Pressure has been building on Trudeau since October, when Liberal backbenchers in Ottawa began warning that if he doesn’t quit, he’ll drag the party down with him in the 2025 election.
A recent Ipsos poll found that 73% of Canadians think Trudeau should step down as Liberal Party leader, among them 43% of Liberal voters.
Conservatives floated three consecutive no-confidence votes in the government, the latest on December 9, with Trudeau’s Liberals surviving thanks to support from their coalition partner – the NDP.
But with arch neocon Chrystia Freeland’s shock resignation last week, and the NDP vowing to table its own no-confidence motion after parliament returns from break on January 27, Trudeau seems doomed.
What’s Canadians’ Problem With Trudeau?
Economic malaise: Canada is on the brink of a recession. Inflation has topped 14.5% over four years, while housing is out of reach for millions of young Canadians thanks to skyrocketing immigration (nearly a million new arrivals every two years), lack of new construction, and homes being snapped up by hedge funds.
Finding a job has also become more difficult, with the official unemployment rate reaching 6.8% (or 8.2% counting by 2019 labor force participation figures).
A social safety net in tatters: including excessively long waiting times for medical procedures, and cutbacks in education and public services.
Petty personal authoritarianism: from unyieldingly harsh Covid lockdowns to the invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to crush the Canada trucker protest (ruled unconstitutional in 2024), and an Orwellian speech law making its way through parliament threatening jail time for literal thought crimes, the PM has proven an excellent ‘young global leader’, in WEF chief Klaus Schwab’s estimation, and Canadians are sick of it.
That’s on top of an aggressive culture wars and LGBT* agenda being pushed through Canada’s schools, including support for ‘gender-affirming care’ for people as young as adolescents – a major concern for many parents.
Fumbled foreign policy: from support for Israel in the Gaza conflict, to the spending of over $3.5 billion on ‘humanitarian’ aid in Syria while Canada’s Indigenous communities continue to lack clean drinking water, to exuberant support for Ukraine, which has cost taxpayers nearly $7.7 billion, many Canadians are looking south for inspiration on a ‘Canada First’-style foreign policy.
The parliament’s standing ovation for SS Galicia Division vet Yaroslav Hunka last year seemed to have driven the point home on the lengths Trudeau’s government has been willing to go to in support of NATO’s aggressively anti-Russian agenda.
Personal scandals: from blackface coverups to a seemingly never-ending series of ethics and corruption probes, including the SNC-Lavalin and WE Charity affairs, and alleged pay-to-play corruption involving the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Justin Trudeau has proven that he’s not above using his post for personal enrichment, another reason why many Canadians want him to quit.
* banned in Russia as an extremist organization