Andrew Potter: Justin Trudeau never cared about Canada
The outgoing PM's legacy will be that of a man who showed shocking contempt for the country he led for almost a decade.
By: Andrew Potter
In a matter of hours — maybe it’ll already have happened when you read these words — Justin Trudeau will cease to be the prime minister of Canada. Mark Carney will be sworn in, a new cabinet will be appointed and Trudeau’s post-political life will be underway. What that means for him and his family is up to them to decide.
For the rest of us, it means the debate over his legacy can begin in earnest. At this early date, one thing stands out. It’s not flattering.
The important thing to keep in mind when evaluating Trudeau’s legacy as prime minister is that he never cared about Canada as such. At no point since he entered politics in 2008 did he give any indication that he understood or appreciated the country as a coherent and comprehensive entity with all of its cultural, economic, and political diversity. This attitude was reflected in his entire approach to public office both as an opposition member of Parliament starting in 2008, right up until he announced his eventual resignation on January 6th of this year.
The primary article of indictment is this comment Trudeau made in February 2012 to a Radio-Canada host, over three years into his tenure as an MP:
"I always say, if at a certain point, I believe that Canada was really the Canada of Stephen Harper — that we were going against abortion, and we were going against gay marriage, and we were going backwards in 10,000 different ways — maybe I would think about making Quebec a country."
Lots of people went a bit nuts over this. Trudeau, after all, is the son of Pierre Trudeau, the arch-anti-nationalist loved by (some) anglophone Canadians for putting Quebec separatists in their place. What Justin Trudeau appeared to be doing with this remark was outing himself as yet another conditional Quebecer, an adherent of the "profitable federalism” that sees the threat of separation as just another negotiating position.
The truth is actually a lot worse. What Trudeau was saying with these comments was that, essentially, Canada is only viable, and even legitimate in his eyes, to the extent that it is willing to elect governments run by people with his values.
There are lots of things to say about this, but here are three: The first is that it does not seem to have occurred to Trudeau that this exact same line of reasoning could be used by conservatives to justify Alberta separatism, or Wexit, with far more justification, given the electoral history of Canada over the course of the last hundred years. The second is that Trudeau does not appear to have considered the possibility that if there was one province where an ethno-nationalist conservative backlash against his sort of “progressive” values was liable to take root in Canada, the obvious candidate would be his adoptive province, Quebec.
Finally, it is crucial to note that nothing Justin Trudeau has said or done, in government or out, since he made those remarks in 2012 would lead anyone to think he had given them any sort of sober second thought. Indeed, just the opposite: for the past nine years his entire manner of governing, both at the level of rhetoric and when it comes to actual policy, has been an increasingly cynical exercise in dividing Canadians into two camps: those who shared his values, and those who didn’t. “A fringe minority with unacceptable views,” is how Trudeau himself once described them — a statement he later claimed to regret. And the way this strategy manifested itself was by using those values as a club with which to attack the very idea of Canada itself.
Looking back, it is shocking just how much contempt Trudeau showed for Canada, and for so long. It began with what became by the end a long list of apologies to various communities for past transgressions. Early on, his government rewrote the official lyrics (but only for the English version, of course) to O Canada to make it more gender neutral. Then there was the tacit encouragement of a movement that saw the country’s 150th anniversary turned into an orgy of national self-hatred, followed soon after by the entirely offhand acceptance of Canada as a genocidal state. There was his decision in 2021 to order the national flag to fly at half staff for an entire summer while blithely ignoring, for months, the factors that went into that decision. Add to this his decision to abandon the decrepit 24 Sussex but not actually do anything about it, essentially leaving it to rot for a decade; the obscenely dismissive attitude toward the appointment of the Governor General and the relentlessly smarmy negging of the Crown, the Royal Family, and what it symbolizes; the offensively bland remake of the passport that ditched images of Terry Fox and Vimy Ridge in favour of clip art … for nine long years, the trashing of the traditional symbols and institutions of Canada just went on and on and on and on.
What is striking about all this is that there is little indication that Justin Trudeau cared about the actual on-the-ground harms that motivated any of these acts. Given the chance to take real action on the wrongs that many of these symbolic decisions supposedly represented, whenever possible he instead chose to do nothing, insult the real victims, or, in one famous case, take a vacation. That is because the real intention was never to make Canada a better country, it was just to drive a clear wedge between Canadians, to pit one group against the other, in the service of his own narrow electoral interests.
