Justin Trudeau resigned this Monday as Prime Minister of Canada, a position for which he seemed destined since he was born in December 1971 when his father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, was the country’s leader. Trudeau could never escape his destiny and this Monday he announced his resignation after nine years in power, since April 2013 as leader of the Liberal Party and since October 2015 as prime minister, making him one of the longest serving contemporary Canadian leaders in power and one that has marked an era in the country’s progressivism.
In April 1972, when Trudeau was just four months old, the then-president of the United States, the now infamous Richard Nixonmade a state visit to Ottawa. At a gala at the National Arts Center in Ottawa and before Pierre Elliot Trudeau, then Prime Minister of Canada, and his wife, Margaret, Nixon rose to offer a toast to his hosts. “Tonight, we will dispense with the formalities. I would like to toast to the future Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Pierre Trudeau,” declared Nixon. To which Pierre Elliot Trudeau replied: “I hope you have the grace and skill of the president.”
The Nixon’s prophecy was fulfilled in October 2015. That of Pierre Elliot Trudeau is a question that political scientists and historians will discuss. But Trudeau’s resignation this Monday comes amid a serious political crisis and with the image of the Canadian politician in tatters after just over nine years at the head of the Government of Canada.
The circumstances of Trudeau’s departure, pushed by the polls and his own Liberal Party colleagues, are diametrically opposed to those that brought him to power. When Trudeau became leader in 2013 of the liberals, the former high school teacher arrived as a ““angelic savior”the only one capable of rescuing a party on the verge of its disappearance.
Trudeau complied and only two years later, in October 2015, at 43 years old, defeated in the general election to the then prime minister, conservative leader Stephen Harper, with a jovial, optimistic and positive message that gave him the majority of the Lower House of Parliament.
“Because it’s 2015”
When the November 4 Trudeau took office, the eldest son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Margaret Sinclair fulfilled his destiny upon returning to 24 Sussex Drive, the official Ottawa residence of the Canadian Prime Minister and where he grew up with his two brothers.
True to form, Trudeau’s first public event after being sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada was a virtual question-and-answer session with children from five Canadian schools. Shortly after, Trudeau unveiled the names of his first cabinet in which for the first time in the history of the country, there was the same number of ministers. When journalists asked him about the meaning of the gesture, he responded elegantly and forcefully: “Because it’s 2015”.
Trudeau would win two more electionsin 2019 and 2021, but never with the luster of the first. Since 2019, the Liberal Party has governed as a minority and only thanks to the particularities of the Canadian electoral system known as single-member majority voting.
Following the 2021 election, Trudeau found himself isolated from the realities of the countryaccording to a large number of political commentators, unable to connect with the electorate that suffers the consequences of a sharp rise in the cost of living, the lack of affordable housing and the worsening of social services. Many, including the Liberal Party itself, consider that a large part of the ills that afflict the country are consequence of Trudeau’s immigration policies that have allowed the arrival of millions of people to the country without adequately preparing for the migratory flow.
The Internal tensions broke out on December 16when his Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, unexpectedly announced her resignation, something that has accelerated the end of the Trudeau era and a succession process that will culminate in elections, probably in October. Paradoxically, this has caused let what happened to Pierre Elliot Trudeau be repeated in February 1984 when, harassed by his party and the polls, he announced his resignation after a walk through the snowy streets of Ottawa.
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