On why Carney can "go to China." On Trudeau hate, post-Trudeau. On the passing of a great Canadian. And the most hilarious/scary celeb breakup in a while.
People don't hate Trudeau for irrational reasons, or at least many don't.
Trudeau ran a decade-long active and deliberate campaign of destruction on the Canada we grew up in and were proud of before he came to power. He earned every speck of animosity that many people have for him, including myself who actually voted for him in 2015 (yay legal weed and less so electoral reform!).
He spent fantastic amounts of money on redistribution and nonsense, while productivity went backwards and standard of living fell. He made our justice system a joke and let crime spiral out of control. He denigrated Canadian symbols, traditions, and identity, especially anything connected with British English Canada. He displayed particular contempt for any white men who weren't completely on board with self-flagellation, while going so far as to embrace insane conspiracy theories like the Kamloops mass grave mirage to boost the victim profile of every other group. He busted open the floodgates to effectively indiscriminate mass immigration, without really any public debate or even much announcement, drastically changing the demographics of our cities and overwhelming our infrastructure. He oversaw the biggest increase in house prices in our country's history, pricing entire generations out of the housing market and acted like this was no big deal at all. He corrupted our media with his payoffs and subsidies. He politicized the public service and judiciary with deeply ideological appointments. He played cynical procedural games in Parliament and avoided accountability for a huge number of scandals. He embraced insanity like UNDRIP and made infrastructure impossible to build. He ran the 2021 election in a shockingly slimy way by calling it while Covid was still active, then demonizing the unvaccinated and gun owners in order to avoid accountability for government waste and overreach. And I'm missing a bunch of examples. He spent his entire term wasting resources, missing opportunities, dividing every available group against another, all while carrying on the most smug, self-satisfied attitude. Matt and Jen did a spectacular job of documenting the many failures of the Trudeau regime, much of it in real time. They shouldn't be so fast to forget these.
And yes, it was especially galling that he kept getting away with it. Finally it was looking like Canadians had figured it out, and were able to focus and see through the bullshit long enough to install a new government that would undo some of the damage, uncover some of the corruption that was permanently stalled in committee, reverse some of the trends, and restore hope to those who had felt targeted and toremented for an entire decade.
But in the end, Trudeau really did get away with it, and the absurdly cynical installation of Mark Carney was just the latest example of how Trudeau and his enablers avoided comeuppance. That Carney avoided addressing any of the 10-year record of the party he was hand-picked to take over, and rather ran his election on a fictional boogeyman campaign against his new friend Donald Trump, abetted by the Globe and Mail, just adds butter cream frosting and a cherry on top.
So I can understand how this anger has transferred directly to Mark Carney. The bad guys weren't brought to justice or even chastised for their behaviour, the reset didn't happen, and while the pace of devastation might slow for a little while (if that), I don't see the trajectory changing.
And don't say "oh only a Liberal could (promise to) make this or that minor change". If Poilievre won a 230 seat majority last fall on a "fuck the media we don't care what they say" campaign, his party sure wouldn't be constrained by what criticisms pundits would have. Especially as half of the legacy media would be packing their shit right now and cleaning out their desks for the unemployment line with the end of subsidies and CBC funding.
For someone who self-identified as voting Liberal in 2015, I find your account of your change in mind to be opaque and quite dubious. You literally pivoted in your post from a superficial duo of preferred policies as a half-sentence justification for voting Liberal, to then listing out a torrent of post-2015 Conservative talking points and accusations. I am left with absolutely no idea of what the heck you were surprised by. When exactly was the first time that Trudeau ever did something that you were actually *surprised* by? Just who did you actually think he was in the 2015 election?
I thought Trudeau was another ordinary cynical politician the night he announced his leadership bid in 2012, and very little surprised me with him in his time in power, beyond the galling lie on electoral reform and the harassment of Jody Wilson-Raybould.
He did not actually "get away" with much of anything. He never recovered his peak popularity nor another majority after his first term, he served as Prime Minister for a time duration of a typical Prime Minister, his voting support fell below 2015 Harper levels after a similar amount of time in power, and he faced the ignominy of being forced out of power by his own party. He's now quietly faded away from political life like every past Prime Minister with no current political power, whatsoever (whereas Stephen Harper had a post-PM role as Chair of the Conservative Party Fund).
