OTTAWA—Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader who governed as prime minister of Canada for nine years, is stepping down, triggering a leadership race to replace him in advance of a federal election that could come within weeks.
Trudeau’s decision to quit, driven out by his fellow caucus MPs after a brutal six months and a more than yearlong nosedive in public opinion polls, was taken after three weeks of what he called “reflection.”
Trudeau, 53, had long insisted publicly and privately up until three weeks ago that he would lead the party in the next election and defeat the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre.
On the anniversary of his father Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s famous “walk in the snow” reflection that led to his retirement from the top office, Trudeau the son had planned to stage his own dramatic snowy declaration last Feb. 29: a snowboarding photo-op on the slopes in Thunder Bay to show he was not his father, that he was energized to stay on in office, and not going anywhere.
That same day, former prime minister Brian Mulroney died. And everything got cancelled.
The period of national mourning that followed focused on political legacies and how unpopular prime ministers could defy their critics and see their places in the history books secured by action on their long-term visions for Canada.
Trudeau, a smarter and more thoughtful man than the political caricatures ever painted him as, insisted he still had a vision.
But polls showed the country no longer shared it.
Neither did most of his MPs and several of his ministers: 10 ministers quit in 2024 alone, most spectacularly Chrystia Freeland, Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, “minister of everything” and finance minister. Her scathing resignation in December lobbed not a grenade, but a bomb at the prime minister’s leadership.
Trudeau never recovered. Over the holidays, caucus calls grew for him to leave.
Trudeau’s decision is a Hail Mary pass aimed at helping the party dig out of the hole where it sits at its lowest levels in public approval in a decade, and facing a formidable Conservative opponent in Poilievre, who has galvanized that party’s fundraising, candidate recruitment and polling numbers.
It is a massive task.
The eldest of the former prime minister’s three sons, Trudeau took over the Liberal party in 2013 after a series of disastrous elections under ill-fated leaders had plunged it into third place. He was then married to Sophie Grégoire, a former Quebec broadcaster, with two children and a third soon on the way.
From just 34 seats in the House of Commons, Trudeau rebuilt the party from the ground up, expanding its coffers, its reach, and its appeal to young people. In 2015, he staged a come-from-behind electoral victory propelled by a wave of sentiment against Stephen Harper after the Conservative prime minister’s nine years in power.
He won by promising a new era. He vowed to regain Canada’s stature on the world stage, to champion climate action and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, to make peace with premiers in a grumpy federation, to delegate power to cabinet ministers and MPs, to restore pride in the public service, to allow government scientists and experts to speak out, and to level the economic inequalities in Canada and expand the middle class.
He defied conventional political wisdom by campaigning to run temporary budget deficits to spur economic investment and growth, and promised electoral reform, scooping up voters on the left and squeezing the NDP, then led by Thomas Mulcair, out of the way.
Trudeau received a massive majority mandate in that election with the Liberals electing a broad slate of rookie MPs who waved the progressive banner. He named a gender-equal cabinet “because it’s 2015” and was welcomed in Ottawa by a public service eager for change.
But Trudeau was soon faced with huge governing challenges: the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and global disruptor-in-chief; the rise of a newly aggressive China under Xi Jinping; the renegotiation of a North American free trade pact; the arrest of a high-profile Chinese Huawei executive on Canadian soil that led to the arbitrary arrest of two Canadians and trade reprisals by China; the COVID-19 pandemic; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and war in the Middle East. The global fallout included energy price spikes, supply chain logjams, a rise in protectionist and nationalist sentiment around the globe, high inflation, interest rate spikes and an antipathy to incumbents everywhere.
Beyond that, there were self-inflicted wounds that started early and came often.
Trudeau displayed impatience with parliamentary opposition when he tried to force a swift vote and elbowed aside a female NDP MP on the floor of the Commons. The Trudeau family and close friends took an ill-advised vacation to the Aga Khan’s private island, deemed a violation of ethical guidelines by the parliamentary ethics office. The ethics commissioner found Trudeau’s government at fault over pressure on then-justice minister and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould to cut a plea deal with Quebec powerhouse SNC-Lavalin, and with his finance minister over a decision to award a pandemic contract to WE Charity. A trip to India where Trudeau and family were mocked for donning over-the-top Indian outfits was marred by the snub by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and by the presence at a reception for the Canadian prime minister of a B.C. man once convicted as a would-be assassin of an Indian cabinet minister. Photos emerged showing the prime minister dressed in blackface and brownface as a young man so many times he couldn’t pinpoint exactly, in an era when Black Lives Matter dominated so much social discourse.
Through it all, Trudeau’s majority hold on Parliament diminished over federal elections in 2019 and 2021 to minorities, each with a declining share of the popular vote.
