Justin Trudeau Was a Prime Minister Like All the Others

A value investor, not a hater

Two notes to readers, before we begin. Firstly, I had planned to share with you a piece on urban freight today, but upon reflection, this piece is timely now and will become less so with each day that passes. So please enjoy this reflection on Canadian politics, and look forward to a discussion of how to improve delivery of goods in our cities on Thursday.

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With Justin Trudeau having finally vacated the office of Prime Minister, we can begin to think about his legacy. Andrew Potter was first out of the gate with his recent assessment in The Line, which sourly portrays Trudeau as a leader who consistently and cynically divided the country, and did so because “he never cared about Canada as such”. Indeed, writes Potter, “it is shocking just how much contempt Trudeau showed for Canada, and for so long.”

Such hatred for the man is not usual at all in Canada. Consider Angus Reid’s account of his personal popularity. The red line is ‘disapprove’, the blue line ‘approve’.

Source: Angus Reid Institute’s Trudeau Tracker. Note the uptick in popularity at the very end of his tenure. More on that in a moment.

Trudeau scored his biggest numbers early in his first government (a term that Canadians use in preference to ‘administration’). After that, his popularity declined, though the distribution of his support across the country allowed him to win two successive elections, albeit with minority governments, in 2019 and 2021. And in 2023, he became unpopular in epic fashion, to the point where, at the end of last year, 75% of those polled disliked him.

Did Canadians fall out of love with Trudeau because they discovered that he hated Canada?

I think there's a simpler and less sinister explanation. Trudeau was, simply, a partisan Prime Minister, who governed according to his personal values and electoral interests. In other words, he behaved exactly as any party leader in our political system would have, and exactly as we should have expected.

And his approach worked… for a time.

The Culture Wanted Culture Warriors

When Trudeau entered politics in 2008, he brought his values with him: the progressive, identity-focused left-wing politics of a Gen X drama teacher. He never really deviated from them. Throughout his political career, from his time as a member of Parliament through his tenure as Prime Minister, Trudeau consistently championed feminism, multiculturalism, Indigenous reconciliation, and environmental protection. And he did so with a smug and preachy vibe.

Potter leans hard on a remark Trudeau made in 2012, to the effect that he, Trudeau, believed that if Canada really was a country opposed to gay rights and abortion rights, that Quebec would be justified in seeking independence from it. Potter offers this as evidence of contempt for the country.

That's one reading. A less histrionic view would be that Trudeau was expressing, in a clumsy way, the depth of his commitment to progressive values.

That style, of maladroit-but-fervent progressivism, was the hallmark of his time in office. He assembled a gender-balanced cabinet “because it's 2015”. He implemented a carbon tax, in spite of pushback from Alberta and Saskatchewan. He apologized for historical wrongs against Indigenous peoples, queer Canadians, and others.

Potter sees these as attacks on Canada's identity. They weren't, of course. They were expressions of a particular vision for the country; one that resonated with enough Canadians to keep him in power for nearly a decade.

To understand Trudeau's approach fully, we need to recognize that he wasn't governing in a vacuum. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Brexit won their respective elections, running on platforms that, relative to local circumstances, reached new heights of sneering mendacity and contempt for their opponents. Other changes followed in their wake: from 2016 to 2019, in the first half of his tenure as Prime Minister, the world saw the rise of identity politics, yawning generational gaps in values, and the increasing salience of Twitter and Facebook in driving short-form, indignation-based discourse. All of these contributed to increasing political tribalism across North America and Europe.

Opposition parties in Canada saw this and leaned into Trumpist and Brexit-style language. Progressive culture warriors on Twitter did the opposite. Trudeau’s commitments were already made, and he embraced the latter. Given that the median Canadian political instinct is ‘do the opposite of the Americans’, Trudeau’s choice was easy. For most of his tenure, Trudeau's brand of progressive politics aligned well with the values of Canadians… or at least enough Canadians to win elections.

His famous “welcome to Canada” Tweet to refugees when Trump implemented travel bans, his emphasis on feminism when the #MeToo movement gained momentum, and his climate activism: these all resonated. Trudeau understood his cultural moment and governed accordingly. And like any successful politician, he translated this cultural understanding into electoral strategy.

Under Trudeau, the Liberals saw their path to victory as paved with the votes of urban and suburban progressives. Their policies catered to those voters: focusing on climate change to energize urban progressives and suburban BC and Quebec, even though that would alienate Alberta and Saskatchewan. Focusing on multiculturalism and immigration and, above all, restrictions on firearms helped in the cities but antagonized rural areas. Gender-focused policies earned the Liberals support with professional women (who are more likely to vote), even if it antagonized working-class men (who are less so).

Crucially, none of this required contempt for Canada. All it required was a clear-eyed assessment of where the votes were and what policies would appeal to those voters. The fact that it was personally appealing to Trudeau helped, I'm sure, but it's hard to imagine any Prime Minister not making the same calculations. Given how long Trudeau was in power, it's easy to forget that all Prime Ministers enter public life with a vision for the country, and they seek to implement it when they obtain power. And to the extent that they are successful, they enrage their opponents, who find the combination of obviously-wrong views and electoral success to be unbearable. Just ask your average Liberal voter (of a certain age) about Stephen Harper or Brian Mulroney, Conservative prime ministers of the past; you will find the animosity to them has not faded.

