Jamie Sarkonak: Justin Trudeau resigns a failure

Many Canadians wanted his soft-on-crime promises, multicultural utopianism and energy stagnation. They just didn't like getting it

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Published Jan 06, 2025  •  4 minute read

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was not a fact of nature. He was a choice made by the Canadian public. Now that he’s leaving, we’d better learn from the ordeal.

Trudeau should have been done in 2021. Or 2019. Instead, on Jan. 6, 2025, he announced his plan to resign as prime minister upon the selection of a new Liberal leader, which will happen while Parliament is prorogued until March 24. He’s finally awoken to the cold feelings of his own people: December saw the Atlantic Liberal caucus call for the prime minister to resign, as well as most of the Ontario Liberal caucus, who no doubt have been anxiously watching their party plummet in the polls.

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The Liberals, amazingly, have dropped to 16 per cent support (among decided and leaning voters) by Angus Reid’s count, which is even lower than the NDP’s 21 per cent. A good many people who voted red in the previous two elections won’t be coming back this time around, either switching teams or sitting out the vote entirely.

Few of us should have been fooled these past nine years. Policy-wise, Trudeau did a lot of what he set out to do: he expanded drug consumption sites and “safe” supply, he took a softer approach to crime, he reintroduced citizenship protections for convicted terrorists, he raised taxes, he loosened immigration requirements, he probed the “ongoing national tragedy” of “genocide” against Indigenous peoples, yet failed to achieve any sort of meaningful reconciliation.

Many of today’s problems, it seems, stem from the very policies that Trudeau was urged to bring in at the beginning of his first mandate, and maintained in his second and third. And of course he maintained them — for the longest time, he suffered no consequences for lavish spending and cultural destruction. Why stop when the people will continue to reward you?

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He first appealed to the strong Canadian desire for niceness circa 2014 that went, at the time, unsatisfied by a tired prime minister who came across as coldly practical rather than fashionably compassionate.

No, the budget didn’t balance itself, as Trudeau said it would, nor did electoral reform happen. Nor did he keep his promise to limit deficits to $10 billion (the latest was $62 billion). But it should have been obvious to voters — seasoned voters, at least — that these were not promises he’d keep.

Indeed, for the first five, six, even seven years, the budget hardly mattered. It was perfectly acceptable to many to watch Trudeau spend exorbitantly and legislate haphazardly as long as it took Canada further down the track of “progress.” Stale and boring Conservative leaders didn’t offer anything nearly as exciting.

It was easy to forget that the government is a machine that needs a competent pilot, and that there are real-life consequences for handing the job to a guy who merely acts and dresses like one. And those consequences have been many.

Early warning signs flashed with the mounting deficit, but it’s often hard for human brains to truly comprehend what billions of (unwisely spent) dollars actually look like, and how such spending corrodes a country’s prosperity over time (though, it will be easier to do that now for anyone who’s been in Canada over the past decade).

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At the same time, Trudeau kneecapped the energy industry’s ability to produce in a whole host of ways — the carbon tax, green electricity regulations, fuel taxes, an onerous new government-approval process, the introduction of a federal Monopoly-money carbon credit system — all to cut down Canada’s one-per-cent-or-so share of global carbon emissions. It sounded good to save the world from a cataclysm that’s always just around the corner, even if the mission was impossible from the beginning.

Even though it sounded stylish and empathetic a decade ago, Trudeau’s post-national multicultural way of refusing to defend any united cultural identity and encouraging tribalism corroded everything it touched. It was what we wanted on the whole — but we found out the hard way that it just doesn’t work.

The justice system became ever more obsessed with the identities of offenders and handing out lenient sentences to fight a newly discovered plague of systemic racism. Federal university grants were co-opted to further an agenda of identity politics. As were business grants and government procurement. Apprenticeships and summer jobs programs prioritized beneficiaries according to identity. And all the while, our national symbols were papered over — on passports, bills and coats of arms — to stifle any sense of national pride.

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As for the machinery of government, Trudeau’s ministers decoratively sat at their posts, leaving the big decisions to the Prime Minister’s Office and the important work to bureaucrats. Responsible government is an idea of the past, with major ministerial screw-ups resulting in dumbfounded shrugs, not resignations.

The hard truth is that a lot of Canadians wanted idealistic policies and jumped at the chance to put Trudeau in the cockpit to see them through — without much regard for the cost. That was something to worry about later.

Well, now it is later, and rising crime, urban disorder, sunken prosperity and flat-lining per-capita GDP are the results. Can’t find a decent apartment for what you earn? Scrambling to find a job while foreign workers fill restaurants, shops and IT offices? These aren’t accidents; they’re the result of human decisions exercised in 2015, 2019 and 2021.

While we rejoice in the fact that we won’t have to listen to Trudeau’s haughty stage voice much longer, look around and really commit the results of his government to memory. Next time the country is pitched a utopian future completely divorced from common sense, remember what it costs to fall for it.

National Post

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