Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing his intention to resign on Monday, January 6, 2024.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announcing his intention to resign on Monday, January 6, 2024. Credit: CPAC Credit: CPAC

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, first elected more than nine years ago, announced his resignation on Monday, January 6.

Speaking from the front steps of his official residence at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, the PM said he had asked Governor General Mary Simon to prorogue Parliament, a request she accepted. 

Parliament will return for a new session on March 24, at which time the Liberal party will almost certainly have a new leader. Trudeau will remain at the head of the Liberals, and Prime Minister, until the party chooses that new leader.

And so, there will be a full-fledged competitive leadership race over the next two to three months. The Liberal caucus will not choose a new leader. Nor will they select an interim leader.

Prorogation is questionable 

Some question the propriety of ending the parliamentary session, and thus killing all government legislation still pending, for no better purpose than avoiding a vote of non-confidence in the House of Commons – a vote the government would likely lose.

When asked about this, Trudeau alluded to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s prorogation in 2008, in a similar circumstance.

Late in 2008, mere weeks after an election in which Harper’s Conservatives had been returned to power with more seats than they had won in the previous vote (but still a minority), the three opposition parties indicated their intention to vote down the Conservatives’ Fall Fiscal Update. 

Such a vote would mean the Harper government had lost the confidence of the House of Commons, a situation which usually triggers an election.

Rather than have a vote mere months after the previous one, the three opposition parties wrote then Governor General Michaëlle Jean to propose they would form a Liberal-NDP coalition government, supported by the Bloc Québécois.

But Jean rejected that request, because Harper had just won a confidence vote in the House on his new government’s Throne Speech. On Monday, Trudeau pointed out that his Liberals have survived three House confidence votes in recent months. 

What was good for a re-elected Conservative PM almost 16 years ago is, it appears, good for the outgoing Liberal leader and Prime Minister today. 

An inexperienced leader who won big

Justin Trudeau was an unlikely saviour when he snared the Liberal leadership in April 2013. 

He had won a seat in Parliament four years earlier, and had held several opposition critic portfolios. But he had scant managerial or political experience.

At the time, at least one other potential leadership candidate, former astronaut Marc Garneau, publicly worried Trudeau was too much of a lightweight for the role of party leader.

The Party emphatically disagreed. 

In the 2011 election, under the uninspiring leadership of Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals had been reduced to a rump of 34 seats, and third place in the House of Commons. 

Ignatieff was an aloof and condescending intellectual, who had spent most of his career outside of Canada. While in the US he had publicly supported President George W. Bush’s 2002 invasion of Iraq.

Trudeau seemed like a just-folks, grassroots leader by comparison – even if he was the son of a long-serving prime minister.

Indeed, the royal jelly of his family name was a big factor in Trudeau’s early success, as were his boyish good looks and equally photogenic wife and kids.

READ MORE: How Justin Trudeau went from Golden Boy to whipping boy 

Old Liberal hands and party insiders rubbed their hands with glee  when they saw something of the late Pierre Trudeau’s charismatic magic come back to life, in the form of a new and fresh avatar.

Trudeau won the Liberal leadership with a massive majority, over 80 per cent of the votes. In the aftermath of that triumph, the new Liberal leader quickly eclipsed the Official Opposition leader, the NDP’s Tom Mulcair, in national media attention.

There were a few hiccups on the way to victory in the general election of 2015. Trudeau had the unnerving habit of saying things that did not always make sense, and that hurt his poll numbers in the run-up to the vote. 

But the Liberals ran a disciplined and effective campaign in 2015. In some respects, they leaped to the left of the NDP. 

While Mulcair promised balanced budgets, an unusual stance for the New Democrats, Trudeau, heeding the advice of his closest adviser, Gerald Butts, said Canada’s need for investment outweighed concerns with fiscal discipline.  

In the end, the Liberals’ gamble on youth and a famous name paid off. They won a comfortable, if not overwhelming, majority in 2015.

Lots of successes for Trudeau Liberals

In power, Trudeau and his Liberal team could boast of some genuine accomplishments.

Perhaps the greatest of those was the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) which raised hundreds of thousands of Canadians out of poverty. The CCB pays families up to $7,778 annually for children under six and a bit more than a thousand dollars less per year for children between six and eighteen.

Then there is the Trudeau government’s early decision to raise the level of taxation on taxable incomes over $200,000. 

That was coupled with a cut to what the government called middle class taxes, which, in fact, disproportionately benefited the very upper portion of the middle class. But no government had even considered raising an extra penny from the richest Canadians for many decades.