The most obvious manifestation of Trudeau's combination of shrewd political calculation and ideological fervour was his handling of the crisis that defined the latter half of his tenure. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, Trudeau adopted a relatively non-partisan approach, focusing on public health measures and economic relief for Canadians. But as the pandemic wore on, and vaccination became politicized, Trudeau saw an opportunity.

This is what Potter calls “the appalling election of 2021”. Why appalling? Because, says Potter, Trudeau called it in the middle of a pandemic, to take advantage of support for how the Liberals were handling the crisis. “No one who genuinely cared about national unity, who wasn't out for sheer partisan advantage, would have called that election at that time, in those circumstances, and conducted the campaign on those terms.”

Uh-huh. Tell it to Doug Ford, who just called an early election in Ontario to capitalize on the crisis of Trump's tariffs. Or Jean Chretien, who called an early election in 2000 to capitalize on a good economy and disarray among the PCs and the Canadian Alliance. Or Mackenzie King, who had no qualms about calling an election during the Second World War, to take advantage of the country's unity in the war effort.

In other words, being out for “sheer partisan advantage” is what our system encourages, and the fact that all four men won their elections shows that they did achieve “unity” to some degree.

In Trudeau's case, he explicitly leveraged majority discontent with the vaccine skepticism of the minority. Was this evidence of contempt for Canada? I don't think so. Rather, it was a politician recognizing that the majority of his potential voters supported vaccine mandates and were frustrated with those opposing public-health measures. Trudeau saw an opportunity to leverage the strong emotion of his voters and took it. What Prime Minister would do otherwise?

Trudeau did have one quality that distinguishes him from many of his predecessors, which is how far he was willing to go to advance his personal agenda. Sure, he did lots of cynical things as leader—l'affaire SNC-Lavalin comes to mind—but the things that Potter singles out, like changing the national anthem to be gender-neutral, were expressions of things that Trudeau genuinely cared about: the importance of representation, reconciliation, and addressing historical inequities.

If we're looking, at this early date, to assess his legacy, we can start there. Trudeau’s authenticity on progressive causes was both a strength and a weakness; he was a compelling spokesman for them, but as a consequence, less willing to compromise. Take the carbon tax, which Pierre Poilievre assailed him for, to great effect, for years. Trudeau could have ‘axed the tax’ whenever he wanted, but never did, no matter how much he was beaten with it. Conversely, Prime Minister Carney ‘axed the tax’ within 24 hours of assuming the office.

So did Trudeau keep the tax for so long because he hated Canada? No. He kept it because he hated climate change. For him, rightly or wrongly, some things were worth pursuing, even if that pursuit made enemies.

That commitment to his vision, ultimately, was his undoing as the national mood began to shift.

There Are No Men for All Seasons

Around 2023 the fundamentals changed. The post-pandemic reality of inflation, housing affordability crises, and economic anxiety created a new set of priorities for many Canadians. The progressive identity politics that had worked so well for the Liberals became exhausting, and kitchen-table economic concerns took centre stage. This was an environment where Trudeau's instincts did not serve him well; the debacle of $250 rebate cheques ended up forcing him out.

Potter is right that the country began to fragment during Trudeau’s tenure. The anger in the West, the declining sense of national attachment, and increasingly bitter partisanship in Canada are real problems, and they emerged on Trudeau’s watch. But attributing these primarily to his supposed contempt for Canada misses the mark. Trudeau was merely a Liberal who governed according to a particular vision, one that was well suited to the tenor of his times, at least at first. Trudeau represented the high-water mark of a progressive politics that emphasized identity, inclusion, and symbolic (even empty and inappropriate) gestures. For a time, this approach resonated deeply with many Canadians and positioned the country as a progressive beacon internationally.

As progressivism lost its hold on the national mood, Trudeau’s fortunes waned, and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre's message of economic populism and freedom from government overreach began to resonate, precisely because it addressed these shifting priorities. The past two months have demonstrated how quickly those priorities can change. Donald Trump's second presidency has brought a punitive tariff regime and explicit annexation threats, which has undone in a stroke the divisions that plagued the country during Trudeau's tenure. Just as Trudeau, from 2023 on, was out of step with his times, Poilievre now seems out of step with this present moment. Trudeau enjoyed one final bump in popularity in his last month in office, as he pushed back against President Trump’s tariffs and loose talk of annexation. So too has his successor: it's Mark Carney's moment now.

Source: 338Canada.com. Note that the Liberals now lead the Conservatives in voting intention. The latter might do well to consult Matthew 16:3.

Potter is right that, as Canada begins its next political chapter, we can begin to assess Trudeau's legacy. But Potter is wrong to think that it begins with Trudeau’s hatred of Canada. Trudeau wasn’t, as the kids say, a ‘hater’. Instead, he was a value investor, buying into progressivism in 2015 before its stock shot up in 2016. The strength of the value investor is also the weakness: they buy, and hold, and sometimes hold too long. The vibe has shifted twice since in the past few years, making Trudeau no longer suited to the country’s mood, but we shouldn't let the fact that he was out of step with 2024 make us think that he 'hated the country'.

He was just a politician of his moment, who governed exactly as such a politician would, for better and for worse. Any realistic appraisal of his legacy should start there.