As to voting Liberal in 2015, I was younger and more naive, and I was annoyed at Harper for - ironically - letting the housing market climb too fast (including stuff like 40 year mortgages and too low too long interest rates) and increasing immigration too much. I was actually starting to warm up to the CPC toward the end of their term but always felt it was very stupid to keep marijuana illegal, and important to get electoral reform passed (in my imagination this was sure to be MMP), so yah those were the issues I voted on.
Trudeau's policies beyond the headline ones were either vague or poorly publicized and I figured I was otherwise voting for Paul Martin in colourful socks. Liberals cared about the little guy so they would return to sensible policies on population intake and housing, and not change much else of what was working, right? At the end of the the crazy-polling 2015 election I also figured the Liberals would get a minority so if things went sideways we could always bring Harper (or his replacement) back pretty easily.
Well 10 years later we got a population perpetually micro-dosed on gummies, "hold my beer" on every policy I disliked about Harper, elections that can go between one party's majority and another's with a 1.5% swing, and disastrous handling of every file that was working just fine before, just for the hell of it.
Trudeau got away with lots. He got re-elected twice when he shouldn't have, and got to govern for the last four years like he had a majority that he absolutely did not earn or deserve, making some of his most significant changes along the way.
You have identified the issues that you voted on, but that still does not clarify what your initial impressions of Trudeau were. You thought you were voting for "Paul Martin in colourful socks" - why? What specifically reminded you of Paul Martin?
What were the most "significant changes" in policy from 2019 to 2024 that the NDP did not readily support? You can debate the merits of the NDP's choices in this time period, but you cannot blame one man for specific policy changes, let alone actual governance or societal outcomes, and at the same time gloss over the two-party support for said policies. Either Trudeau's governance agenda fundamentally had appeal among the support base of two different political parties, or it did not. You cannot give a rational assessment of a politician's legacy without an objective accounting of where they ignored or defied pushback and where they actually received broad-based encouragement.
I'm not quite sure what you are asking here. I guess I failed to conduct sufficient psycho-political analysis on the leader in question before seeing him in action. I think the rest of his record speaks for itself. And thanks to centralization of power in the PMO (another Liberal 'hold my beer' to a bad trend started by Harper) it really IS Trudeau's record. He was personally the one in the driver's seat to an extent that I also didn't anticipate.
As to the NDP, as soon as their metric for success became "keeping the Conservatives out of power", there were no Liberal policies they wouldn't go along with. Jagmeet Singh may or may not have been an explicit Liberal operative, but it doesn't matter because his actions would have been no different if he was.
The reason for the fuck Trudeau/Carney anger is the stupid destructive shit they have or want to do: climate alarmism. Genderwang tranny shit. Mass graves genocide hoax. Mass immigration. Public service bloat. Housing. Censorship. CBC & media subsidies. Central Digital Currency. Youth unemployment. Safe supply. Catch and release b/c of a judiciary out of touch with the average Joe. All the bullshit apologies. All the scandals. And people looked past all that and voted them in anyways. It’s all fucking gross. It’s not just fuck Trudeau/Carney, it’s fuck everyone who voted for this gross gross shit
Snort. I won't delete this or ban, since everyone needs to blow off some steam, but for everyone else paying attention, if this had been directed at someone else, this would have been a comment ban.
I keep the comments as civil as possible, Roddy, because that's good for business, and The Line is a business. Don't make a habit of this.
10 likes to this comment, for the wording, esp. the first sentence. And for the concise, properly widely encompassing contents. Carney will drive Canada into the hole that he helped Trudeau to dig. For Carney, Canada is nothing but a plaything to experiment on at the end of his working life, that is evident from examining the public information available regarding him. I wish him a short and a very harsh ride.
"Canada is nothing but a plaything to experiment on at the end of his working life"
Ummm, how is that not more or less equally true of every Canadian Prime Minister? Every Canadian Prime Minister had their career peak in their time as Prime Minister and never achieved anything more consequential after that. Every Canadian Prime Minister "experiments" with what they believe is their superior knowledge on what would benefit the country.
You know, there's smarter criticisms available to make of Carney than the garbage that the Canadian conservative movement keeps regurgitating. Like the Trojan Horse Bill C-2 that Conservatives currently seem incapable of questioning even the slightest.
