FIRST READING: Here’s when a normal prime minister would have resigned

Trudeau clung to power through multiple scandals that should rightly have driven him out sooner

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Published Jan 07, 2025  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces his resignation as Liberal leader and prime minister outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa on Monday, Jan.6, 2025. Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

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With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally setting an end-date on his time as prime minister, he caps off a term that can certainly be described as resilient. Trudeau has weathered any number of scandals that would have spelled doom for a conventional political leader. By the standards of almost any other democratic peer, Trudeau has whistled past crises that would have been a guaranteed career-ender in the likes of Australia, the U.K., New Zealand or much of Europe.

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Below, a cursory review of some times when Trudeau, if he was normal leader, probably would have already resigned.

SNC-Lavalin scandal

This was the first moment in Trudeau’s premiership when the “r-word” was repeatedly thrown in his direction. The 2019 SNC-Lavalin scandal was where Trudeau was accused of using his influence to halt a corruption prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec engineering firm with strong Liberal party ties. The scandal yielded the resignation of two cabinet ministers — Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott — and a subsequent probe would determine that Trudeau had indeed broken the law by seeking to interfere with the workings of the Ministry of Justice.

Although SNC-Lavalin has since been joined by a lengthy list of other Trudeau government scandals, this one was a big deal at the time. For context, the defining scandal of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien — and one of the contributors to his own resignation — had been the Sponsorship Scandal, which involved about $1 million in misallocated marketing contracts.

In one of Canada’s closest Commonwealth cousins, Australia, prime ministers are typically removed via “leadership spills.” As soon as a leader starts to waver, their caucus can vote to declare the position vacant, triggering a leadership election. And these are often sparked by little more than a bad poll or a mismanaged government file; Tony Abbott was ousted in a spill due in part to controversy over his awarding the Order of Australia to Prince Philip.

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So, a spill would have almost certainly been sparked by a leader caught unilaterally attempting to halt a serious criminal investigation for political purposes.

Blackface scandal

It’s not just that a cascade of photos of Trudeau wearing blackface makeup came out in 2019, it’s that it happened in the middle of a federal election campaign. The Liberals were never poised to do great in that election, but there remains the possibility that if they’d run a good campaign they could have security a second majority.

Instead — amid swirling international coverage of Trudeau’s minstrel past — they permanently dropped into minority status.

At a provincial level, there’s any number of examples of Canadian politicians resigning after an electoral result that they technically won — but which illustrated that they’d lost their edge.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney resigned in 2022 despite winning a leadership review for the United Conservative Party. He deemed that the 51.4 per cent margin was too narrow to continue. Similarly, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty resigned in 2012 after leading his government into minority status; he stepped down soon after his Ontario Liberals lost a byelection that would have restored their majority status.

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But Trudeau stayed the course after 2019. He may have hoped to reverse the results, but it was instead the beginning of a very long decline both for himself and for the Liberal party.

When he was caught surfing on the first National Truth and Reconciliation Day

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned in 2022, due in part to revelations that his staff had been holding alcohol-fuelled parties in defiance of the COVID lockdowns that they were imposing on the rest of the country (a scandal known as “Partygate”).

There were other reasons, but Partygate helped galvanize a growing sense of discontent in Johnson’s caucus — and it ultimately sparked a wave of cabinet resignations that made Johnson’s continued leadership untenable.

If Canada operated under British rules, that moment could well have come in 2021, when Trudeau was caught taking a clandestine beach vacation on the first annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a holiday his own government had inaugurated. Trudeau had turned in lacklustre performances in two consecutive federal elections, his net approval rating had just taken a plunge from which it would never recover — and now he was publicly making a mockery of his government’s much-trumpeted issue of Indigenous reconciliation.

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Instead, the incident yielded no resignations, and not even a Liberal MP calling out his actions.

When polls first started showing the Liberals were doomed

At least among Commonwealth governments, Trudeau has often been compared to New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern: A young idealist whose popularity began to plummet once the consequences of her high-minded progressive policy began to pile up.

Ardern resigned in January 2023, just at the cusp of polls beginning to show that her government was unpopular and unlikely to win the next election.

If Trudeau had followed the Ardern route, he would have been gone more than a year ago. As early as September 2023, polls began to consistently show the Conservatives with a double-digit lead over the Liberals — more than enough for the Tories to secure victory in a general election. For each of the subsequent 16 months that Trudeau has stayed on, those numbers have only gotten worse for him.

IN OTHER NEWS

This happened just before Justin Trudeau announced his (eventual) resignation: A gust of wind kicked up and blew away the pages of his speech.

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sort of announced his resignation today, he did it in a way that may actually extend his term as prime minister. The House of Commons had been scheduled to resume on Jan. 27, at which point all the opposition parties had promised to vote yes on a non-confidence vote to bring down the government. Thus, given the usual length of federal elections, Trudeau was on track to be forced out of office by about mid-March. Under today’s pledge, the House of Commons is prorogued until March 24. So, depending on how the leadership race shakes out, Trudeau may ultimately get an extra week of prime ministering.

It looks like Jagmeet Singh got his pension. It’s been a common Conservative talking point that NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s obsequious support of the Trudeau government has been driven largely by his desire to secure a gold-plated House of Commons pension. Singh becomes eligible for the pension on Feb. 25, the date when he’ll have officially been an MP for six years.

Lest we forget, Trudeau’s political demise was hastened in large part by a promise from U.S. President Donald Trump to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports unless Ottawa could better secure their mutual border. The tariff issue has been cited often by Liberals in calling for Trudeau’s departure. Anyway, Trump celebrated the resignation announcement by again calling for Canada to be annexed.

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