Trudeau changed Canada - for the worse

Prime minister loved the poetry of governing more than the prose

In happier days, the Liberals offered free reconstructive facial surgery

Critics have often accused me of having my head in the clouds, if not somewhere darker and more malodorous. But I was literally in a cloud forest, sitting in a volcanic hot spring, when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation last Monday.

It was the first major political event in recent Canadian history I have not covered - and I can’t say I was upset about not participating in the pile-on. Trudeau is going and history will likely judge him more kindly than his contemporaries, as we saw with Brian Mulroney.

Yet, as his first biographer and someone who has covered his career since he was first elected in 2008, I feel obliged to weigh in now.

Much of what follows is based on opinions formed while interviewing and writing the 2019 book, Trudeau: The Education of a Prime Minister, which I think stands up pretty well. Many of the reviewers felt it was too harsh in its criticisms, at a time when he was still being given the benefit of the doubt by many of my colleagues. But I think the core assessments remain sound.

In the book, I noted that Trudeau was elected on a promise to transform a country that was designed to withstand change - his Twitter bio at the time read: “Changing the world, a little bit every day”.

He promised generational change and renewal, unveiling a gender-balanced, telegenic, ethnically diverse cabinet, as if it was cast with a view to the movie version that might follow. It was symbolic of the promise of change and ambition, after the austere years of the Harper government.

Yet, the sky-high expectations and euphoric optimism could not be sustained in the messy real world.

“(The Liberals) loved the poetry of governing a lot more than the prose,” wrote historian JDM Stewart in The Hub this week.

Mis-steps, controversies and broken promises, such as the pledge to make the 2015 election the last held under the first-past-the-post system, led many to the realization that this was a leader who valued style over substance and talk over action.

Trudeau’s time in office gradually drained the enthusiasm of those who voted for a man who promised to change the world, but couldn’t even change the voting system.

The first major criticism in the book is that, while Trudeau may have been the greatest front-man since Freddie Mercury - a narrator and a communicator who, as writer Ian Brown noted, “moves through the crowd like someone doing an easy crawl through lake water”, his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.

Trudeau’s ability to understand the feelings of others and play on them; his impulsiveness and tendency towards sanctimony, meant that a growing number of Canadians, particularly older men, decided he was a manipulative phony, who got to be prime minister because of his famous name, not his achievements.

“Canada is back and we’re here to help,” Trudeau told the 2015 Paris climate conference. That was typical of the smugness and hubris of which world leaders and domestic voters have grown tired.

The second criticism in the book was that the focus on communications came at the expense of making things happen after they had been announced. Even his senior staff admitted that the prime minister was much more interested in the initial idea than on the implementation, which created challenges in execution.

Critics like Robert Asselin, a former senior adviser in the Liberal government, claim the centralization of decisions in the Prime Minister’s Office led to the decline of cabinet government, with ministers often left to announce and defend decisions made at the centre, on which they had had little input.

Over time, the Trudeau government strayed into areas of provincial jurisdiction with plans for national pharma and dental care, while bungling key federal priorities like defence, fiscal policy and immigration.

The narrative that won the government the 2015 election centred on “modest” deficits of around $20 billion over four years, with a credible plan to balance the budget in 2019. Instead, the national debt has doubled in the past nine years and the Liberals have missed many of their own fiscal targets because of their propensity, if not addiction, to spending. The percentage of GDP spent on programs increased to 15.9 percent last year, compared to 13.2 percent in the last year of the Harper government. The total of $485.6 billion in program spending is 30 percent higher than in the Harper years, driven in part by a 28 percent increase in the size of the public sector (even though population has only grown by 10 percent in those years).

This has been a government that has more often boasted about how much money it has spent, rather than about the results that ensued.

The charge that Trudeau’s leadership resulted in an inefficient, reactive style of governance is hard to refute. The Liberals inherited what was arguably the world’s best immigration system and devalued it by allowing many more lower skilled and temporary workers into the country.

The neglect shown toward the economy constitutes a dereliction of duty. Canadians’ income grew in tandem with the U.S. between 1991 and 2014 but it has diverged since. The decline in living standards relative to the U.S. and drop off in business investment can be attributed in the early years of the Trudeau government to a fall in the oil price. But crude prices and production levels have recovered since the pandemic, while Canada’s per capita GDP performance has declined for eight of the past nine quarters. Long-term problems such as labour productivity stagnation, regulatory inefficiency, a lack of innovation and internal trade barriers that the IMF estimates cost the equivalent of a 20 percent average tariff between provinces were just not sexy enough to hold Trudeau’s interest.

