Outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, a gust of wind blew away Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s notes yesterday. It was moments before he was to announce his resignation as head of the Liberal Party and his exit from the PM’s office after nine years in power. It was a too easy metaphor of how Trudeau’s hopes for an enlightened new Canada — a counterbalance to Donald Trump’s America — cut and run as only dreams can.
I wrote about Trudeau for a Rolling Stone cover story in 2017 in an admittedly overly credulous profile. (Not to mention that I was pilloried for saying Canada was protected by two vast oceans instead of three, forgetting, uh, the Arctic Ocean). The profile is a product of its time. Six months into the first Trump term, things were so desperate that an American magazine put a Canadian on the cover because he was handsome, had normal hair, and did not see non-white immigrants as an existential threat. The contrast was strong: Trump instituted a travel ban, while Trudeau met Syrian refugees at the airport with hugs. Eight days after Trump was inaugurated, Trudeau tweeted, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.”
One of the key differences between Trudeau and Obama was that Obama was not born to the manor. Trudeau’s birth on Christmas Day in 1971 was a national event, the first son of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his impossibly glamorous wife, Margaret. (Before the decade was over, she would be dancing at Studio 54 and palling around with the Rolling Stones.) After his parents separated, Trudeau and his two brothers were raised in a stately Montreal home where his dad decreed on which floors English would be spoken and on which floors only French was allowed. His tween years were spent accompanying his dad on state visits and international trips and while it might not have been as traumatic as Keith Richards taking his son Marlon on the road with the Stones at the same age, it’s the kind of upbringing that can leave scars and skew reality.
In his twenties, the younger Trudeau was seen as a bit of a himbo, a pretty boy lightweight whose gravitas was less than one of his father’s trench coats. He worked as a snowboard instructor, tried his hands at acting, before settling in as school teacher in Vancouver. Ironically, it was Trudeau’s eulogy for his father in 2000 that established him as a serious person. His father died of prostate cancer, but Trudeau told me it was from a broken heart after the death of his brother Michel in an avalanche in 1998. “I watched it kill my dad,” Trudeau told me. “He just lost it. He couldn’t understand why God had taken his son away from him like that.”
Before his father’s funeral, Trudeau gathered his friends together and wrote a memorable eulogy ending with a Robert Frost line: “He has kept his promises and earned his sleep.” He began to cry and shake. “Je t’aime, Papa,” he said and rested his forehead on his father’s flag-draped coffin.
His rise still wasn’t inevitable but it seemed possible. Then, comically, Trudeau was propelled by a victory in a 2012 celebrity boxing match over a meatier Conservative foe who happened to be an indigenous Canadian. (Canadians are bilingual, but their politics can be just as shallow as their American neighbors.) When I interviewed him in 2017, Trudeau bragged about the calculation behind the match which should have been a warning sign of a Blair-like cynicism that would cause him trouble as prime minister.
“It wasn’t random,” Trudeau told me. “I wanted someone who would be a good foil, and we stumbled upon the scrappy tough-guy senator from an indigenous community. He fit the bill, and it was a very nice counterpoint. I saw it as the right kind of narrative, the right story to tell.”
There were early victories, notably an attempt to pivot Canada, a top world oil producer, to a more climate aware country with the passing of a carbon tax that won global praise but absolute visceral rage from Canada’s prairie provinces, particularly Alberta with its vast oil sands. Canada did become a safe haven during the first Trump years. Women in power became a fact of life, not a sop for votes. He helped create a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation for indigenous Canadians, an attempt to correct the wrongs of two hundred years of colonialism that featured the taking of children from their families and sending them to residential schools where they endured abuse and sometimes death.
But the soaring rhetoric and ideals only took Trudeau so far. He ran on a pledge to provide safe drinking water to indigenous Canadians but almost a decade later, boil water mandates still remain in some communities. Just as damning, Trudeau was found not to practice what he preached. In 2019, an ethics commission found he had worked “to circumvent, undermine and ultimately attempt to discredit” the former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, when he urged her to inflict a civil penalty rather than a criminal prosecution to an influential Canadian engineering firm involved in a bribery scandal. Wilson-Raybould was Trudeau’s highest ranking indigenous minister. He apologized, but Wilson-Raybould still resigned from Trudeau’s party. Later that year, photos emerged of Trudeau in brown face as Aladdin at a 2001 Halloween party. It was a pattern of do as I say not as I do again highlighted by the first official Truth and Reconciliation Day in 2021. Trudeau spent it on a family vacation rather than participating in remembrance ceremonies.
Covid hit in 2020 and Trudeau again flashed the good and bad Justin. He became the first world leader to isolate himself after his wife Sophie suffered with Covid. Trudeau and Canada at first exemplified grace under pressure that American pissed away as most of the country masked up and schools remained largely open after the first wave passed. But then he undermined his credibility by calling an election in 2021 to press a political advantage just as he was urging his citizens not to congregate in large groups. The ploy backfired with no real change from a 2019 election, but created a growing feeling that Trudeau’s personal goals were diverging from the national interest.
From there, Trudeau suffered the slings and arrows of inflation and a violent reaction to his vaccine policies. He required that Canadian truckers be vaccinated if they were going to drive from province to province. Conservative activists saw an opening. A well-orchestrated group of truckers descended on Ottawa in January of 2022 creating a January 6 Lite experience, blockading the capital for a week blowing their horns making the city unworkable and borderline unlivable for days. Trudeau eventually had to use sweeping emergency powers to end the crisis, further raising the rage and bile of his populist opponents.
The two years since then has seen Trudeau and the Liberal Party’s slide in the polls amidst calls for Trudeau to leave the stage. Like Joe Biden before him, Trudeau refused in a final act of denial and narcissism, claiming that only his personal leadership could save his party and the country.
That was exactly wrong. The final blow happened before Christmas when Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland resigned in a dispute over budget tricks Trudeau was using in hopes of goosing his popularity as his party’s approval ratings fell into the teens. Freeland was the most prominent woman in Trudeau’s government and had previously served as his deputy prime minister. She had led his efforts to reform Canada’s NAFTA rules, keep Trump tariffs at bay, and spearheaded Canada’s strong support of Ukraine after Putin’s invasion. Her departure was a definitive sign that it was time for Trudeau to go that even he could not ignore.
Sadly, like Biden before him, it is too late. Trudeau’s delay leaves his eventual successor with no time to separate themselves from his reign and the Liberal Party is barreling toward a catastrophic wipeout in a spring or summer election. Trudeau heads into tariff negotiations as the lamest of lame ducks as Trump taunts him on social media calling him governor of Canada, the 51st state of America. Now estranged from his wife, Trudeau is all alone.
It was a far cry from when I traveled with him to New Brunswick in 2017 for the Acadian Games. There, Trudeau was swarmed Hard Day’s Night style. It was a level of adulation I’d never seen with a politician and, yes, Obama-esque if Obama was ever allowed to wade into such uncontrolled mayhem.
The day ended with another round of universal praise at a nearby ice cream social. But then something happened. We left for the airport and the motorcade detoured onto a dirt road. I wondered if there was a crisis or a security threat. And then Trudeau rolled down his window and dropped his ice cream cone in the dirt. He didn’t want to be seen littering on a Canadian highway. Image had overtaken the actual man.
The sunny ways would soon be behind him.
From Rolling Stone US
