Is Trudeau finished?

There is mayhem in the supposedly tranquil lands of Canada, my home country.

The voice of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, has been hammering home a stark message: “Immigration is out of control, crime is out of control, and now the government has lost control of the country’s finances.” He does not sound hyperbolic in claiming that everything is out of control at the worst possible moment as we face a possible trade war with the United States, our largest trading partner.

Canada has become a laughingstock around the world, and Canadians are sick of it. Open up X and there is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being taunted by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who refers to him as the “governor” of the “great state of Canada.”

Just days ago, Chrystia Freeland, who served as the minister of finance and deputy prime minister, abruptly resigned instead of delivering her scheduled fall economic update in Parliament. She released her resignation letter on X, where she scathingly asserted that we need to eschew “costly political gimmicks” to keep “our fiscal powder dry” for a possible trade war. She is referring to a decision by the government to suspend the national sales tax on certain goods relating to Christmas for two months starting this past Monday and to send out checks for $250 to 19 million working Canadians. These “gimmicks” are clearly a blatant attempt to bribe Canadians with their own money to vote for Liberal Party candidates.

But Freeland is not really to be trusted any more than Trudeau when it comes to finances. She has gone along with such gimmicks in the past, and it appears that the only reason she balked now was that Trudeau told her on Friday (on Zoom) that she was being shuffled out of the finance position to a lesser position immediately after the fall economic statement was tabled. This was, apparently, so she could take the blame for the deficit ballooning to $62 billion after the government had promised to keep it under $40 billion last year. But Freeland decided it was time to bring a gun to a knife fight and distance herself from the captain of the sinking ship. She may just have ended Trudeau’s hold on power.

Over this past year, the Liberals have lost special elections in Quebec, Toronto, and, most recently, in British Columbia. Monday’s election in a district near Vancouver saw the Conservatives take two-thirds of the vote in a district previously held by the Liberals. About one-third of the Liberal caucus is now calling for Trudeau to step down.

Why is Trudeau hanging on? Parliament is on a six-week break, so it is possible he will step down in the new year. The National Post is already running stories on who his possible successor might be. Trudeau, who was divorced earlier this year, seems to be living in a bubble and appears oblivious to the reality that he cannot possibly win again. Polls show the Conservatives winning one of the largest majorities in Canadian history, and the polls have not budged all year. Gimmicks aren’t working anymore.

It is difficult to understand why Trudeau does not at least allow his Liberal Party salvage what it can in the next election under a less unpopular leader. Canadians famously tend to vote out governments after a couple of terms—it is practically a tradition. But this feels different. The visceral hatred for this government outside the Toronto-Montreal elites is palpable.

This is a prime minister who, over the last nine years, has given us porous borders, legalized drugs, criminals released into the community instead of being locked up, uncontrolled abortion, euthanasia with hardly any guardrails, a housing crisis, rampant inflation, ballooning deficits, anti-Semitism on the streets, gender ideology in the classrooms, a crumbling military, bad relations with the United States, scandal after scandal, the suspension of basic civil rights as a political tool during the trucker convoy crisis, and a general sense of a diminished standing in the world. And yet, Trudeau continues as if everything was fine. He appears utterly disconnected from reality.

Canada used to be known for peace, order, and good government. Those days are long gone. Increasingly, we are a postmodern, post-national, and post-Christian piece of territory being fought over by various immigrant groups seeking to colonize it in the name of their own form of nationalism or political religion.

In 1965, the great Canadian philosopher George Grant wrote the classic of Canadian political thought, Lament for a Nation. In it, he lamented that Canada had ceased to exist as a sovereign state because it had been assimilated by U.S. foreign policy. He worried that Canadian identity was being lost. If only he could see us now.