Toodle-Ooo, Trudeau? Update: Announcement Coming

Alternate headline: North America’s Upgrades Continue Apace.

The end of the second Trudeau era in Canada had already come into view over the last few weeks. Now it might only take a few more days. The Globe and Mail reported last night that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will resign on Wednesday, a story that got picked up by Reuters and whose reporters accelerated the timeline:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to announce as early as Monday that he will resign as Liberal Party Leader, The Globe and Mail reported on Sunday, citing three sources.

The sources told the Globe and Mail that they don’t know definitely when Trudeau will announce his plans to leave but said they expect it will happen before a key national caucus meeting on Wednesday.

Trudeau’s premiership has been on life support for a while. Canadians have clearly tired of Liberal rule, backing the Tories now by 23 points in national polling. The current crisis began when Trudeau tried to float a new $7 billion spending bill that even his own finance minister couldn’t stomach. Chrystia Freeland resigned her post rather than support Trudeau, calling the bill a “political gimmick,” and suggested that Trudeau should think about the next stage of his career.

That opened the Liberal floodgates, with Trudeau’s former allies suddenly demanding new leadership. That continued over the weekend, not just with individual MPs but with regional Liberal councils as well:

“It’s now January 4,” Fragiskatos said. “I believe that [Trudeau] has had a very good opportunity to consider his future … The Christmas holidays have passed. Constituents want to know where I stand.”

Fragiskatos joins a chorus of other Liberals who are publicly calling on Trudeau to resign, including Winnipeg South Centre MP Ben Carr, Don Valley West MP Robert Oliphant and Mount Royal MP Anthony Housefather.

“A number of members of parliament have expressed the view now that the prime minister ought to resign,” Fragiskatos said. “That number has grown and frankly, is likely to grow larger.”

Some regional caucuses, including Atlantic, Quebec and Ontario Liberal MPs, are also reportedly encouraging the prime minister to step down as party leader.

Fragiskatos tried to put a positive gloss on it, insisting that history would look fondly back on the Trudeau II: Marxist Boogaloo era. We’ll let history speak for itself, but right now, Trudeau appears to be just the latest Leftist elitist to fall in the West. With the exception of France — where the Left had to work overtime to prevent their loss of power — populists from the Right have rejected the old and bankrupt progressive world order. That very much includes the United States, where voters decisively rejected the elitsts’ attempts to pull a switcheroo after Joe Biden got exposed as a cognitively impaired incompetent and his hand-picked successor not much different.

Right now, Liberals hope that Fragiskatos is incorrect. Their only hope to hold onto power is to convince voters that Trudeau failed rather than the progressive Liberal agenda. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre told Jordan Peterson this weekend that the Liberals’ core Marxism and obsession with multiculturalism are the real problems — and he insists that the Tories have to stop playing along with it:

“First they were communists, and then they became socialist, and then they became social democrats, and then they became — they stole the word liberal, and then they ruined that word. They changed their name to progressives, and then they changed their name to woke. And now they claim they don’t want to be called woke anymore,” he said. …

“We’re not interested in the world’s ethnocultural conflicts,” Poilievre said, praising multiculturalism but saying people who come to Canada need to leave their baggage back in their home countries.

“Most people come here to get away from those things. So by getting back to a common sense of values and identity, and reminding people that they are — when they get here, they are Canadian first. Canada first. Leave the hyphens; we don’t need to be a hyphenated society.”

He urged Canadians to “put aside race, this obsession with race that wokeism has reinserted.”

Just the fact that Poilievre did Peterson’s podcast was enough to send Canadian media looking for smelling salts and fainting couches. Whether the election comes immediately or Liberals attempt to hold out for the next few months, the writing is on the wall for the Left north of the border — and probably for the media there as well as here.

Update: In response to Moflicky’s question in the comments, it’s not clear what this means for elections in Canada. That’s one issue that the Liberals will discuss in their convention starting on Tuesday. Had Trudeau lost a no-confidence vote (usually on budget matters), then elections would have to be called immediately and the Liberals would have created a caretaker government for the interregnum. Since Trudeau is resigning (reportedly), they could choose a new PM as long as their coalition with NDP would support a new government. Realistically, though, that would only extend their power for another few months and risks deepening their collapse in polling. We should know more later this week.

Update: Whatever they decide, the moment is coming quickly:

Justin Trudeau will make an announcement at 10:45am this morning at his residence at Rideau Cottage, the press gallery was just told

— Brian Platt (@btaplatt) January 6, 2025