It was clear the temper of the times had changed. The 2021 election campaign saw an unprecedented level of harassment and threats.
Then came the so-called ”Freedom Convoy” of 2022, when pandemic frustrations boiled over. The truckers’ protest convoy jammed the nation’s capital and Canada-U.S. border points for more than three weeks with police unable to clear it, and jurisdictional snafus clouding action. Trudeau, having earlier dismissed the protesters as a fringe minority, invoked the Emergencies Act in a historic first use of a law meant to replace the War Measures Act that his father had used to quell separatist extremism. Trudeau was vindicated by an inquiry, but a federal court found the law’s use unconstitutional.
In an attempt to reach for parliamentary stability, Trudeau struck a supply-and-confidence deal with the NDP to support his minority government for the following three years. Together, they moved to ban replacement workers in federal workplaces, to enact free dental care, and to take steps toward a universal nationwide public drug plan. While those may be on the chopping block, other Trudeau moves like national child care seem certain to survive any future change in government.
Yet Trudeau found himself nine years in facing a volatile electorate grown weary of the Liberal incumbent.
With his party so low in the polls, it was only surprising it took Trudeau so long to quit, giving the Liberal Party of Canada just a few months to choose a new leader. Critics outside and within his caucus have been clamouring for just that. But with perhaps just weeks before the next election campaign, and Conservatives with a 20-point lead in public support, it’s doubtful much can change.
Several polls show there’s no saviour waiting in the wings to stage a comeback for the party the way Trudeau once did.
There is no obvious successor. Trudeau did not groom one.
If anything, his repeated insistence he would lead the party into the election was intended to quash overt campaigning by those in his cabinet who eyed the top job, among them Freeland, Anita Anand, Mélanie Joly and François-Philippe Champagne.
The names of other possible contenders surfaced as well, with Dominic LeBlanc — who replaced Freeland as finance minister — among them. And while Trudeau kept a door open for any outside would-be aspirants like former central banker Mark Carney or former B.C. premier Christy Clark to join the Liberal team and run for Parliament, neither have. Trudeau showed the door to others who may have had big ambitions but lacked political skill, like former finance minister Bill Morneau.
It was a bug and a feature of Trudeau’s leadership style. He is both an open and a closed book.
He deliberately sought to get rid of factions within the party, deciding Liberal senators appointed by his predecessors Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin would not sit within caucus. He kept old-guard advisers of those two teams at arm’s length. And contrary to his promise of being accessible to all in caucus, he formed a tight inner governing circle within which not many cabinet ministers or caucus members found themselves.
Clearly at ease in heady political and celebrity circles, Trudeau as Liberal leader hated sycophants and loved to be challenged; he also valued hard ground work by MPs and political workers, having learned in his own riding fight in Papineau that it pays off. In doing so, he was able to exert a surprising level of discipline over his caucus and cabinet even as public support for his leadership slid for more than a year.
None dared speak out loud the notion that it was time for him to go. Those calls came from outside.
That is, up until last June’s disastrous byelection loss in the critical Liberal stronghold of Toronto — St. Paul’s, followed by another byelection loss in Montreal’s Lasalle — Émard — Verdun. Those defeats bookended a terrible summer for Trudeau.
Suddenly, the once-quiet grumbling grew louder.
On a mid-December morning, Freeland’s sudden departure — and her publicly released letter of resignation, which slammed Trudeau’s decision-making at a time of economic peril in the face of Donald Trump’s threatened tariff war — could not be ignored. It upstaged the fall economic update, the same-day departure of housing minister Sean Fraser (another once-rumoured leadership contender), and ignited fresh calls for Trudeau to go.
Now he leaves the national stage with big shoes to fill.
No one else can lay claim to his instant name recognition or, despite Trudeau’s nature as an introvert, his exuberant charisma in a crowd.
No one else in his cabinet can lay claim to being substantively different than Trudeau, since all have been part of his government’s big and controversial decisions: to raise taxes on the rich; to adopt consumer carbon pricing; to use high government spending during the pandemic to support individual Canadians, businesses and provinces at a time when health-care systems were buckling and unemployment soared; and to support increased immigration when housing supply could not keep up.
If Trudeau, the most senior leader in the G7 group of wealthy democracies, leaves with any regrets, it may be that his decision to stay on this long was a factor in the breakup last summer of his 18-year marriage to Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, with whom he has children aged 17, 15 and 10.
Trudeau once rued that as prime minister, his father had not been able to keep his own family together during a lifetime in politics. “They couldn’t make it work,” he said of his parents on Radio-Canada’s “Tout le monde en parle.”
In that regard, Trudeau conceded, he had followed his father’s footsteps. Yet he also defended his decisions, saying that while life in politics is “tough,” it was important to be “faithful” to his values and vision, and “to continue to do politics, even if it’s difficult.”
