On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s future was thrown in doubt. Five days later the Liberal Party is itself in peril. A week really is a long time in politics.
“I’m not thinking about elections,” Rachel Bendayan, the new minister of official languages, said outside Rideau Hall following Trudeau’s cabinet shuffle Friday.
Well, she had better think about it because one is coming.
Most Canadians now want early election as Trudeau support drops again: poll
… Though the polls haven’t yet fully captured Canadians’ reactions to Freeland’s departure, Nik Nanos(opens in a new tab), CTV News pollster and Nanos Research Chair, says Trudeau’s 2024 leadership numbers are already at their worst in his tenure as prime minister.
At about 8:45 on Monday morning, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrived on Parliament Hill, his motorcade gliding to a stop in front of the ornate set of wooden doors used almost exclusively by him.
But instead of immediately getting out, Mr. Trudeau stayed in the back seat of the black SUV, on the phone.
On the other end of the line: his deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland.
It was one of the worst weeks of his political career, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was ringing in the season.
At the Liberal Party’s annual holiday gathering, Trudeau put on his party face, despite being blindsided the day before by the snap resignation of one of his most trusted allies, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, just hours before she was due to deliver an economic statement in Parliament.
But even as some members of his own party were calling on him to leave, the prime minister struck a resolute, defiant tone as he addressed the party faithful in his dark blue suit and tie.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is under intense pressure to step down after the abrupt and acrimonious resignation of a key deputy on Monday highlighted his deep unpopularity after nearly a decade in power.
On Friday, as Mr. Trudeau tried to save his leadership by rearranging his cabinet, another prominent political ally turned on him, calling him a failed leader and vowing to bring down his government.
Have you got a couple of hours?
Justin Trudeau has carried out a major reshuffle of his cabinet, changing a third of his senior team – even as a series of blows seemed to guarantee the end of his term as prime minister and a spring election for Canada.
The move on Friday came at the end of a disastrous week that saw the shock resignation of his deputy, calls for his resignation from within his own party and public mockery from Donald Trump.
Moments before the reshuffle was announced there was one last setback, as the New Democratic party, which had been helping keep Trudeau in office, announced it was withdrawing support – essentially writing the death certificate for his government.
In recent days several pundits have described Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s current political situation as “the worst” he has ever faced. That’s entirely correct. People are rightly baffled by Trudeau’s refusal to step down.
One of the most momentous weeks of Justin Trudeau’s political career came to a close on Friday with arguably his least momentous cabinet shuffle.
This is not to take away from the personal significance of the moment for any of the new cabinet members, such as Public Safety Minister Dalton McGuinty or Housing Minister Nate Erskine-Smith, who probably expected to leave this Parliament as backbenchers.
(Open link incognito)
Fife "Will (Trudeau) actually step down, I think he will. If he doesn't, it will just be more bleeding out. It will get worse"
"So everybody who's talked to him has come away with a different version of how the discussions that they had with him went"
ICYMI – We have Telford,… pic.twitter.com/2OBtzXy09w
— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) December 20, 2024
That disgruntled Liberal members of Parliament lack the ability to remove their leader is entirely their own fault. It is they who decided to deny themselves the ability to do so.
Fairly late into its decade in government, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives passed something called the Reform Act. Introduced as an amendment to the Parliament of Canada Act as a private members bill by Conservative MP Michael Chong, its purpose was to enhance the power and influence of MPs, ensure none of them could be evicted from their caucus without the approval of their peers and—most important—grant them the power to remove their party leader.
It was then, as we thought… A major shakeup of the cabinet, rather than a few surgical transplants, as Prime Minister Trudeau takes the opportunity to widen his declared support base within his own Liberal Party.
Widened, but diluted… Most of the newbies are people that only their constituents could be expected to have ever heard of. In military terms, it is the deployment of reserves and raw recruits, the main force having been battered into ineffectiveness.
You know you’re probably not doing your best as a leader to stem an ever-growing wave of hate in your country when another leader has to personally phone you up to tell you so. That’s what happened Thursday after a repeated attack on Beth Tikvah synagogue in Montreal. That’s the message that was delivered.
Here’s a JNS write-up on Herzog’s statements.
Herzog slams ‘vile’ wave of violence against Canadian Jewry
One characteristic of a failed state is that it has no functioning national government. By that standard, Canada is failing pretty badly.
At the very moment when the country faces an existential tariff threat from the incoming administration of president-elect Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are self-consumed with division, leaving the Prime Minister essentially powerless.
President-elect Donald Trump is several weeks away from taking the oath of office, but his influence on the world stage is already making life difficult for embattled Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The longtime premier of Canada has become a favorite punching bag for Trump, who has mocked Trudeau as the “governor” of the “great state of Canada” and repeatedly insinuated that Canada should become the 51st state of the United States.
The Canadian Armed Forces has been deploying “gender advisors” to international operations, including in Ukraine and Haiti, as part of a broader push to integrate gender ideology into military activities abroad.
This initiative, highlighted in the Department of National Defence’s recently released 2024 Departmental Report, is drawing sharp criticism from veterans and observers who question its relevance during active conflicts and humanitarian crises.
Pretty sure our armed forces need to be shut down and rebuilt from the ground up.
h/t Mauser
Donald Trump doesn’t think much of Justin Trudeau. The president-elect has been needling the Canadian prime minister for weeks, amusingly calling him “governor” of the “Great State of Canada.” During the June 2018 Group of Seven summit in La Malbaie, Quebec, the president called Mr. Trudeau “meek and mild” as well as “very dishonest and weak.”
With Mr. Trump’s help, Mr. Trudeau, who has flirted with political disaster for years, came close to hitting rock bottom on Monday. This was because of the stunning resignation of Chrystia Freeland as deputy prime minister and finance minister. Often dubbed the “minister of everything” because of her influence in the Liberal government, Ms. Freeland expressed her anger and frustration with the ineffectiveness of Mr. Trudeau’s response to Mr. Trump’s threat of 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods.
