Canada’s liberal leader Justin Trudeau “achieved a lot for Canada,” our former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar declared yesterday. Mr Varadkar – who, in the summer of 2017, teamed up with the Canadian PM for an afternoon at Montreal Pride, basking in public adulation as the sun beamed down and crowds cheered for the two progressive politicians – reckons that Trudeau would be remembered as one of the great Canadian prime ministers.
“He will be seen as one of the great Canadian prime ministers, certainly a consequential one,” Varadkar said, addressing the question of what Trudeau’s legacy will look like. For many, that idea that he will be remembered as some sort of a great leader will be seen as something straight out of Alice in Wonderland.
Varadkar’s rose-tinted perception of Trudeau comes as no surprise, though, given the pair’s shared passion for all things socially liberal and progressive. But the other side of the coin, away from LGBTQ activism, many may look back on Trudeau’s reign with far less favour. Yes, he may be a kind of icon for those so keenly committed to ideologies like LGBTQ and abortion, but to many ordinary Canadians, the truth is that his legacy is rathwer more complicated.
Did he accomplish a great deal in the time – almost a decade – that he was in power? Or is it rather the case that Trudeau hurt Canada, weakening the country’s credibility on the international stage? In my opinion, the hysterical Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates, the crackdown on protests through the Emergency Powers Act, alongh with soaring inflation, and Trudeau’s government’s gruesome efforts to expand its inhumane euthanasia regime, on mental health grounds alone, do not make for positive achievements for the former leader.
Trudeau’s popularity had collapsed not only with conservatives, but gradually, with liberal-leaning Canadians too – to the point where recent polling (carried out in September) indicated that a whopping 70 per cent of the country was of the view he should quit. Whilst he started out as prime minister on 4 November 2015 by promising “sunny ways,” his leadership transformed the social and legal fabric of Canada through measures that were often heavy-handed, and did not change the country for the better.
Even his own cabinet minister, Chrystia Freeland, stood down in December, in a scathing indictment of Trudeau’s response to stiff tariffs threatened by Donald Trump. Trudeau’s government has remained in a shambles since the president elect’s threats to impose 25% tariffs on all goods and services from Canada and Mexico in an effort to clamp down on cross-border drug and people smuggling.
An embattled Trudeau has faced calls to resign for months on end, compounded by Trump’s belittling of him as a mere “governor.” In fact, Trump won acclaim for his social media posts suggesting Canada should, at this point, just consider becoming a US State. The country has long been engulfed in political turmoil with Trudeau at the wheel, a man who has seemed incredibly stubborn and deaf to widespread criticism and calls to call it a day.
While Varadkar showered praise on Mr Trudeau for his green policies, saying, “He was very good on climate, had the courage to bring in a carbon tax and bring Canada into the Paris accords, and bear in mind, there’s a really strong lobby in Canada – oil industry, gas industry, all of that,” many saw the national tax as nothing short of crippling.
Three years after his election, in 2018, Trudeau imposed the widely unpopular carbon tax on Canadians, despite backlash which only mounted as the years went on. The tax, which increased the price of burning fossil fuels, remained broadly unpopular over the last six years, with seven provinces asking the government to either pause or cancel the levy, which consistently added to the price of gas. Trudeau burnt bridges with the public over the green tax he championed, with ordinary Canadians arguing the law only increased their cost of living, but he didn’t seem to care.
Trudeau seemed to use Covid to divide Canadians against each other. The more recent years of his tenure saw the explosion of the Canadian truckers protests, with thousands of protestors blocking roads across Canada, garnering enormous international attention. Many truckers argued that freedom itself was in jeopardy, and that the country was headed down a path akin to communism unless stopped.
“We’re prepared to stay here for ten years,” some truck drivers declared, telling international TV crews, “We’re just trying to get our freedoms back” as footage of the monster protests flashed across the world on TV screens. The movement grew so big that it sparked convoys to rise up in Europe, including in the UK and in Ireland, as farmers rallied against green policies.
The uproar was a direct reaction to Trudeau. The truckers protests were sparked by Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates imposed by Mr Trudeau and his government, which were among the harshest in the world. All essential service providers, including truck drivers, had to be fully vaccinated, or risk losing their jobs. All of those coming into or leaving the country had to be vaccinated too, leaving many unvaccinated expats stuck in the country with no hope of escaping.
The battle between Trudeau and legions of hard-working truckers, whose businesses had been brought to a standstill by draconian and illiberal restrictions, was a head-on collision.
The liberal politician gained a reputation not only within Canada but internationally as a leader in love with authoritarian-leaning measures. He invoked emergency powers to punish his own people, especially those who objected to mandatory vaccines.
His decision to use the Emergencies Act in February 2022 was unprecedented, and triggered the suspension of civil liberties and the suppression of trucker protests against vaccine mandates. The Act also allowed Trudeau to freeze both personal and business bank accounts of those protesting, without the need for a court order, and to clear protestors in some areas.