Just finished listening your segment on "fuck Carney" sentiment, and I think Matt's theory of "anger based on Trudeau keep getting away with things" is quite on point. Also personally, I wished that Trudeau hadn't resigned so that we have a historical record of Canadian voters, by massive landslide, rejected Trudeau. Not just some opinion polls that existed in archived Wikipedia or 338 page, but in documented historical record of the country.
The fact that didn't happen because Carney managed to salvage Liberal party disappointed me, and I can see people who shares the same feeling as me (but more intense) will channel that frustration onto Carney. This is the pattern of Canadian electoral history, with Turner, Campbell, or Eves in ON were rejected by voters in large part as rejection of their predecessors.
If in 40-50 years or so people read the legacy of Trudeau and saw "he never lost an election" as part of it, they'd think that Trudeau was some great PM that defined Canadian identity in a way he wanted it to be, and no record shown to disagree with that piece.
I doubt it. Decades later we know Trudeau Sr and Mulroney were unpopular. The fact that they weren't shown the door by the electorate doesn't change that. JT was far from the first leader or the last who will leave rather than face certain defeat. History will record that.
We don't really know that though. Mulroney was considered this elder statesman who wisely brought in free trade, and Trudeau Sr. is practically venerated as a saint in eastern Canada for "giving" us the highly dubious gifts of the Charter and multiculturalism.
Mulroney wasn't looked at that way in 1993 and neither was Trudeau in 1984. Give it 30 years and even JT may be looked at favourably. That won't change the record on how he was looked at when he left office.
Did we? As a millenial new Canadian, this is the first I've heard of it. Before this I only know that he's the best PM Canada ever had, and the airport.
Well, those who study the history would. He won two minorities in elections with near identical results. Similar to Trudeau in 2019 and 21. He saw the writing on the wall and started planning his exit. Trudeau did not.
This is a very normal Canadian political move. Jump ship right before you get decimated. It's not a particularly novel thing, and even the liberals winning another election isn't that unprecedented. What remains to be seen is if Carney can do what many have previously struggled with and actually separate from his predecessor. He's certainly trying, at least.
I am happy to say that prior to seeing Junior at the Throne Speech I had not thought of him at all since at least February. (I noted the consternation about the footwear he wore at that event but as the joke goes, I don’t have any less respect for him now, than I did before he made that sartorial choice.) Despite my concerns about how Carney actually will govern, his arrival has been such a breath of fresh air from a gravitas/seriousness/communication style perspective that he has largely scrubbed Junior from my memory. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.
But yeah, regarding those concerns about how Carney will govern. (And also yeah, about that axiom, “we are recording early so something is gonna’ happen that we would want to address”.) Apparently, late this afternoon Carney responded to a question by declaring that if a Province doesn’t want a pipeline running through its territory, then no pipeline shall traverse that Province. Sorry, but this is genuinely disqualifying for a PM. Now, maybe he will walk this back after a night of sober thought and consultations with some Constitutional experts. And we should always judge PM’s by their actual actions and not their (potentially) off-the-cuff words. But this is a VERY bad sign. Because I am willing to give Carney a shot, I was shaking my head at Jen’s neighbour instantaneously replacing the Fuck Trudeau flag with a Fuck Carney flag. But if Carney sticks to this position, I could see me coming to share that sentiment.
I find it strange that Alberta doesn't want any other province to veto a pipeline, but believes it has a right to blackmail the country into something it wants. The "pipeline or we secede" seems to me to be the other side of the same coin as 'no one wants a pipeline here".
Pipelines have significant and immediate benefits: they bring investment, jobs, and wealth. That’s why Alberta and Saskatchewan want them. Opposition to pipelines on trumped-up environmental concerns is petty and gross. It’s jealousy, and that just gross. So much of Canada just grosses me out.
The benefits of pipelines are massive. The costs are small. A country that wasn’t governed by cynics would get them built
I mean there's the classic response here of "we did actually build pipelines under Trudeau", but my point is why does what Alberta and Saskatchewan want matter more than what Manitoba or Ontario wants? To flip it, Alberta doesn't like green energy incentives, but other provinces do. So does that mean we should ignore Alberta? We live in a confederation with a weak federal government, that means provinces are going to have a say
Alberta/Sask does nothing to block the ability of another province to grow their economy or trade.
