Justin Trudeau steps down, leaving a wrecked party and a divided Canada

On January 6th Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announced his resignation after weeks of speculation and a mounting political crisis. The Liberal Party has won three successive elections under his leadership. But over the past year he has become an isolated and polarising figure as supporters abandoned his party, angry that it had failed to deal with inflation, growing housing costs and strains caused by high levels of immigration which have driven the fastest population growth since 1957.

His party is now gripped by a leadership struggle. Canada faces an election which must be held by October. It will be fought over Mr Trudeau’s flawed legacy, the right response to a looming trade war, geopolitical risks and a sluggish economy. “This country deserves a real choice in the next election,” said Mr Trudeau. “It has become clear to me that if I am having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.”

He joins a growing list of progressive leaders done in by their failure to assuage the anxieties of ordinary voters, many of whom are shifting to populist parties. Among those crowing over his exit was president-elect Donald Trump. His contempt was laid bare recently in a stream of social-media posts, dismissing Mr Trudeau as the “governor” of “the Great State of Canada” and urging Canadians to consider becoming the 51st member of the United States. The rampant Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, will be watching who the Liberals pick next and eyeing a landslide election victory.

Whoever is chosen must face down Mr Trump while leading an enfeebled and unloved Liberal government. The president-elect is threatening to put tariffs of 25% on all of Canada’s exports to the United States immediately after his inauguration on January 20th. Pile that onto an already anaemic economy and the double-digit lead that Mr Poilievre has held in national polls for more than a year, and that landslide looks very likely.

That Mr Trudeau has said he will go so near the end of his term means his party is missing an essential ingredient for success: time to recover. Whoever succeeds him will probably have only a few weeks as prime minister. The election must be held by October, but will almost certainly come this spring. Opposition parties in Canada’s parliament, which the Liberals control as a minority, have all vowed to bring down the government at the first opportunity through a vote of no confidence.

Parliament was due to return from holiday on January 27th, but Mr Trudeau has managed to “prorogue” it, aborting the current session and leaving the legislature suspended until March 24th. That triggers a ten-week sprint to choose a successor, appoint a new cabinet and develop an electoral blueprint. The successor must then either face that no-confidence vote or he or she must call for an election that would probably take place in May.

Mr Trudeau’s arc has been vertiginous (see chart). He took his party from third place to a majority mandate in 2015 by winning over a wide swathe of the electorate, including working-class, indigenous and first-time voters. He championed the causes that animated progressive politics a decade ago, such as climate change and minority rights. He won praise in his first term for reducing child poverty and successfully negotiating with a truculent first-term President Trump to clinch a new free-trade agreement.

In elections in 2019 and 2021 Mr Trudeau won with less support and minority mandates. Much of his political capital was squandered as his Liberals failed to recalibrate in the wake of the pandemic, and as the public’s priorities shifted to inflation, housing and immigration. He and his party offered pious sermons that railed against their Conservative rivals’ coarser tactics, rather than pragmatic solutions to the problems that bedevilled anxious voters.

Support for the Liberal Party has crashed. A recent survey by the Angus Reid Institute, a pollster, suggests it is now backed by just 16% of voters, compared with the 45% who support Mr Poilievre’s Conservatives. That represents a new low for one of the world’s most successful political organisations: the Liberals have been in power for 93 of the past 129 years. When Michael Ignatieff led them to their first (and so far only) third-place finish in 2011, they had the backing of 19% of voters.

The Liberals’ meagre support is mirrored in its bank accounts. The party raised one third of the C$29m ($20m) pulled in by the Conservatives in the first nine months of 2024. This feeble fundraising has shown up in the paltry number of advertisements for the Liberals on television, radio and the web. Every hockey game or home-renovation show seems to be flooded with Mr Poilievre’s face, or his voice intoning Conservative slogans.

Despite these formidable challenges, several aspirants to be the Liberal leader have been quietly assembling campaign teams for months. Those being urged to run by fellow Liberal MPs include Chrystia Freeland, whose surprise resignation as finance minister on December 16th precipitated the crisis that saw much of Mr Trudeau’s caucus abandon him. Mark Carney, who governed the Bank of England and before that the Bank of Canada, may jump into the race if the party does not opt to choose a new leader from among existing Liberal MPs. Mélanie Joly, the foreign-affairs minister, and François-Philippe Champagne, the industry minister, are also weighing their prospects.

Whoever becomes leader must prepare to fight an election campaign that will turn in part on which party is best placed to confront the challenge of Mr Trump. Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, estimates that the president-elect’s proposed tariffs would shave 2.6% off Canada’s GDP and tip the economy into recession. But the election will also be a battle over Canada’s identity. A decade of progressive liberalism has ended in widespread disillusionment. Far more than the Liberal Party’s fortunes will be at stake when it selects its next leader. ■