What will Canada's second Trudeau era leave behind?
When historians examine his time as prime minister, there will be much to consider
In an interview in December 2022, Justin Trudeau allowed himself to talk about legacy.
He has typically avoided entertaining such stuff. But sitting in his West Block office a little more than two years ago, he spoke of "unfinished business" and a desire to "lock in what Canada is doing as an open, progressive, confident democracy." And when it was pointed out to him that it sounded like he was talking about a legacy, he didn't entirely run away from the idea.
"I don't expect that when the dust settles and I'm a paragraph in some history book, 30 years from now, people are going to be able to point [to the equivalent of] multiculturalism or the [Charter of Rights and Freedoms] as the big legacies or the big consequence," he told me.
"But for me … my dad was a professor, I'm a teacher. There's a difference there, right? Where it's about empowering and building processes that extend forward in the right direction. I mean, a good teacher sets their students up so that the next year, when they move on from them, they're able to build and move forward on that success."
It is impossible in the present to know what history will remember. In Justin Trudeau's case, his time as a maker of history — his tenure as prime minister — is not even done. And the final days, with the inauguration of a new United States president, could be eventful.
But the end of Trudeau's time as a resident of Rideau Cottage is now within sight. It is not too early to start considering what Canada's 23rd prime minister might leave behind. And there is much to consider.
The rise and legacy of another Trudeau
His fall was almost as spectacular as his rise.
When Trudeau announced his candidacy for the Liberal leadership in October 2012, it was not obvious the Liberal Party of Canada — the most successful Canadian political party of the 20th century —would or should continue to exist. After a succession of poor election results, the party was down to 34 seats. Books were being written about why the Liberals were doomed and how the Conservative Party was positioned to dominate federal politics in the years ahead.
It also wasn't obvious that Trudeau deserved to be taken seriously. He was 41 years old, had never worked in business or government and had only just been elected to Parliament four years earlier. To critics, he was just the famous son of a former prime minister, getting by on his good looks and his last name. In some corners, doubts about his seriousness still linger more than a decade later.
But by October 2015, Trudeau was the next prime minister of Canada, carried to victory by "sunny ways" and the promise of something new, different and ambitious. As he basked in the glow of that moment, his approval rating neared 60 per cent. Almost immediately he became an international celebrity, bound ultimately for the cover of Rolling Stone.
"Is he the free world's best hope?" the magazine asked with typical understatement in 2017.
The initial excitement was never going to last. But even if the phenomenon of 2015 was unrepeatable, the man himself proved hard to dismiss. He will depart sometime between now and March 24 as the seventh-longest serving prime minister in history, having held office for something like nine years and four months — just shy of the tenures of Stephen Harper (nine years, nine months) and Jean Chrétien (10 years, one month).
Because of his natural advantages, personal gifts, stated ideals and big promises, it has always been tempting to assess Trudeau in terms of what should have or could have been — he never won another majority, he did not implement electoral reform, he did not save the free world. That frame of reference isn't entirely unfair, though Trudeau would hardly be the first prime minister — or the first human — fo fall somewhat short.
The next time academics come together to rank the prime ministers, his record will be put up against theirs. And though it might be hard for Trudeau, or any future prime minister, to crack the traditional top five (in some order: John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Mackenzie King, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau), there might be an interesting discussion about where he slots in after that.
What Justin Trudeau and his government did during that time can be measured against the essential promise of "real change" after nearly a decade of Conservative government and placed within the great challenge of building a progressive, liberal democracy at a moment when reactionary populism is on the march.
The ups and downs of 'real change'
On the Trudeau government's first full day in office, it announced the reinstatement of the long-form census. Then it set about resettling what would ultimately be nearly 45,000 Syrian refugees.
It legalized marijuana and reformed the Senate. It introduced a carbon tax and purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline and expansion project. It created an infrastructure bank and invested in "superclusters." The use of supervised-consumption sites was expanded to help those with drug addictions. The lyrics of O Canada were changed to be more inclusive and gender identity was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act.
The Harper government loudly picked a fight over the fact that some Muslim women chose to wear the niqab and Conservatives worried aloud that newcomers were bringing "barbaric cultural practices" to Canada. The Trudeau government loudly embraced diversity and then increased immigration.
Straying beyond their campaign commitment to run temporary deficits, the Liberals eventually more or less abandoned the orthodoxy of a balanced budget and ended up partially reversing three decades of austerity. Tax increases were directed at the highest earners and the federal government's attention was turned toward economic equality. The social safety net was expanded.
