When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on Monday, he said he was “motivated by what is in the best interests of Canadians.” But Canadians know better: Trudeau has always privileged his own interests above all else, subordinating the welfare of Canadians, the health of the economy, our country’s geopolitical interests and national unity to his own egotistical whims. The prime minister makes his slow exit unaware of the immense damage he has done to the country he says he loves so deeply.
It was hard to imagine in 2015 that our new prime minister’s “sunny ways” would take such a dark turn. Back then, Trudeau was somewhat of a celebrity throughout the English-speaking world. Vogue ran a “steamy” feature with photos of him and his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, in a loving embrace. GQ published a spread of his “fun socks.” Chatelaine held on his every word. And Bloomberg Businessweek hailed him as the “anti-Trump.”
But after a two-year honeymoon, it started to become clear that he was more style than substance — and even his style started getting him into trouble. Trudeau took a ribbing in 2018 for touring India dressed as a Bollywood star. A year later, photos emerged of him wearing blackface on numerous occasions in the early 2000s.
Such instances of overt racism and cultural appropriation, combined with a host of other scandals, from the Aga Khan to SNC-Lavalin, held Trudeau’s Liberals to a minority government in 2019. But in Trudeau’s mind, this was a mistake — one that would be rectified by doubling down on his progressive policies and bribing voters with their own money.
He found that opportunity in the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost overnight, Trudeau swapped his clean-shaven look for a stately beard, and made near-daily spending announcements intended to protect the economy from the onerous restrictions his chief public health officer was recommending.
To be sure, the Trudeau Liberals never had any sense of fiscal responsibility. On the campaign trail in 2015, Trudeau promised to run deficits of no more than $10 billion for three years and to balance the budget in the final year of his mandate. That never happened. And when the pandemic hit, Trudeau did the one thing he knows how to do best — spend ungodly amounts of money, often with few safeguards to ensure it was going to the right people.
In the 2020-21 fiscal year, the deficit ballooned to around $330 billion. Within a few short years, Trudeau and his lackeys managed to rack up as much debt as every previous Canadian government combined. Even when the COVID threat subsided, the Liberals continued to spend money like it was going out of style, arguing that it would be “short-sighted of us not to.”
Despite increasing the debt to a record-breaking $1.2 trillion, from a modest $620 billion in 2016, Canada has very little to show for it — and key areas have been neglected.
Our military doesn’t have enough troops to meet its needs. The Liberals reneged on a Conservative plan to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets for $9 billion, only to announce years later that they would purchase 16 F-35As for $7 billion. And our Arctic remains largely undefended despite increased threats from Russia and China.
Given the dilapidated state of our Armed Forces, it should come as little surprise that Trudeau’s latest plan to aid the Ukrainians in their defensive war against Russia involves transferring them firearms confiscated from law-abiding Canadian gun owners.
As with Trudeau’s pandemic spending programs, which were designed to give the illusion that the government was doing something, he advanced sweeping firearms reforms that did little, or nothing, to curb gun violence.
The Liberals used the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia as an excuse to enact their first sweeping gun reforms, going as far as allegedly pressuring then-RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki to release information about the firearms used in the crime to further the government’s political agenda.
It didn’t matter that all the firearms were obtained illegally — and that the Liberals knew this full well. The result was a ban on 1,500 firearms that had been safely used by legal, law-abiding gun owners for years.
Practically everyone with knowledge of the situation, including police, knew that banning legal firearms would do little to reduce gun crime. Yet the Liberals went back to the same policy over and over again, continually adding to the list of prohibited weapons, while doing little to curb gun smuggling from the United States.
Trudeau’s crackdown on law-abiding gun owners contrasted sharply with his government’s general soft-on-crime policies. Over the past nine years, it has systematically repealed mandatory minimum sentences, ensured dual-nationals convicted of terrorism offences couldn’t be stripped of citizenship, instituted race-based sentencing guidelines, encouraged “safe supply” drugs and green-lit a disastrous drug-decriminalization experiment in British Columbia.
The government’s lax approach to criminals, coupled with an ever-worsening economy, contributed to urban decay, homelessness and crime rates that haven’t been seen in decades.
Part of our economic woes can be blamed on global factors outside our control, yet there can be little doubt that Trudeau’s climate policies set the stage for our economic decline.
His constitutionally dubious carbon taxes raised the prices of goods and services throughout the economy. At the same time, the oil and gas sector, once the beating heart of the Canadian economy, was singled out with special emissions standards that weren’t applied to Central Canadian industries.
Trudeau did manage to see the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion through to fruition — even if he turned it into a costly government boondoggle — but also brought in new laws designed to ensure that large energy infrastructure projects would never be built.
And when Trudeau had an opportunity to use Canada’s vast energy reserves to further our economic, geopolitical and environmental interests by helping our European allies wean themselves off Russian gas and replace coal-fired power generation with a much more sustainable fuel source, he turned down a series of foreign leaders who came here practically begging us to sell them liquefied natural gas.
Of course, those countries all found other sources of gas. Trudeau’s intransigence did nothing to further the global fight against climate change, but did manage to ensure that Canada’s economy would not benefit from world events, and that it would be that much harder to recover from the economic downturn.
Yet doing what’s best for the country has never been top of mind for Justin Trudeau. He only cares about what’s best for him, and what makes him look good to his legions of kindred spirits on the left. Trudeau never stopped seeing himself as the “anti-Trump” — the saviour of the progressive cause — even after Democrats retook the White House in 2020. And he was not at all adverse to using draconian measures to silence people he disagreed with.
He oversaw the largest government takeover of the internet in history. And he took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act to deal with the disruptive, but largely peaceful, Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.
That’s how he deals with people on the other side of the ideological spectrum. When it comes to the antisemitic, and often violent, pro-terrorist protests that have been disrupting Canadian cities since Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, Trudeau has been happy to stand idly by and do nothing at all.
Witnessing the sharp increase in antisemitism, Trudeau likes to say that “this is not who we are as Canadians.” But he has worked tirelessly to degrade Canadian values and paper over our history, turning Canada into the “post-national state” he envisioned back in 2015. He has overseen an unprecedented increase in immigration from countries with high rates of antisemitism. And he has turned his back on Israel, while repeating Hamas talking points and taking the word of a terrorist organization over that of a democratic ally.
It’s hard to believe the prime minister’s track record could get much worse. But the way he handled the foreign interference scandal arguably takes the cake. After numerous credible news organizations, citing intelligence sources, reported on alleged foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections, the prime minister spent months discrediting the reports and downplaying the issue.
When it became clear that the issue wouldn’t go away on its own, he appointed a family friend, former governor general David Johnston, to sweep it under the rug. Even after he set up a formal public inquiry, Trudeau continued to attempt to turn it into a domestic political issue.
A prime minister who was truly “motivated by what is in the best interests of Canadians” would have stood up right from the start and said that, “We will not tolerate foreign interference in our democracy and will do everything in our power to root out any bad actors, regardless of which party they belong to.”
But Justin Trudeau is not interested in what’s in the best interest of anyone but himself. He subjected the country to a pandemic election to try to right the perceived wrong of the minority he was handed in 2019. He brokered a deal with NDP extremists to keep himself in power. He fired his two finance ministers for daring to object to his overspending. And he hung onto the Liberal leadership for dear life as his party plummeted in the polls.
For Justin Trudeau, it’s always been about himself — to the detriment of the economy, social cohesion and national security. He leaves Canada a divided country in far worse shape than he found it nine years ago.