After a year of declining poll numbers, failed resets and embarrassing scandals, Justin Trudeau’s government is now experiencing a slow-motion collapse, a kind of political “slow heat death”.
Usually, leaders who have stayed in power for nearly a decade, as Trudeau has, can look forward to leaving behind a legacy in the form of a signature policy that will endure beyond their own political lives. But the Canadian PM may not even have that, because on 1 April Canada’s federal carbon tax is set to increase, and what had been a relatively uncontroversial measure when it was introduced nearly five years ago has become nothing short of a political firestorm.
