Justin Trudeau nears the end

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has been walking on a political tightrope for years. His balance is unsteady. The threads of the rope are fraying. Yet, somehow, Trudeau keeps managing to stay upright. 

Trudeau should have prorogued parliament or resigned years ago

It’s not due to skill or political savvy. That Trudeau has survived so far is mainly down to sheer dumb luck. His minority Liberal governments have survived solely because of mathematical logistics of seat tallies rather than any popular legislation he has passed. He’s faced Conservative opposition leaders who have imploded. He’s been propped up by the New Democratic Party, Canada’s socialist alternative, which has supported Trudeau’s party in a supply and confidence agreement for over two years. 

Some political observers believed Trudeau’s final performance in the parliamentary big top had occurred on Monday. This was after deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s bombshell announcement that she had resigned from Trudeau’s cabinet. No one apparently saw it coming, including her stunned Liberal colleagues.

“On Friday, you told me you no longer want me to serve as your finance minister and offered me another position in the cabinet,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Upon reflection, I have concluded that the only honest and viable path is for me to resign from the cabinet. To be effective, a minister must speak on behalf of the prime minister and with his full confidence. In making your decision, you made clear that I no longer credibly enjoy that confidence and possess the authority that comes with it.”

Freeland also added that, “For the past number of weeks, you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada.”

What caused this dissension? Chiefly it is Trudeau’s inability to work with Canada’s provinces and territories to find a solution to President-elect Donald Trump’s impending 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods. “We need to take that threat extremely seriously,” Freeland noted. “That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment.”

Freeland knows that Trudeau has relied heavily on political gimmickry. He favors style over substance. He enjoys softball discussions about “woke” ideology and environmental activism, and is usually disinterested in policy discussions related to financial matters. She, on the other hand, has been called the “Minister of Everything’ due to her influential hand in devising this government’s political and economic policies.

It’s pretty clear who the brains of this political operation was. And now she’s gone, sitting as a back-bencher until the time is right to run for the Liberal leadership.

This led to a period of pandemonium in Ottawa. Trudeau hid under the radar for several hours. No replacement for the minister of finance was announced until the late afternoon. (It was eventually given to Trudeau’s longtime friend and confidant, public safety minister Dominic LeBlanc.) Freeland was bizarrely slated to give the long-delayed Fall Economic Statement to parliament on Monday, in spite of all that had happened. Understandably, she didn’t. Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives, who have led in the polls for more than two years and are set to easily form the next government, had a field day. As Poilievre amusingly quipped in Parliament, “I have a question for the finance minister. Who are you?’

CTV News even circulated a rumor that Trudeau was either going to prorogue parliament or announce his resignation. A few people in the know, and many who think they know, bought into this. I wasn’t one of them. 

Yes, Trudeau should have prorogued parliament or resigned years ago. A traditional political leader would have already done this to save himself from further embarrassment. Trudeau doesn’t fit into this category. He’s long been a divisive and delusional prime minister, as I wrote in a recent National Post column. He thinks he’s the smartest person in the room, although no one else agrees. He believes that he’s the only one who can save Canada from Trump, although no one would be crazy enough to select him for this task. He doesn’t seem to have the ability to recognize the enormity of the mess he caused on Monday. And when he spoke to a friendly audience at the Laurier Club Event in Gatineau, Québec, that evening, it was like nothing had ever happened.

Trudeau will be gone in 2025. He may resign or be forced out early. He may hold on until the bitter end and go down with the Liberal ship. Either way, he plans to keep walking that political tightrope for as long as he can.