All of this culminated in the appalling election of 2021, which Trudeau called, in the middle of a pandemic, for the sole purpose of taking advantage of what he perceived to be broad public support for his government’s handling of the crisis. Turns out he perceived wrong. Canadians were unimpressed, Trudeau lost the popular vote to Erin O’Toole but clung to a bare minority, while his supporters boasted online of the amazing “efficiency” of the Liberal vote (thanks to the workings of an electoral system Trudeau had once vowed to replace).
No one who genuinely cared about national unity, who wasn’t out for sheer partisan advantage, would have called that election at that time, in those circumstances, and conducted the campaign on those terms. Yet despite the precarious mandate that it gave him, two weeks after the election Trudeau imposed an entirely capricious vaccine mandate, which was again designed to divide Canadians into right- and wrong-thinkers. This soon helped generate one of the most shocking displays of anti-government outrage in this country’s history, which we have not yet fully reckoned with or recovered from.
So what is Justin Trudeau’s legacy as prime minister? It rests in a series of polls released in and around the new year, beginning with an Angus Reid survey looking at Canadians’ emotional attachment to their country and sense of national pride. The results were bad. In the survey, only 49 per cent of respondents said they had a “deep emotional attachment” to Canada, down from 62 per cent in 2016 and 54 per cent in 1991. Even worse: Only 34 per cent of respondents said they are “very proud” to be Canadian, down from 52 per cent in 2016 and 78 per cent in 1985.
When you dig into the numbers, things are even more disconcerting: Over the past decade, Albertans went from being some of the most patriotic Canadians in the country to some of the least. And immigrants, who were until 2015 more reliably patriotic than native-born Canadians, have become much more mercenary and transactional about the country, with over half of new immigrants saying their attachment to the place hinges on being provided with a good standard of living. It should have come as little surprise then to see a Nanos poll, released in mid-January, reveal that pessimism towards the federal government had reached unprecedentedly bad levels, with feelings of satisfaction and optimism at historic lows. The most significant levels of dissatisfaction, if that’s not too benign a word for it, were in the prairies, where the dominant feeling towards Ottawa of an astonishing 42 per cent of respondents was “anger.”
There has been a very welcome surge in Canadian pride and nationalism in recent weeks, for obvious reasons we don’t need to get into here, but it comes entirely despite, and not thanks to, anything Justin Trudeau has said or done. His panic-stricken last-minute decisions and notions, from building high-speed rail to reforming the RCMP to fixing 24 Sussex, only underscore just how dismissive and neglectful he has been of the national interest, and for how long.
Ultimately, the real problem with Trudeau’s time in office isn’t just that he did so much to make Canadians feel bad about their country — lots of long-in-the-tooth prime ministers go out with their tails between their legs, leaving the country feeling wretched. The problem is that with Justin Trudeau, more often than not it seemed deliberate.
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This is a great article, published just as Trudeau is passing over the keys to a Challenger jet, Rideau Cottage, the PMO and his government issue CC.
Being Prime Minister is hard, hard work. I acknowledge that, but Trudeau certainly maximized the perks every step of the way.
Finally, it is plainly obvious that Trudeau was a spent political force by 2019. The fatal blow was right at hand on his election campaign plane when he faced his Blackface music in front of media covering the election.
The media refused to deliver the knock out punch. A contrite Trudeau apologized for two days and the storm blew over, as the media turned to picking on Scheer for his “hidden agenda” or dual citizenship. (Funny how Carney has three passports, to nobody’s concern today.)
Someday, I hope that a book is written about the Trudeau Liberals amazing ability to control the media narrative over such a long period of time. The acquiescence of the media to play along didn’t serve Canadians well, delaying a badly needed retirement for another 5 years.
As a ~5th generation Canadian, whose uncle fought in the 2nd WW, and whose father and grandfather were spared the Wars as they were farmers, and farmers fed soldiers and the country, I have never in my 5+ decades ever felt as less patriotic as I do now. I hold to account, the dismissive and corrupt LPC for this. In my next decades, I will leave the lightest economic footprint in Canada, and look to explore the world for a home (or at least a winter home), which better reflects a balanced worldview. I have also resigned myself to the reality that my twenty-something children are better off making a life for themselves and their future family in a country other than Canada. I write this without conceit or contempt, and more from a place of loss and sadness. But this is not the Canada I recognize or love. Sadly, I'm afraid that if Mr. Carney remains as something more than an interim PM, the feelings of loss for my Canada will only increase.