Justin Trudeau resigns as Canadian prime minister

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a news conference at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, Canada where he announced his resignation. Photo / AFP

Bowing to pressure from opponents and allies alike, Justin Trudeau – whose championing of progressive politics rocketed him into the international spotlight as Canada’s Prime Minister but who has faced growing headwinds at home – announced that he intends to resign as Liberal leader, making way for a new Prime Minister.

“I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader,” Trudeau, who has been in power since 2015, told reporters in Ottawa following a protracted political crisis that saw top Liberal allies urge him to quit.

Trudeau, 53, the telegenic son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was viewed around the world as a bulwark of the liberal order. He won re-election in 2019 and 2021, but his popularity has cratered over the last year amid a housing shortage and cost-of-living crisis.

Calls for his resignation ballooned after Chrystia Freeland, his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, resigned from Cabinet last month, accusing Trudeau of being more focused on “costly political gimmicks” than the existential threat posed by the incoming Trump administration.

The President-elect has vowed to impose steep tariffs on Canadian goods on his first day in office – levies that economists forecast will hammer the country’s economy. The political uncertainty here has left Canada weak and destabilised weeks before Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Trudeau and his Liberals have charted an arc that has seen them go from indomitable to imperilled.

Even as they bled support over the past several years, Liberal lawmakers had kept their angst about Trudeau private, in part because he rescued the party from the political wilderness after its worst-ever result in a federal election in 2011 and many owe their careers to him.

But now, with the Liberals trailing the Conservatives by more than 20 points ahead of an election that must be held by October, Trudeau is set to leave the party at the end of his nearly decade-long tenure as Prime Minister just as he found it: on track for a potentially historic defeat.

He conceded today that he was not the best candidate to lead the Liberals into an election that must be held this year.

“This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.”

Trudeau last met with New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Laos along with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Photo / Jamie Ensor

Trudeau’s rise to power

Trudeau’s rise was charmed. He was in the spotlight and on magazine covers from birth. During his father’s 1972 federal election campaign, a reporter joked that “baby Justin may emerge as the best campaigner” in the family.

After Trudeau delivered a eulogy at his father’s funeral 28 years later – “I love you, dad,” he said in French, before resting his head on the flag-draped casket – observers speculated more seriously about his potential future in politics.

He was elected to Parliament in 2008 and became Liberal Party leader in 2013. The party, which had dominated post-Second World War politics here, had been consigned to its deathbed. Trudeau’s Liberals began the 2015 federal election campaign in third place.

Trudeau sought to cast himself as a plucky underdog. Rivals dismissed him as a pretender who would exceed expectations in a leaders’ debate simply by showing up “with his pants on”. Attack ads branded him “just not ready”.

But Trudeau catapulted to power on his own wave of “Trudeaumania,” winning a majority Government with pledges of “sunny ways” and “real change”. With matinee-idol looks, the heir to a political dynasty was something of a celebrity, mobbed for selfies at home and abroad.

His first Cabinet featured the first minister who was Muslim, the first Indigenous justice minister and an equal number of men and women for the first time in Canada’s history: “Because it’s 2015,” he explained, in remarks that went viral.

Trudeau sought to cast himself as a foil to ascendant right-wing populist leaders in the West, once welcoming Syrian refugees to a Toronto airport and handing out winter coats to them. In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine put him on its cover and asked, “Why can’t he be our president?”

Former NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hitched a ride with Trudeau on his plane after attending the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London. Photo / Supplied

Cracks in Trudeau’s brand

It didn’t take long for ethical lapses and controversies to erode Trudeau’s image. Critics charged that he was a Prime Minister of selfies and sanctimony, not substance, and they accused him of hubris and hypocrisy.

He vowed action on climate change, but bought an oil pipeline. He promised to meet “the highest ethical standards”, but was twice found by an ethics watchdog to have broken conflict-of-interest laws. He said Canada was “back” on the world stage, but allies said it wasn’t pulling its weight.

In 2019, he and his top aides were accused of improperly pressuring Jody Wilson-Raybould, the country’s first Indigenous Attorney-General, to cut an out-of-court deal with a Quebec-based engineering firm facing corruption charges, and demoting her when she resisted.

Opponents called him a fake feminist. Maclean’s magazine branded him “The Impostor”.

Then came the emergence of photos and videos showing Trudeau in blackface and brownface as a younger man. He apologised, repeatedly.

The scandals left Trudeau down, but not out. He won re-election in 2019 and 2021, with a minority.

Crises foreign and domestic

Trudeau’s Government legalised recreational cannabis, imposed a price on carbon, created a nationwide $10 per day childcare programme, reduced child poverty and made strides in advancing reconciliation with Indigenous people.

He drew praise for guiding Canada through the bruising renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement during the first Trump administration. After Trump lobbed personal insults at Trudeau, even the Liberal leader’s rivals rushed to his side.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, Trudeau’s Government doled out billions in aid. For months, he gave a daily news conference outside his Ottawa residence where, like many Canadians, he was quarantining and working from home.

But his Government faced another crisis in 2022, when thousands of demonstrators used pick-up trucks and big rigs to blockade Ottawa and several border crossings to protest his Government and vaccine mandates, which were mostly imposed by the provinces.

Trudeau invoked never-before-used emergency powers to clear the so-called “Freedom Convoy”. Most Canadians supported the move and opposed the weeks-long blockades, but the Federal Court of Canada ruled last year that the use of the powers was unreasonable.

A public inquiry disagreed, finding the evocation of the Emergencies Act justified. But it said that Trudeau’s dismissal of the demonstrators as a “fringe minority” energised them, “hardening their resolve and further embittering them toward government authorities”.

A loyal ally’s resignation

Freeland’s resignation accelerated a downfall long in the making.

The Liberals lost several special elections last year in what had long been safe seats. Trudeau walked back parts of his signature domestic policies: the carbon tax and a plan to dramatically increase immigration. None of the attempts to reverse the slide worked. After nearly a decade in office, many Canadians had tired of him.

Then came Freeland’s resignation letter on December 16, signed “with gratitude” but issued hours before she was set to present a fiscal and economic update to Parliament.

The resignation of one of his most loyal allies blindsided Trudeau. He cancelled year-end interviews. Opposition parties said that they would vote to bring his Government down in a non-confidence vote when Parliament returned from the holidays, triggering new elections.

The number of Liberal lawmakers publicly calling for his resignation grew by the day.

- with AFP