The Toronto Star reported this week that per capita income rose 23 percent over Trudeau’s tenure. But the story failed to mention that inflation increased by nearly 26 percent in the same period.

The third assertion is perhaps the most damning: that Trudeau’s belief, bordering on dogmatism, that Canadians share his devotion for his activist agenda, saw him dismiss those who disagreed with him as uninformed, irresponsible or motivated by unworthy purposes. This special state of grace was described by American conservative thinker Thomas Sowell as “The Vision of the Anointed” in his 1995 book of the same name.

Sowell said the Anointed predict future social, economic and environmental problems unless there is government intervention. “Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error but in sin,” he said.

That is the perfect description of the way Trudeau sees himself and his opponents.

In reality, Canada’s post-war political history has been more centrist than progressive left and, particularly after signing the deal with the NDP in 2022, the Liberals have left the median voter far behind. The drift toward identity politics alienated many people who had voted for the Liberal “fairness agenda” in 2015 because of the promises to address issues like the cost of living, the lack of accessible housing and high taxes.

Trudeau was elected after promising to bridge partisan divides. Conservatives were not the enemy, he told Liberals, they are your neighbours. Yet, he proceeded to engage in years of playing identity politics, with baked-in hostility toward anyone deemed “privileged”.

Western voters seethed that the Liberals were trying to kill Canada’s most economically important industry by tightening regulations and introducing a carbon tax. Former finance minister Bill Morneau dismissed the charge as “absurd”, pointing to the government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. But the suspicion remained that Trudeau was hoping the shale revolution in the U.S. would make the Canadian oil and gas industry an expensive and losing proposition.

Liberals excused their own lack of transparency and accountability because they decided their intentions were good. In this light, the SNC-Lavalin debacle in 2019 that saw then attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould pressured to strike a plea-bargain with the Montreal engineering company accused of bribery and corruption overseas was deemed by Liberals as a necessary evil to secure votes in Quebec. In reality, it was a blatant abuse of the rule of law and the prosecutorial independence of the attorney general’s office.

Trudeau did not apologize for his role in the affair. But his tendency to apologize for the darker chapters of Canada’s history, while not boasting about its successes, did not endear him to his critics.

The decision to lower the Canadian flag to half-mast on public buildings for months following the discovery of what were believed to be remains of children at a former residential school in British Columbia was seen as an example of Trudeau’s virtue signalling, even among people sympathetic to Indigenous anger. His declaration that Canada has no core identity and is a “post-national” state was the catalyst for a steady decline in the pride of being Canadian.

The white-hot anger now being directed towards the prime minister is the result of a cultural backlash from people who feel like they have become strangers in their own land, abandoned by progressive values and policies they don’t share or understand.

Was it all bad? Of course not. I would argue that Trudeau dealt with the first Trump administration and the COVID pandemic about as well as could be expected. He spent too much money and used the virus as an excuse for an unnecessary election. Using a deadly disease as a wedge issue was pretty unforgivable. But he organized a quick response and kept businesses from collapsing.

I backed the carbon tax as the most market-oriented way to reduce emissions, even if it is now politically toxic.

He prioritized Indigenous reconciliation and spent eye-watering sums of money to pacify past grievances, including billions on class action suit settlements (Canada now spends as much on Indigenous issues as it does on defence). But it was long overdue for a Canadian government to seriously tackle the problems facing Indigenous communities and for that Trudeau should be commended, especially when there were few votes to be gained.

For me, the safety net of benefits the Liberals introduced in the early years will prove to be their most durable legacy. A generous child benefit, an enhanced Canada Pension Plan, a bolstered Old Age Security program and an increased low income workers benefit have effectively created a guaranteed annual income for seniors and low income parents. The Liberals made a conscious choice to be more interventionist by spending more money on those on the poverty line and it seems unlikely that future governments will reverse those decisions.

But the inescapable conclusion is that Trudeau has left the country in worse shape than he found it - from the perspective of the public finances; from the glaring regional fissures that threaten national unity in the West and in Quebec; and from this country’s abysmal relations with the world’s great powers.

Trudeau has been the compelling political figure of his time, so much so that it is possible that his departure will mollify much of the anger and anxiety bubbling away across the country like a volcanic hot spring. His resignation is long overdue but it is welcome nonetheless.