The Canada Child Benefit helped dramatically reduce poverty. The Canada Pension Plan was enhanced to increase benefits for future retirees. In more recent years, large federal investments in child care have increased access and reduced fees. A new dental program has provided care to more than a million Canadians. More federal money is being put into the health-care system, with at least the promise of transparency and accountability.
At the same time, progress on pharmacare now hangs in the balance. And those hoping for a robust federal disability benefit may be left wanting.
Even if previous Canadian governments set a low bar — and even if the job is very far from done — the Trudeau government can credibly boast of having done more than any of its predecessors to combat climate change and advance Canada's transition to a clean economy. When the Liberals came to office, Canada was on track to miss its existing 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target by hundreds of megatonnes. Nine years later, Canada's emissions are declining and the country could be in sight of meeting a more ambitious target, at least so long as existing policies are fully implemented and maintained.
If Canada manages to reach net-zero emissions in 2050, it might be that these last nine years will have proven be a turning point.
Even if the Liberals struggled mightily to live up to the prime minister's own rhetoric on reconciliation, the actions of the last nine years could still amount to a similar turning point for this country's relationship with Indigenous peoples — driven by major new funding commitments, significant legislative change and the settling of long-standing historical grievances.
Of course, on both counts, there will be credible arguments that the Trudeau government could have done much more.
Trudeau famously appointed the first gender-balanced cabinet in history. He was also the first prime minister to march in a Pride parade. He nominated the first Indigenous Governor General and the first Indigenous justice of the Supreme Court and his government made a deliberate effort to diversify all federal appointments (the face of the federal judiciary has markedly changed).
He also appointed the first Indigenous attorney general and the first female finance minister, though his ability to brag about those choices will forever be limited by how badly each ended for him.
In all, Trudeau may have run the most progressive and activist federal government since his father stepped down in 1984 or since Lester B. Pearson left office in 1968. But his time in office was deeply marked by two unforeseen and historic crises: the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the globe in 2020.
In the case of Trump, the government seemed to succeed at minimizing the potential damage — the renegotiation of NAFTA was broadly hailed as a victory. And while there are no winners in a pandemic, Canada's response compared favourably with peers like the United States and the United Kingdom — aided in no small part by the federal government's extraordinary financial support and an effective vaccination program.
Both crises showed a government that could be nimble, creative, proactive and thorough. But such qualities were not always in evidence.
The shortcomings and scandals
Trudeau seemed blessed of boundless enthusiasm, but his government could be slow, clumsy, platitudinous and lacking in both focus and the revolutionary transparency that was promised. To his detractors, Trudeau was preachy, arrogant, frivolous and phoney.
While the Liberals committed large sums of money to various pursuits, it wasn't always clear what that money had actually achieved. While the public service regained some of the resources it lost in past cuts, its capacity and performance remains a concern. Subsidies for journalism organizations have become a point of political controversy and haven't saved the media industry.
Having made a great many promises in 2015, the Liberals spent their years in power fighting the criticism that they were more talk than action. Whatever the Liberals did, it was not hard to find examples of things they hadn't — not least that loud and categorical promise to change Canada's electoral system, which collapsed after a long and aimless consultation process. Having wrapped himself rhetorically in high ideals — feminism, reconciliation, tolerance — he regularly found himself accused of falling short or outright contradicting himself.
There were big fights with the provinces. And Trudeau undermined one of his signature climate policies — the carbon tax — with a desperate bit of fiddling in 2023.
Every government gets its share of controversies and scandals, but Trudeau and his government displayed a certain gift for finding trouble — from the prime minister's ill-chosen vacations to the explosive SNC-Lavalin affair to the WE debacle to the implosion of Julie Payette as Governor General. Whatever Trudeau's penchant for public interaction — his first few years in office included annual town-hall meetings in which anyone in attendance could ask a question — he struggled to manage the personalities he attracted to government. Former ministers — from Jody Wilson-Raybould to Bill Morneau to Chrystia Freeland — had a habit of publicly airing their grievances and disappointment after angrily departing cabinet.
"One of the first things I said when I won my nomination [in 2008] is, look, there's people out there who have incredibly high expectations, there are people out there who have incredibly low expectations," Trudeau recalled in an interview with me in 2019. "I'm fairly certain I'm going to disappoint everybody by being somewhere in the middle between the stratosphere and the depths."
On that, if nothing else, he was basically correct.
The slow and personal downfall
The pandemic culminated not in a moment of national relief and celebration, but in a divisive debate over vaccine mandates and then the acrimony and dysfunction of the self-styled freedom convoy and the siege of Ottawa. Someone somewhere has by now made a small fortune selling "F--k Trudeau" flags.
