The Will of the People

What our outgoing Prime Minister still doesn't get

Dave Chan/Getty Images

Justin Trudeau made global headlines this week, announcing that he intended to resign as prime minister and party leader. Blaming “internal battles” in the Liberal Party for his exit, Trudeau revealed that the Governor General had granted a request to prorogue Parliament until March 24, giving the Liberals a chance to hold a leadership race.

At the press conference, Justin Trudeau said he was motivated by “what is in the best interest of Canadians.” But Canadians have already made it clear that he and his party aren’t it. Recent polling shows support for the Liberals at just 16 percent, and numerous street-level incidents have seen frustrations bubble over, including one at a ski resort over the holidays, when a woman told Trudeau to “get the f**k out of B.C.”

As media coverage shifts to speculation around who will win power, it has been astonishing to hear Liberal insiders argue that a change in leadership may well salvage the coming election. These Liberals appear to believe that the party’s popularity problems are situational, temporary — cosmetic, even. The political winds, they seem to think, could change at any moment.

But those of us who regularly interact with the public suspect otherwise.

Here’s what the Liberals can’t comprehend: In the past decade, the social contract in this country has collapsed. My generation of Canadians was raised with the belief that if you went to school, worked hard, and respected the law, you could afford a decent, safe place to live, enjoy quality health care, and have a family if you wanted one. This is simply no longer the case in this country.

During Trudeau’s tenure, home prices and rental rates have skyrocketed, there are two million monthly visits to food banks, a runaway temporary foreign worker program has supressed wage growth for low-wage workers and increased youth unemployment, the health care system is in shambles, violent crime has increased, and our birth rate has hit a record low, making us one of the “lowest low” fertility countries in the world. As all this was happening, non-violent protesters saw their bank accounts frozen, despair took hold in the form of a devastating overdose crisis, and morale plummeted as national cohesion ceased to be any kind of priority. “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” Trudeau told The New York Times in 2015, musing that we were “the first post-national state.”

These are not cosmetic issues. They cut to the heart of what it means to be Canadian.

Trudeau’s brand of elite progressive politics — “identitarian moralism,” as I refer to it — makes a big show of its lofty ideals, but ultimately ignores material conditions on the ground. It’s not surprising, then, that this ethos has proven unpopular with electorates, most recently playing a role in the American presidential election.

But Trudeau and the Liberal Party still don’t see the writing on the wall. They still don’t get that they have fundamentally misunderstood what the public wants and needs from its leadership class. Worse, they actively thwart the will of the people, shutting down Parliament, the very seat of our democracy.

While Liberal insiders are busy blaming inflation and the incumbent disadvantage of Covid governments the world over, no one is facing the facts. The simple truth is that the party has left the country in worse shape than they found it.

The Canadian public knows that — and is not likely to forget it anytime soon.