Alberta leads the Nation in green energy investment and projects and it’s not even close. It’s the Wild West of windmills and solar panels out here. This is why Premier Smith put a 6 month pause (now expired) on permit issuance while regulation caught up. Hasn’t slowed down as a consequence.
What are Canadians supposed to think about a Carney supposition that:
-Alberta wants another pipeline to BC tidewater.
-This BC pipeline could make the “approved list” of projects deemed to be in the national interest.
-Any Province that is facing a “national interest” pipeline traveling through it can say no, thanks.
Pipelines that cross Provincial boundaries fall under federal jurisdiction, but Carney’s waffling suggests that he will not spend one cent of his political capital to override Provincial objections and approve a pipeline anyway. (Certainly not a pipeline through Quebec, with a Quebec election looming).
I appreciate your thoughtfulness in mitigating the risks of audience capture. On that broader topic of malaise/polarization/anger, I think even talking about it openly and with compassion is a good start! Just how you speak directly to people's behaviour, you speak to those emotions too. Maybe if institutions and leaders had been better at doing that during the woke era, that pressure would have been released? Anyway, thanks for the podcast! Also, loved the Marc Garneau article!
I was in high school when Marc Garneau went up the first time. 1984 was a great year that I'll always remember because ... a Canadian was in space. I think you can praise the man, his accomplishments and his manner and separate that from legitimate criticism. There is anger in the land from all directions. Pandemic laid everything bare. (Why no Royal Commission on how and why 60K fellow citizens died?) but everyone has a smartphone and social media have been around a long time now. Something has happened to our brains. We talk to people online that we've never met before and type things we would never say to that individual in person. I think our brains have been rewired and this is part one of the inevitable singularity.
It would be highly beneficial to identify who is making the decisions at the White House. It sure as hell isn't Trump. He is just the blithering idiot of a showman. I would like to think our behind the scenes people are getting a grasp as to how decisions are made.
Glad we are all enjoying the political entertainment. As our editors suggested, it's all just fun till someone gets poked in the eye. 2026 will be better yet!
Ms. Gerson's disappointment at the nation not rising to greatness in response to some name calling and economic punishment is a little surprising. There is no nation to rise. We do not have autonomy and certainly no defining culture. Globalisation and years of culturicide by the LPC ensured this.
As noted elsewhere, Trudeau minor isn't as much hated as despised. He was a vacuous windsock, and woke was the prevailing wind. Those who voted for him are contemptible, and they mindlessly transferred their support to Mr. Carney. And so he is now despised, as one of them. The irony lies in the fact the LPC supporters view Mr. Trump's supporters as morons.
Bad news, you are not conservatives. The old Progressive Conservative Party (I miss it too) was basically the LPC with brains. While both editors claim innumeracy, they clearly understand that just because you have a credit card, doesn't mean you have money.
Trudeau was exceptionally over-hyped and over-hated purely as a result of circumstances of birth. His father was one of the more polarizing Prime Ministers, and those who loved and those who hated Pierre Trudeau's legacy projected their expectations of continuity onto his son. The result was a Prime Minister whom a large chunk of Canadians never actually assessed on the merits: neither worth the active support that he received in his early political career from 2008 to 2012, nor worth the hate that he has long endured from the conservative movement.
As a repeated candidate for MP myself, I have been seriously held back by being a mere mortal in terms of name recognition; but I can also count on one or two hands the number of people who actively hate my political work. Nobody hates you when you are a perceived nobody; some people hated Justin Trudeau as soon as he was born. Trudeau was not in office for a particularly long time by the standards of a typical Prime Minister, and probably felt he deserved another shot accordingly - even though what Canadians were actually tired of were not so much his time in political office, but instead simply tired of his 5 decades in the public limelight altogether.
Even though I expect Carney to burn expectations and someday crater in public support, he will never be hated the way Trudeau is, simply because he does not have the same number of decades in the public limelight that Trudeau did.
Hilarious, I am just listening to Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro talking about how both Trump and Elon are already cooling the fires of their fight. While I appreciate your work sometimes you should listen to American commentators.
I don't think you should take it at face value that Trump and Elon are all good now just because people who have a vested interest in avoiding the appearance of disunity are telling us that they've kissed and made up.
People don't hate Trudeau for irrational reasons, or at least many don't.
