After the collapse of Germany’s centre-left coalition government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz and snap elections scheduled for February, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has become the latest liberal incumbent whose popular mandate has prematurely run its course due to rising voter discontent.

On January 6, the heir to one of the settler colonial Canadian state's most influential political dynasties stood outside his official residence and announced his resignation as Prime Minister, as well as the suspension of parliament until March 24. It was an unceremonious end to his nine-year tenure at the helm of government, its trajectory summed up by one commentator with the words "soaring ambition and brutal failure."

After an over-confident Kamala Harris phenomenally lost the US presidential elections to a now even more combative Donald Trump emboldened by his sweeping electoral mandate, Trudeau’s downfall may well herald another key NATO member country’s shift towards the populist right.

As Germany braces itself for a rude awakening come election day with all eyes on the right-wing AfD which is polling in second place, Canada’s Conservative Party under their leader Pierre Poilievre, dubbed the "Canadian Trump", is already looking to capitalise on this anti-Liberal Party momentum by calling for early elections as soon as possible.

The Ukraine/Gaza double standard

 A host of reasons have contributed to the US Democrats' failure to win a second consecutive term and Scholz's and Trudeau’s demise. Chief among them are the unbridled hypocrisy of their liberal politics in which retrogressive policies are sold to the people as progress by hubristic actors who arrogantly believe in the moral infallibility of their (mis)deeds and that they are more ethical than their political rivals from the right.

On the foreign policy front, messianic support for both NATO’s costly proxy war in Ukraine and "Israel’s" horrific genocide in Gaza come to mind, which are being carried out on the backs of the tax-paying working class and against rising resentment among voters at their respective country’s entanglement in these foreign wars, marketed as necessary actions to safeguard the "free world."

In Canada and Germany, Trudeau’s and Scholz’s open-door refugee policy for Ukrainians has understandably led to deep resentment among refugees fleeing other, far more devastating wars in terms of human suffering, numbers of civilians killed, and scope of destruction, such as Sudan or Gaza.

According to figures published by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), only 334 people had arrived in Canada as of October 5, 2024, under the temporary special measures for Palestinian extended family in Gaza, with the government agency’s website blaming the shamefully low number on "extremely challenging…factors outside of Canada’s control" instead of on the lack of political will. Also, the temporary resident visa applications for Gazans fleeing genocide are capped at 5000 applications.

Now compare this to the nearly 1 million temporary emergency visas issued to Ukrainian nationals since March 2022 and the egregious double standardism and (anti-Palestinian) limits of Trudeau’s progressive politics become clear as day.

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'A sordid legacy'

While the immediate trigger for Trudeau’s resignation might have been internal party politics, as was the case with Scholz, Ottawa’s lamentable foreign policy towards "Israel’s" ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which the apartheid regime has killed over 46,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023, most of them women and children, must be factored into any posthumous analysis of the Trudeau era.

"Trudeau ultimately leaves behind a sordid legacy of complicity in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza," reads a statement by Quebec-based advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), which goes on to condemn his "staunchly pro-Israel policies" and "extreme indifference to Palestinian human rights and open disdain towards international law."

CJPME also lambasts his "consistently…hostile attitude" towards Canada’s Palestine solidarity movement, pointing out that he has voted in favour of an anti-BDS motion in parliament and that under his leadership, "[a]nti-Palestinian racism has become even more embedded in government policy."

"With his relentless smears against Canadians who stand up for Palestinian human rights, Trudeau has created a climate of repression for Palestinians and their allies," CJPME’s statement concludes in its scathing indictment of a man who began his 2015 election night victory speech with the words "Sunny ways, my friends, sunny ways. This is what positive politics can do."

13 out of 94

Palestinians and their allies in Canada are not the only ones who will have a hard time missing Trudeau. Many in Canada’s First Nations communities also have no love lost for the country’s 23^rd Prime Minister with regards to his patchy track record on Indigenous and environmental rights.

In March 2016, four months after Trudeau took office and two months before he signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into law, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published its landmark 94 Calls to Action in an effort to "redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation." As of September 2021, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s interactive Beyond 94 website which tracks the status of each call to action had marked only 13 as complete.

In 2018, the Trudeau government approved the controversial purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline which runs through Alberta and British Columbia, expanding it despite his promise that he would not build new oil pipelines. The move further cemented his reputation as a "climate hypocrite."

The expansion project, which cut through unceded Indigenous land, faced a slew of (in the end unsuccessful) legal challenges launched by First Nations groups who cited the government’s failure to uphold its constitutionally enshrined duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous groups when it "considers conduct that might adversely impact potential or established Aboriginal or treaty rights."

Crown-Indigenous relations under Trudeau are best encapsulated in the words of Eva Jewell of the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research centre based at Toronto Metropolitan University, "He was just as colonial as any other prime minister."

A progressive in blackface

Canada’s 1.5 million Black people will of course remember the diversity-touting Trudeau as the Prime Minister who repeatedly engaged in the despicable racist practice of blackface. The notorious image of his face painted dark as part of a costume went viral in 2019 when the scandal broke and has seen a revival on social media in the wake of Trudeau’s exit. It is a reminder to always take the antiracist credentials of so-called progressives with a grain of salt and choose one's allies wisely.

Equally infamously, he will also go down in Canadian history as the Prime Minister who unwittingly invited a Nazi war criminal to parliament. The now 99-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian-Canadian former conscript in the Waffen-SS who is implicated in countless war crimes, received not one, but two standing ovations from members of the House of Commons in August 2024, including Trudeau and visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Genocidal complicity, anti-Palestinian hostility, casual racism, and a penchant for superlative gaffes: that is what the faux-progressive Justin Trudeau will be remembered for by his many critics across the political spectrum, his legacy a testament to liberal hubris and hypocrisy.