Then came inflation — at a level no one had experienced in a generation — as the global economy struggled to get back up to speed. And then the Bank of Canada rapidly increased interest rates to combat inflation.
Meanwhile, already high real estate prices had surged during the pandemic and housing affordability and availability, long a concern in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, became a national crisis — exacerbated perhaps by a surge in temporary immigration. The Trudeau government's renewed investments in social housing proved sorely unequal to the task and its push for municipal zoning reform came late.
In the last 12 months, complaints have spilled over to the greater economy — the national discourse has quickly become very interested in GDP-per-capita and the chattering classes have returned to worrying about productivity. (Trudeau's macroeconomic record will take a longer time to sift through, but he and Bay Street were never the best of friends.)
The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, said all of these maladies could be blamed on Trudeau's policies and choices. The carbon tax, the most prominent element of the Liberal government's climate agenda, was turned into a scapegoat for the higher cost of groceries and other goods (even if expert analysis undercut Poilievre's claim).
In December 2022, Trudeau was looking ahead to a time when Canadians would begin to see and feel the benefits of his government's climate policies and investments in clean technology and energy. But that proved to be wishful thinking. The national mood turned sour. Many incumbent governments across the Western world can empathize right now. But as dramatically as many Canadians had rallied behind Trudeau in 2015, many now turned angrily against him.
Support for the Liberal Party fell back to 2021 levels. Trudeau didn't seem to have the words or the policies to save himself. The party lost what should have been a safe seat in Toronto. Trudeau could have taken that as his cue to leave, but he persisted.
"He's an extraordinary individual and probably, in retrospect or in history, he'll be treated very well," Liberal MP John McKay told the CBC's Power & Politics in December, a few days after Freeland's exit. "But his perception after 50 years of living in a — if you will — political aristocratic bubble is different than the perception or the reality that you and I live in. And it enables him to do extraordinary things and I think he has done extraordinary things. But it also leaves a bit of a blind spot and so, where others might see peril, he sees opportunity."
What comes next?
Trudeau's unified theory of everything — of both his own political success and for advancing the cause of progressive, liberal democracy — was based on economic security. Journalists came to roll their eyes at mentions of "the middle class and those working hard to join it," but it was more than just a slogan.
"Regular Canadians were worried about their future, and we made a promise to support them through these uncertain times," Trudeau said in a speech in Hamburg, Germany in 2017. "But that worry — that anxiety — isn't unique to Canada. It's everywhere.… Increasing inequality has made citizens distrust their governments. Distrust their employers. It turns into 'us' versus 'them.' And we're watching that anxiety transform into anger on an almost daily basis."
The anger is now directed at him and voters are looking elsewhere for reassurance.
How much of that frustration is specific to Trudeau — how much Canadians are simply tired of his face, his voice, his manner, his accumulated baggage — might now be tested by a new Liberal leader. But in gambling on his own ability to hang on, Trudeau has given his party very little time to prepare for the next election.
At times, over the last nine years, Canada was held out as an island of progressive reason and openness amid a world roiled by populists, demagogues and anti-establishment backlash. But it's now very likely that Trudeau will ultimately be replaced by a combative populist who loudly opposes "wokeism" and attacks his political opponents as "wackos."
It's impossible to know exactly which pieces of Trudeau's agenda will survive a change in government. If nothing else, Poilievre seems determined to put into action the conservative ideology he's been thinking about since he was a teenager — and he has already committed to repealing a number of climate and environmental policies.
However much Canadians have come to reject Trudeau, it's not clear how much of a change in direction they desire. A poll in December 2023 suggested strong majorities did not want Poilievre to scrap the Trudeau government's investments in child care and dental care and did want Poilievre to take climate change seriously.
But if the path of federal policy now changes dramatically, it will inevitably be asked whether Trudeau should have done something more or something different — whether he should have promised less or brokered greater compromises or made more institutional changes.
What of the "processes" that might "extend forward in the right direction?"
However imperfectly, Trudeau's liberalism might be said to have rested on a handful of ideas: that government should actively seek to address economic and social inequality, that pluralism and diversity should be embraced, that the past must be reckoned with, that evidence and expertise should be respected, that Canadians had both a responsibility and an incentive to combat climate change, that divisive populism should be rejected.
Not everyone will agree that those ideas — or how Trudeau's actions aligned with them — constitute the right direction for Canada.
But some part of Trudeau's legacy might be written in how much those ideas are reflected in whatever comes next.
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