiliated with any party, but who actually remembers the context for what happened over the last 10 years.