Trudeau ran a decade-long active and deliberate campaign of destruction on the Canada we grew up in and were proud of before he came to power. He earned every speck of animosity that many people have for him, including myself who actually voted for him in 2015 (yay legal weed and less so electoral reform!).
He spent fantastic amounts of money on redistribution and nonsense, while productivity went backwards and standard of living fell. He made our justice system a joke and let crime spiral out of control. He denigrated Canadian symbols, traditions, and identity, especially anything connected with British English Canada. He displayed particular contempt for any white men who weren't completely on board with self-flagellation, while going so far as to embrace insane conspiracy theories like the Kamloops mass grave mirage to boost the victim profile of every other group. He busted open the floodgates to effectively indiscriminate mass immigration, without really any public debate or even much announcement, drastically changing the demographics of our cities and overwhelming our infrastructure. He oversaw the biggest increase in house prices in our country's history, pricing entire generations out of the housing market and acted like this was no big deal at all. He corrupted our media with his payoffs and subsidies. He politicized the public service and judiciary with deeply ideological appointments. He played cynical procedural games in Parliament and avoided accountability for a huge number of scandals. He embraced insanity like UNDRIP and made infrastructure impossible to build. He ran the 2021 election in a shockingly slimy way by calling it while Covid was still active, then demonizing the unvaccinated and gun owners in order to avoid accountability for government waste and overreach. And I'm missing a bunch of examples. He spent his entire term wasting resources, missing opportunities, dividing every available group against another, all while carrying on the most smug, self-satisfied attitude. Matt and Jen did a spectacular job of documenting the many failures of the Trudeau regime, much of it in real time. They shouldn't be so fast to forget these.
And yes, it was especially galling that he kept getting away with it. Finally it was looking like Canadians had figured it out, and were able to focus and see through the bullshit long enough to install a new government that would undo some of the damage, uncover some of the corruption that was permanently stalled in committee, reverse some of the trends, and restore hope to those who had felt targeted and toremented for an entire decade.
But in the end, Trudeau really did get away with it, and the absurdly cynical installation of Mark Carney was just the latest example of how Trudeau and his enablers avoided comeuppance. That Carney avoided addressing any of the 10-year record of the party he was hand-picked to take over, and rather ran his election on a fictional boogeyman campaign against his new friend Donald Trump, abetted by the Globe and Mail, just adds butter cream frosting and a cherry on top.
So I can understand how this anger has transferred directly to Mark Carney. The bad guys weren't brought to justice or even chastised for their behaviour, the reset didn't happen, and while the pace of devastation might slow for a little while (if that), I don't see the trajectory changing.
And don't say "oh only a Liberal could (promise to) make this or that minor change". If Poilievre won a 230 seat majority last fall on a "fuck the media we don't care what they say" campaign, his party sure wouldn't be constrained by what criticisms pundits would have. Especially as half of the legacy media would be packing their shit right now and cleaning out their desks for the unemployment line with the end of subsidies and CBC funding.
For someone who self-identified as voting Liberal in 2015, I find your account of your change in mind to be opaque and quite dubious. You literally pivoted in your post from a superficial duo of preferred policies as a half-sentence justification for voting Liberal, to then listing out a torrent of post-2015 Conservative talking points and accusations. I am left with absolutely no idea of what the heck you were surprised by. When exactly was the first time that Trudeau ever did something that you were actually *surprised* by? Just who did you actually think he was in the 2015 election?
I thought Trudeau was another ordinary cynical politician the night he announced his leadership bid in 2012, and very little surprised me with him in his time in power, beyond the galling lie on electoral reform and the harassment of Jody Wilson-Raybould.
He did not actually "get away" with much of anything. He never recovered his peak popularity nor another majority after his first term, he served as Prime Minister for a time duration of a typical Prime Minister, his voting support fell below 2015 Harper levels after a similar amount of time in power, and he faced the ignominy of being forced out of power by his own party. He's now quietly faded away from political life like every past Prime Minister with no current political power, whatsoever (whereas Stephen Harper had a post-PM role as Chair of the Conservative Party Fund).
As to voting Liberal in 2015, I was younger and more naive, and I was annoyed at Harper for - ironically - letting the housing market climb too fast (including stuff like 40 year mortgages and too low too long interest rates) and increasing immigration too much. I was actually starting to warm up to the CPC toward the end of their term but always felt it was very stupid to keep marijuana illegal, and important to get electoral reform passed (in my imagination this was sure to be MMP), so yah those were the issues I voted on.