The crackdown on protests was driven by Trudeau alone, it was clear, when the Canadian Public Order Emergency Commission, heard that the Emergencies Act had not been asked for by Canadian police or by the country’s National Security Agency.
It had been requested on the threat of ‘serious violence,’ Trudeau said, while at the same time admitting that there had been no violence. It is no small wonder, given on Trudeau’s own assertions, that he managed to survive as prime minister past 2022.
The attempts to shut down protest amounted to a crackdown on devious free speech which made the goings on in Canada a continual talking point. Similarly, Canada’s online harms Bill was described as ‘Orwellian’ – behind the Bill’s stated purpose (to protect children from online victimisation) lay a much darker aim.
The controversial law authorised house arrest and electronic tagging for individuals deemed likely to commit a future crime. The text of the Bill, which hit the headlines last year, stated that if a judge was of the brief there are reasonable grounds to ‘fear’ a future hate crime, the as of yet innocent party can be sentenced to house arrest, along with electronic tagging, mandatory drug testing and communication bans.
Hugely popular Canadian psychologist and author, Dr Jordan Peterson, said that under the legislation, Bill C-63, his own criminalisation would be a certainty. He described the legislation – which passed its first reading – as “the most totalitarian Bill I’ve ever seen.”
The contents of the Bill amount to the creation of a new extrajudicial system that isn’t bound by the rules of legal investigation or guilt, which has an “unlimited range of expansion, and all the powers of a court,” according to Peterson. Indeed, the law seemed much more geared towards protecting Trudeau’s Liberal government online than towards protecting children online.
Trudeau’s litany of pitfalls does not end there. I think it’s fair to say that the social fabric of Canada was ripped apart under Trudeau – thanks in large part to the extreme and accelerated expansion of euthanasia, which was first legalised by Trudeau’s government in June 2016. The intensity and breadth of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) regime, of which Justin Trudeau was chief cheerleader, continues to alarm many.
The usual promises focusing on safeguards and restrictions were made, but it only took five years before the law was expanded in 2021 to include people who did not have terminal illnesses. Tell me again how the ‘slippery slope’ does not exist? Trudeau’s government, horrifyingly, planned and proposed to include people whose sole underlying condition was mental illness, with these proposals subject to a court challenge and stalled until 2027.
The rise of medically assisted deaths has been so rapid that they now account for one in 20 deaths in Canada. The rate of assisted suicide in Canada increased by nearly 16 per cent in 2023 to record levels, and shows no sign of slowing. Canada’s assisted suicide story is nothing short of a horror in which the Canadian citizens who cry out for help from their government are seen as increasingly disposable. You can say Trudeau’s Canada became the epicentre of progressivism, but it also became a hotspot for sheer ruthlessness.
Canadian public life looked increasingly like a soap opera under Trudeau. There was the hilariously surreal moment in 2018 when he was accused of ‘mansplaining’ when he told a woman not to say ‘mankind’ but to use ‘people-kind instead.’ “We like to say ‘people-kind,’ not necessarily ‘man-kind.’ It’s more inclusive. We can all learn from each other,” said Trudeau in the encounter which cemented his status as the king of virtue signalling.
For what it’s worth, Trudeau’s liberal approach to drugs should also be remembered as something which caused great social harm. In November, Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre called for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to “fully reverse his radical liberalization of drugs” in Canada, adding that drug overdoses have claimed the lives of approximately 47,000 residents — which he said was higher than the number of Canadian veterans lost in the Second World War.
Poilievre, who has been tipped to replace Trudeau as prime minister, called on Trudeau to “put partisanship aside for the sake of our people,” urging him to ban drugs, secure Canada’s borders, and prosecute drug traffickers.
After nine years of Justin Trudeau, the NDP-Liberal Government’s radical experiments of hard drug legalization and taxpayer-funded free drugs have been a disaster in the eyes of many bereaved Canadians.
An unwavwering focus on all things woke couldn’t hide Trudeau and his liberal government’s failure to deliver on key issues. For everyday Canadians, housing prices have jumped and the cost of groceries and essentials has rocketed under inflation, whilst the country also faces the prospect of heavy tariffs imposed by the main trading partner, the US. He has been challenged on the true size of Canada’s federal deficit. His political rivals, including Poilievre, are right when they claim Trudeau lost control of Canada’s borders, immigration, and spending.
Trudeau, after more than nine years, has managed to deliver very little which has bettered his country. He did, there is no doubt, strive to create a woke utopia that is now cracking at the seams. He has turned Canada into a cautionary tale for other nations, a country which has embodies all the excesses of an era of woke Western politics that is drawing to a close after the damage has been done. So no, I do not agree with our own former Taoiseach that Mr Trudeau, the prince of Woke, should be remembered as a great leader. My thoughts are that he should instead go down in the history books as one of the worst Canada has produced.