Justin Trudeau Has Left the Building

The writer is in Australia.

The man who went from ski instructor and kindergarten teacher virtually straight to being the Prime Minister of Canada has finally left the building. He resigned. But that was all for show. His party forced him out because the polls were diabolical. Go and read the Fraser Institute’s analysis of Canada’s economic performance after 10 plus years of Trudeau at the helm. When Justin took over from the Conservative Stephen Harper government in 2015 the per capita wealth and wages of Canada’s richest provinces compared well to all but nine or 10 US States. Today, wages and salaries are lower in every Canadian province compared to all 50 States, below even the poorest US States of Mississippi and Louisiana. Growth? Bad. Productivity? Woeful. Multiple quarters of GDP per capita decline. And this was assessed before Trump won last year’s November election, lest those with a bad case of TDS be tempted to blame the Orange Man. (As a further aside, a painful one, Canada’s economy is really bad. But Australia’s is worse than Canada’s on all these measures. Just sayin’ because you won’t hear it on the ABC.)

Trudeau loved to virtue-signal. He was a fully paid-up climate change catastrophist and stopped pipelines from being built to let Alberta’s oil and gas get to the ocean – the result today is that Alberta sells it to the US or to no one. Trump didn’t do that. Trudeau did. So a Net Zero cheerleader. Spent next to nothing on defence (meaning even less than we in Australia do as a percentage of GDP). He ran a massive immigration Ponzi scheme. And he was a thug – yes, a thug – during the Covid lockdown hysteria. Ask the truckers. The result of all the schools closing, paying people to do nothing, closing small businesses, borrowing and spending money in unheard of amounts, weaponising the police and more was that you got big time asset inflation, massive monies transferred from poor to rich and from young to old, even worse educational results, productivity killing ‘working from home’ and, well, things will basically be screwed up for decades because of lockdowns. (By the way, our Coalition government was as bad as, or worse than, Trudeau on all these fronts. All but a couple Coalition MPs during Covid should be hanging their heads in shame for the rest of their lives. They won’t. But they should.)

At any rate, reality caught up to pretty boy Justin. Renewable energy is ghastly expensive save for huge implicit and explicit subsidies – you need baseload power Mr Bowen. Spending nothing on defence in a Hobbesian world is stupid. Inflation was bad. Housing costs soared. The young were being screwed over. By November of last year his Liberal Party was 23 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. And Trudeau led a minority government. The even further Left NDP party had the power to bring down Trudeau and force an election any time it wanted. Yet the NDP leader refused, even though his party had overtaken Trudeau’s and had every likelihood of forming the Official Opposition were there to be an election. (Poilievre’s much-repeated theory for why the NDP refused to act and bring down Trudeau was that if the government scraped along till this past February the NDP leader would trigger his gold-plated parliamentary pension – he’d be set for life. All one can say about that theory is that once no election could be held before the pension would trigger, the NDP leader announced he’d bring down the government.)

Too late. Trudeau resigned. He prorogued Parliament – which means he put it into a sort of suspended animation between the end of one session and start of a new one. This, in my view, was conventionally within Trudeau’s constitutional power – the remedy lying with the voters once the election is held. And a Canadian court recently upheld Trudeau’s power to do this. Just note, however, that when Boris tried to prorogue the UK Parliament to get Brexit through all 11 Remainer UK Supreme Court judges overturned three centuries of precedent and ruled – in a country with an unwritten constitution – that Boris could not do that. It was a disgraceful judgment. But recall my theory about bills of rights and today’s judicial elites: when you buy such an instrument (or asking them to interpret a written constitution) all you are buying is the preferences and worldviews of the unelected judiciary. Trudeau in his 11 years had appointed nearly all the Canadian judges. I predicted he’d win the proroguing case and he did. The difference in the two proroguing cases was whether the judges were with the politician or against. It’s that bad I’m afraid.

That takes us to today. Davos Man extraordinaire, former Canadian and British top central banker, Mark Carney has been parachuted in to be the new Liberal Party leader and therefore Prime Minister. Odds are that he’ll call an election for late April or early May. If he loses Carney is likely to break the 19th century record of 69 days for ‘shortest time as PM’. If he fails to win a seat he’ll be the only Canadian PM never to sit in Parliament.

So where do things stand? The polls have seen a Carney Liberal Party shoot way up from Trudeau’s 23 points behind to nearly level pegging. Remember, though, that twice in the past a long-serving, now unpopular Canadian PM (Trudeau Sr for the Libs and Brian Mulroney for the Tories) made way for new faces. Both times their replacements shot way up in the polls, indeed into the lead very briefly. It didn’t last. John Turner lost badly as Trudeau Sr’s replacement. Kim Campbell, who was put in after Mulroney, led the Tories to the worst election defeat in anglosphere history – from a big majority in a 270 plus seat legislature to two – yes, just two – seats in the whole house. Up till now, in other words, the voters have political parties sussed out when they try the old switcheroo at the last minute. It doesn’t work.

The wild card in all this is Donald Trump. Many Canadians are taking his jibes literally and nationalism has become a real thing in my native country. (Think for one minute, though, about whether a Republican President would really want to incorporate 38 million Canadian voters – so, another California and one that would be even more Left-wing than California itself – into the US. Bring Canada into the US and no Republican could win the Presidency for the foreseeable future. It’s patently obvious that Trump does not really want to make Canada the 51st state.) And the media focus on tariffs masks the hard truth that pursuit of Net Zero idiocies costs Canadians orders of magnitude more than any US tariffs will. Still, the Trump effect has thrown Poilievre quite a dilemma. His voting base would probably have half who love Trump and half who hate him. So it’s a very delicate highwire act he has to walk. But here’s Jimbo’s prediction. Poilievre will win a solid majority. Globalist Davos Man Mark Carney will be Canada’s shortest serving PM in history. That would be a fitting tribute to pretty boy Justin’s devastating decade in power.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.