Trudeau's policies beyond the headline ones were either vague or poorly publicized and I figured I was otherwise voting for Paul Martin in colourful socks. Liberals cared about the little guy so they would return to sensible policies on population intake and housing, and not change much else of what was working, right? At the end of the the crazy-polling 2015 election I also figured the Liberals would get a minority so if things went sideways we could always bring Harper (or his replacement) back pretty easily.
Well 10 years later we got a population perpetually micro-dosed on gummies, "hold my beer" on every policy I disliked about Harper, elections that can go between one party's majority and another's with a 1.5% swing, and disastrous handling of every file that was working just fine before, just for the hell of it.
Trudeau got away with lots. He got re-elected twice when he shouldn't have, and got to govern for the last four years like he had a majority that he absolutely did not earn or deserve, making some of his most significant changes along the way.
You have identified the issues that you voted on, but that still does not clarify what your initial impressions of Trudeau were. You thought you were voting for "Paul Martin in colourful socks" - why? What specifically reminded you of Paul Martin?
What were the most "significant changes" in policy from 2019 to 2024 that the NDP did not readily support? You can debate the merits of the NDP's choices in this time period, but you cannot blame one man for specific policy changes, let alone actual governance or societal outcomes, and at the same time gloss over the two-party support for said policies. Either Trudeau's governance agenda fundamentally had appeal among the support base of two different political parties, or it did not. You cannot give a rational assessment of a politician's legacy without an objective accounting of where they ignored or defied pushback and where they actually received broad-based encouragement.
I'm not quite sure what you are asking here. I guess I failed to conduct sufficient psycho-political analysis on the leader in question before seeing him in action. I think the rest of his record speaks for itself. And thanks to centralization of power in the PMO (another Liberal 'hold my beer' to a bad trend started by Harper) it really IS Trudeau's record. He was personally the one in the driver's seat to an extent that I also didn't anticipate.
As to the NDP, as soon as their metric for success became "keeping the Conservatives out of power", there were no Liberal policies they wouldn't go along with. Jagmeet Singh may or may not have been an explicit Liberal operative, but it doesn't matter because his actions would have been no different if he was.
Are you both fucking stupid?
The reason for the fuck Trudeau/Carney anger is the stupid destructive shit they have or want to do: climate alarmism. Genderwang tranny shit. Mass graves genocide hoax. Mass immigration. Public service bloat. Housing. Censorship. CBC & media subsidies. Central Digital Currency. Youth unemployment. Safe supply. Catch and release b/c of a judiciary out of touch with the average Joe. All the bullshit apologies. All the scandals. And people looked past all that and voted them in anyways. It’s all fucking gross. It’s not just fuck Trudeau/Carney, it’s fuck everyone who voted for this gross gross shit
Snort. I won't delete this or ban, since everyone needs to blow off some steam, but for everyone else paying attention, if this had been directed at someone else, this would have been a comment ban.
I keep the comments as civil as possible, Roddy, because that's good for business, and The Line is a business. Don't make a habit of this.
Geez Matt, Jen used to drop 50 f-bombs a show and you never scolded her for it. I was just channeling her vibe.
Nothing to add to my above.
10 likes to this comment, for the wording, esp. the first sentence. And for the concise, properly widely encompassing contents. Carney will drive Canada into the hole that he helped Trudeau to dig. For Carney, Canada is nothing but a plaything to experiment on at the end of his working life, that is evident from examining the public information available regarding him. I wish him a short and a very harsh ride.
"Canada is nothing but a plaything to experiment on at the end of his working life"
Ummm, how is that not more or less equally true of every Canadian Prime Minister? Every Canadian Prime Minister had their career peak in their time as Prime Minister and never achieved anything more consequential after that. Every Canadian Prime Minister "experiments" with what they believe is their superior knowledge on what would benefit the country.
You know, there's smarter criticisms available to make of Carney than the garbage that the Canadian conservative movement keeps regurgitating. Like the Trojan Horse Bill C-2 that Conservatives currently seem incapable of questioning even the slightest.