When the previous Jean Chrétien Liberal government decided to slash the federal deficit in 1995 it did so entirely through cuts, especially to federal transfers to the provinces for health, social services, and higher education. 

The finance minister of the time, Paul Martin, was adamant that neither wealthy individuals nor well-heeled corporations would be required to do their part to combat the pending fiscal crisis.

Famously, the Trudeau government did not only decriminalize, it legalized marijuana. This measure finally took the marketing and distribution of a widely used, but relatively innocuous, drug out of the hands of organized crime.

Three of the Liberals’ accomplishments involved rolling back regressive Harper government measures.

The first involved the rights of charities. In an effort to squelch the movements for environmental and social justice, Harper severely limited charities’ right to engage in policy advocacy. Harper’s measures threatened the charitable tax benefit of organizations which used any of their donors’ money to educate the public.

Trudeau changed that, and did the same for many of the anti-democratic measures of the Conservatives’ oxymoronically-named Fair Elections Act. That legislation was spearheaded by none other than now Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre’s Act weakened the power of the Commissioner of Elections to investigate abuses, imposed ID requirements that made it harder for many people to vote, and limited the capacity of the Chief Electoral Officer to communicate with Canadians. 

And those were only three of its noxious provisions.

The Trudeau government rolled most of them back – and it acted similarly on Harper’s new rules for refugees.

Harper’s immigration minister Jason Kenney had brought in a series of notional reforms to the refugee process, which discriminated against certain classes of asylum seekers, and made the appeal process more arduous and arbitrary.

The Trudeau government changed most of those.

On climate change, the Trudeau government’s record has been mixed. Its main weapon has been a carbon tax, which is, by design, a free-market-based method. 

Economists with a favourable bias toward unfettered capitalism tend to view carbon taxes as preferable to what they see as the heavy hand of government regulation. 

Don’t try telling that to Pierre Poilievre, though. 

Nor should you waste your breath explaining to Poilievre, and other carbon tax detractors, how most taxpayers come out ahead under Trudeau’s carbon tax regime – as a result of the carbon rebate payments the government sends them each quarter.

The Trudeau government’s performance at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was also, as a whole, salutary, especially when contrasted with that of other countries, such as the US led by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson’s UK.

The Trudeau government showed respect for scientific and medical expertise and acted quickly to counter the economic hardships engendered by COVID, through such measures as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).

More recently, there have been the progressive measures championed by the Liberals’ erstwhile partners, the New Democrats, most notably: pharmacare, dental care, federal anti-scab legislation, and a hike to the federal minimum wage. 

Trudeau’s biggest failure

Then there is the thorny area of democratic reform. Trudeau made two big promises on that front, but only kept one. 

He reformed the process for naming members to the federal upper house, the Senate. We now have a non-partisan system, based on merit. All of Trudeau’s many appointments to the Senate have been in the independent or non-affiliated category. None are bagmen, rewarded for service to the Party.

The NDP has long argued for abolition of the Senate, which, sadly, would be a near impossible feat since it would involve amending the constitution. Trudeau focused on a feasible reform, and he seems to have succeeded.

On the other promise in this category Trudeau failed miserably. That one is electoral reform. 

During his resignation announcement Trudeau cited his failure to institute a new electoral system as a major disappointment. True to form, however, Trudeau tried to shift the blame to others.

He said opposition political parties would not agree to the option he favoured, a ranked ballot – and so he abandoned the reform process. 

In the run-up to the 2015 election, Trudeau promised (to rapturous applause) to get rid of our current first-past-the-post system. But he never said he would accept only one reform option. 

Indeed, Trudeau set up an all-party Commons committee to examine the entire range of possible replacements for our current system. 

The majority of MPs on that committee favoured a reform which would allow for a measure of proportionality, meaning parties would get representation at least partially based on their share of the popular vote.

But MPs on the committee said, at the time, they were open to what is essentially a hybrid of Trudeau’s favoured ranked ballot and the proportional vote. That system is called the single transferable vote (STV).

STV creates multi-member ridings, with voters ranking their choices (first, second, third choices, etc.). For Canada, it would have been a realistic compromise option, one that is currently used in a number of countries, and has been used, in the past, by Manitoba and Alberta.

In short, Trudeau’s claim of opposition intransigence on the electoral reform question is disingenuous. In fact, his failure to achieve electoral reform could turn out to be the low point of his nine-plus years in power. 

There will be time for a more detailed evaluation of Justin Trudeau’s record and legacy over the next few months.

Today, Canadians are likely looking with no small measure of unease toward an uncertain future, not only for the Liberal party but for their country.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...