Justin Trudeau’s failed vision for Canada

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In his recent book, On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century, former British prime minister Tony Blair writes that “it takes 10 years to change a country.” In Justin Trudeau’s now almost 10 years in office the most profound changes have resulted from events, not policies, including the advent of Donald Trump, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the election of a slew of Conservative premiers and, of course, the COVID pandemic. At the same time, the accelerating pace of technological change made most government actions seem less important.

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Few of Trudeau’s policies had the significant benefits promised for them. Deficit spending failed to boost incomes. The federal carbon tax did not reduce emissions: oil and gas production reached record highs. National unity was weakened by repeated federal intrusions into provincial jurisdiction. Canada’s long-standing embrace of immigration weakened when a surge in new arrivals after 2020 overwhelmed health care and housing. Fatally, Trudeau’s tenure was marked by lack of a strategic vision and indifference to efficient implementation.

Elected on a smorgasbord platform promising a more activist federal government that would put Canada in the vanguard of the global progressive movement, Justin Trudeau’s government was soon swimming upstream against currents forcing it to change direction. Trump’s election in 2016 triggered an unexpected renegotiation of NAFTA. China’s illegal detention of the “two Michaels” aborted attempts to improve economic relations with an increasingly autocratic and rogue regime. A string of newly elected provincial governments fiercely resisted further federal intrusions. The COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine underscored the importance of defence spending and border and energy security. All these forces meant Trudeau was increasingly out of step with his times — discordancy that was reflected in a falling share of the popular vote and minority status after the last two elections.

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Before becoming prime minister, Trudeau had mused about Canada being the world’s “first post-national state” — thus making him a charter member of “the confident paternalistic vanguard … seduced into anticipating a post-nationalist future,” as Oxford economics professor Paul Collier phrased it in 2020’s The Future of Capitalism. This world view became increasingly obsolete, however, after the election of Donald Trump, Britain’s vote for Brexit, the backlash against Germany’s acceptance of one million Middle East refugees and the closing of borders worldwide during COVID.

Collier argues that the flaw in “post-nationalist” thinking is that while many elites like to “denigrate the nation” and “actively disparage their own country,” for the mass of people “place-based identity is … hard-wired deep in our psyche.” Geographic place is “the most viable concept of nationality,” and the idea of a “non-spatial political unit is a fantasy.”

In fact, far from being post-national, Canada is almost pre-national in not allowing goods, services and people to move freely within our own territory. In 2017 Statistics Canada estimated that trade within Canada moves as if we had a seven per cent internal tariff. Our mutual distrust was underscored when a majority of provinces closed their borders to other Canadians during the COVID pandemic, something American states never did.

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Justin Trudeau has always tried to link Canada’s identity to his own progressive values, which he assumed a majority of Canadians shared. He wrote in Common Ground, his 2015 campaign autobiography, that these values include “openness, respect, compassion, justice, equality, and opportunity,” which suggested he subscribed to journalist Anthony Billen’s view that class-driven politics were giving way to new movements pushing feminist, anti-racial, LGBTQ and environmental agendas.

But there is a flaw in believing national identity is grounded in shared values. As Collier explains, “everyone believes in their own values and assumes they are the right ones on which to build shared identity.” But in fact “an astonishing range of values can be found within modern society; it is one of the defining features of modernity.”

Recent changes in Canadians’ views on immigration demonstrate how place-based identity dominates values. Our national consensus on the benefits of immigration made us almost unique in the G7. But Trudeau undermined this consensus by authorizing a post-2020 surge without either making the case for it publicly or consulting other levels of government regarding its almost certain impact on housing and government services. The immigration surge also undermined other parts of Trudeau’s agenda, another pitfall of not having an overriding strategic plan. Extensive research shows that support for redistributing incomes within a country erodes rapidly when immigration increases, as people feel their hard-earned taxes are going to groups perceived as not contributing their fair share.

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Tony Blair explains why values cannot be the sole basis for foreign policy, either. Soon after becoming prime minister, he writes, he realized that Labour’s platform promise of an “ethical foreign policy” was impossibly naïve “in the real world … of grown-up politics.”  Similarly, Joe Biden had to climb down from his initial hostility to Saudi Arabia to maintain American interests in the Middle East.

Despite Trudeau’s credo, he did not base his policies on values alone. For key economic policies, notably the ill-fated 2017 reform of small business taxation and the carbon tax, the government turned to academics for guidance. In both cases, that caused it to ignore important political considerations about fairness. And when public backlash led to both policies being watered down, the effect was to offend proponents without appeasing opponents. The government found itself in this position of being run over from both directions when dealing with other important issues, such as the environment and the war in Gaza.

Despite soothing assurances about how there is no conflict between the economy and the environment, in the end the Trudeau government failed to reconcile the two. Quite the opposite: Canada has had both the poorest economic growth in the G7 over the past decade and the worst score for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Despite relentless preaching about the “existential” need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fossil fuel production hit record highs. The oil and gas industry was outraged by decisions to block pipelines and cap oil and gas production, while environmentalists were offended by the government’s rescue of the Trans Mountain pipeline, its attempt to salvage the Keystone XL pipeline and the relentless increase in oil and gas production.

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In the absence of a plan to implement a clear vision for Canada, Trudeau’s government was quickly reduced to a series of poorly-designed, ineptly-implemented, incoherent and often contradictory policies. The government became famous for its inability to implement policies. Early on it embraced the “deliverology” Tony Blair pioneered — but mainly as a public relations gimmick to monitor progress on its myriad election promises. According to Blair, however, deliverology never works when applied to the whole government. It is meant to be “a focused, targeted, laser-beam-like instrument of the Leader’s priorities.” Trudeau’s creation of a new Cabinet position in 2023 to improve the delivery of government services acknowledges how completely “deliverology” failed in his government despite succeeding elsewhere.

Trudeau broke some of his 2015 promises because they had been made mainly to stoke his image as an agent of change. “Sunny ways” and open, transparent government based on a consensus in Cabinet soon gave way to the reality of the ever-increasing concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office. Having won a big majority with just under 40 per cent of the popular vote, Trudeau casually discarded his promise to end first-past-the-post elections.

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In On Leadership, Blair reflects that “governing is the one profession in which a person with no qualifications, no track record, a CV devoid of content, can rise to a position of extraordinary power. In any other walk of life, we would consider such a circumstance unthinkable, ridiculous even.” This description fits Justin Trudeau so well it would not be surprising if Blair had him in mind when writing it.

The twin measures of Trudeau’s failure are declining domestic support for his progressive agenda and Canada’s increasing irrelevance abroad. No world leader now looks to Trudeau’s Canada as anything other than an example of what to avoid. Instead of a vanguard of progressive change in the world, Trudeau became a laggard in adapting to the new reality that place-based politics trumps ideology. Other prime ministers who were as unpopular at the end of their tenures as Trudeau is now, such as Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper, recovered in stature as over time Canadians came to appreciate their accomplishments. In view of his meagre impact both at home and abroad, it is hard to believe the same will happen to Justin Trudeau.

Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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