Just finished listening your segment on "fuck Carney" sentiment, and I think Matt's theory of "anger based on Trudeau keep getting away with things" is quite on point. Also personally, I wished that Trudeau hadn't resigned so that we have a historical record of Canadian voters, by massive landslide, rejected Trudeau. Not just some opinion polls that existed in archived Wikipedia or 338 page, but in documented historical record of the country.
The fact that didn't happen because Carney managed to salvage Liberal party disappointed me, and I can see people who shares the same feeling as me (but more intense) will channel that frustration onto Carney. This is the pattern of Canadian electoral history, with Turner, Campbell, or Eves in ON were rejected by voters in large part as rejection of their predecessors.
If in 40-50 years or so people read the legacy of Trudeau and saw "he never lost an election" as part of it, they'd think that Trudeau was some great PM that defined Canadian identity in a way he wanted it to be, and no record shown to disagree with that piece.
I doubt it. Decades later we know Trudeau Sr and Mulroney were unpopular. The fact that they weren't shown the door by the electorate doesn't change that. JT was far from the first leader or the last who will leave rather than face certain defeat. History will record that.
We don't really know that though. Mulroney was considered this elder statesman who wisely brought in free trade, and Trudeau Sr. is practically venerated as a saint in eastern Canada for "giving" us the highly dubious gifts of the Charter and multiculturalism.
Mulroney wasn't looked at that way in 1993 and neither was Trudeau in 1984. Give it 30 years and even JT may be looked at favourably. That won't change the record on how he was looked at when he left office.
The difference is that Liberal in 1984 and PC in 1993 were decimated, while Liberal in 2025 increased their vote share and seats.
That won't change the fact that people will know Trudeau would have certainly lost. Like we know Pearson would have lost in 1968.
Did we? As a millenial new Canadian, this is the first I've heard of it. Before this I only know that he's the best PM Canada ever had, and the airport.
Well, those who study the history would. He won two minorities in elections with near identical results. Similar to Trudeau in 2019 and 21. He saw the writing on the wall and started planning his exit. Trudeau did not.
This is a very normal Canadian political move. Jump ship right before you get decimated. It's not a particularly novel thing, and even the liberals winning another election isn't that unprecedented. What remains to be seen is if Carney can do what many have previously struggled with and actually separate from his predecessor. He's certainly trying, at least.
I am happy to say that prior to seeing Junior at the Throne Speech I had not thought of him at all since at least February. (I noted the consternation about the footwear he wore at that event but as the joke goes, I don’t have any less respect for him now, than I did before he made that sartorial choice.) Despite my concerns about how Carney actually will govern, his arrival has been such a breath of fresh air from a gravitas/seriousness/communication style perspective that he has largely scrubbed Junior from my memory. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.
But yeah, regarding those concerns about how Carney will govern. (And also yeah, about that axiom, “we are recording early so something is gonna’ happen that we would want to address”.) Apparently, late this afternoon Carney responded to a question by declaring that if a Province doesn’t want a pipeline running through its territory, then no pipeline shall traverse that Province. Sorry, but this is genuinely disqualifying for a PM. Now, maybe he will walk this back after a night of sober thought and consultations with some Constitutional experts. And we should always judge PM’s by their actual actions and not their (potentially) off-the-cuff words. But this is a VERY bad sign. Because I am willing to give Carney a shot, I was shaking my head at Jen’s neighbour instantaneously replacing the Fuck Trudeau flag with a Fuck Carney flag. But if Carney sticks to this position, I could see me coming to share that sentiment.
I find it strange that Alberta doesn't want any other province to veto a pipeline, but believes it has a right to blackmail the country into something it wants. The "pipeline or we secede" seems to me to be the other side of the same coin as 'no one wants a pipeline here".
Pipelines have significant and immediate benefits: they bring investment, jobs, and wealth. That’s why Alberta and Saskatchewan want them. Opposition to pipelines on trumped-up environmental concerns is petty and gross. It’s jealousy, and that just gross. So much of Canada just grosses me out.
The benefits of pipelines are massive. The costs are small. A country that wasn’t governed by cynics would get them built
I mean there's the classic response here of "we did actually build pipelines under Trudeau", but my point is why does what Alberta and Saskatchewan want matter more than what Manitoba or Ontario wants? To flip it, Alberta doesn't like green energy incentives, but other provinces do. So does that mean we should ignore Alberta? We live in a confederation with a weak federal government, that means provinces are going to have a say
2 things.
Alberta/Sask does nothing to block the ability of another province to grow their economy or trade.
Alberta leads the Nation in green energy investment and projects and it’s not even close. It’s the Wild West of windmills and solar panels out here. This is why Premier Smith put a 6 month pause (now expired) on permit issuance while regulation caught up. Hasn’t slowed down as a consequence.
It depends on the merits of the thing.
What are Canadians supposed to think about a Carney supposition that:
-Alberta wants another pipeline to BC tidewater.
-This BC pipeline could make the “approved list” of projects deemed to be in the national interest.
-Any Province that is facing a “national interest” pipeline traveling through it can say no, thanks.
Pipelines that cross Provincial boundaries fall under federal jurisdiction, but Carney’s waffling suggests that he will not spend one cent of his political capital to override Provincial objections and approve a pipeline anyway. (Certainly not a pipeline through Quebec, with a Quebec election looming).
I appreciate your thoughtfulness in mitigating the risks of audience capture. On that broader topic of malaise/polarization/anger, I think even talking about it openly and with compassion is a good start! Just how you speak directly to people's behaviour, you speak to those emotions too. Maybe if institutions and leaders had been better at doing that during the woke era, that pressure would have been released? Anyway, thanks for the podcast! Also, loved the Marc Garneau article!
I was in high school when Marc Garneau went up the first time. 1984 was a great year that I'll always remember because ... a Canadian was in space. I think you can praise the man, his accomplishments and his manner and separate that from legitimate criticism. There is anger in the land from all directions. Pandemic laid everything bare. (Why no Royal Commission on how and why 60K fellow citizens died?) but everyone has a smartphone and social media have been around a long time now. Something has happened to our brains. We talk to people online that we've never met before and type things we would never say to that individual in person. I think our brains have been rewired and this is part one of the inevitable singularity.
It would be highly beneficial to identify who is making the decisions at the White House. It sure as hell isn't Trump. He is just the blithering idiot of a showman. I would like to think our behind the scenes people are getting a grasp as to how decisions are made.
Glad we are all enjoying the political entertainment. As our editors suggested, it's all just fun till someone gets poked in the eye. 2026 will be better yet!
Ms. Gerson's disappointment at the nation not rising to greatness in response to some name calling and economic punishment is a little surprising. There is no nation to rise. We do not have autonomy and certainly no defining culture. Globalisation and years of culturicide by the LPC ensured this.
As noted elsewhere, Trudeau minor isn't as much hated as despised. He was a vacuous windsock, and woke was the prevailing wind. Those who voted for him are contemptible, and they mindlessly transferred their support to Mr. Carney. And so he is now despised, as one of them. The irony lies in the fact the LPC supporters view Mr. Trump's supporters as morons.
Bad news, you are not conservatives. The old Progressive Conservative Party (I miss it too) was basically the LPC with brains. While both editors claim innumeracy, they clearly understand that just because you have a credit card, doesn't mean you have money.
Trudeau was exceptionally over-hyped and over-hated purely as a result of circumstances of birth. His father was one of the more polarizing Prime Ministers, and those who loved and those who hated Pierre Trudeau's legacy projected their expectations of continuity onto his son. The result was a Prime Minister whom a large chunk of Canadians never actually assessed on the merits: neither worth the active support that he received in his early political career from 2008 to 2012, nor worth the hate that he has long endured from the conservative movement.
As a repeated candidate for MP myself, I have been seriously held back by being a mere mortal in terms of name recognition; but I can also count on one or two hands the number of people who actively hate my political work. Nobody hates you when you are a perceived nobody; some people hated Justin Trudeau as soon as he was born. Trudeau was not in office for a particularly long time by the standards of a typical Prime Minister, and probably felt he deserved another shot accordingly - even though what Canadians were actually tired of were not so much his time in political office, but instead simply tired of his 5 decades in the public limelight altogether.
Even though I expect Carney to burn expectations and someday crater in public support, he will never be hated the way Trudeau is, simply because he does not have the same number of decades in the public limelight that Trudeau did.
Hilarious, I am just listening to Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro talking about how both Trump and Elon are already cooling the fires of their fight. While I appreciate your work sometimes you should listen to American commentators.
I don't think you should take it at face value that Trump and Elon are all good now just because people who have a vested interest in avoiding the appearance of disunity are telling us that they've kissed and made up.